The annual Atlassian Summit has been rebranded Team ’21 this year to emphasize Atlassian’s focus on building team productivity. Here is our take on the highest points from today’s live sessions.
Product Announcements
- Atlassian platforms are not just for software development
- Atlassian was used by 2 major drug companies in development and logistics for COVID-19 vaccine development
- Airlines used Atlassian for planning and logistics for vaccine delivery
- Cloud Enterprise Edition is increasing the user limits
- Just last year, Enterprise Edition was limited to 5,000 users. This forced enterprise customers to set up multiple instances based on function, geography, or some other segmentation.
- Starting in June 2021, the limit is increasing to 20,000 users, with plans to increase to 35,000 users later this year.
- This reinforces Atlassian’s commitment to large organizations.
- Regulatory and sovereignty improvements
- Data residency for Cloud will be rolled out this year for Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management
- HIPAA and Financial Services regulatory requirements will be met in early 2022
- FedRAMP certification granted for Trello, and other platforms remain on course for late 2022 and 2023
- Machine Learning in Cloud products
- Atlassian tools are meant to support transparent communication; new ML tools help identify topics in your organization that may relate to your work, so your organization can reduce duplication of efforts
- The cultural implication of this is huge. If information can no longer hide, then organizations will transition to a share-first point of view, with great potential to break down silos.
- Alpha availability and plans for “Point A” products
- Halp, for conversational ticketing that integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Jira Work Management, which replaces Jira Core, will have almost 2 dozen prebuilt, customizable template workflows for business-specific functions
- Jira Product Discovery, to allow Agile product managers to collect, sift, and aggregate feature requests into development workstreams
- Compass, to improve cross-team collaboration and management of complex, distributed architectures that contain many components, APIs, and other elements
- Team Central, referred to as the “capstone of a lot of things Atlassian has been working on” over the years, with the lofty goal eliminating the need for out-of-band status reporting across the organization
- Atlassian Forge managed application platform
- A dedicated platform for building apps and extensions that aims to solve the problems of data residency for 3rd-party apps
- Function-based declarative coding platform
- Can be used to build and host an enterprise’s custom apps, too
- Cloud and Data Center Coexistence
- Atlassian recognizes that some things will never make it to the cloud for security reasons, such as Bitbucket repos for security-sensitive organizations
- They are making it easier to manage identities and integrate platforms between Cloud and Data Center with an integrated Single-Sign on capability
- User data integration will reduce duplication of identities and information
- External users will remain external, for example, for customer interactions and status on Jira issues or Confluence content
Interviews on Modern Mindsets for Work and Life, notable insights
- Conversations on making great teams with Jill Ellis, Coach of the U.S. Soccer Team, and Katie Sowers, retired NFL Coach
- Jill Ellis on building a team, relates that her bench is not made up of “substitutes”; instead, they are “game changers waiting in the wings”. This mindset can be a game-changer for managers, and is worth exploring for managers working with today’s younger workforce.
And finally, Jill Ellis on where team culture really comes from
Jill Ellis told a story about where team culture really comes from. A new player came to her once and remarked about how the team culture was not what she was used to, and made some suggestions about how Jill could improve it. Jill asked the player where she learned the culture on the team she came from. The player replied that she learned it from the senior players on the team. This was an “aha” moment, as the player realized that she had more to do with culture than the coach did. Jill further emphasized that no coach can dictate culture, but that it is something that the team collectively builds spontaneously.