Feature Focus 2026 Vol. 11 (September)

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*Special Note: Due to the move of the Atlassian Community forums to a new platform currently planned for September 22, the forums will be in read-only mode for at least 10 days starting today. The Feature Focus will recommence once content publishing resumes on the new platform.

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State of AI SDLC is a single-day digital summit for technical leaders responsible for planning, building, and running software in the AI era. Hear directly from Atlassian CEO and Co-Founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian Chief Product & AI Officer Tamar Yehoshua, and industry leaders at DX, Lovable, and more as they reveal how AI is transforming the modern software development lifecycle. Related to this, we’re bringing governed agent loops to the AI-Native SDLC.

Why AI ROI Still Stumps Leaders And How Context Closes The Gap: Forbes spoke with Avani Prabhakar, Chief People Officer at Atlassian, to understand why capturing AI ROI remains a challenge and how organizational change can drive lasting, measurable impact.

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Inside Atlassian

• Plan your Team ’26 Europe experience in Amsterdam: Get ready for Team '26 Europe by using the Agenda Builder to create your personal schedule. Check out inspiring keynotes, breakout sessions, and live demos designed to help you craft game-changing product experiences.

• You don’t need a team of AI experts. You just need one. Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab set out to find out: does it matter how many AI-skilled people are on a team? The answer was clear and surprisingly specific. The biggest jump in team performance came from adding just one AI superuser to a team that previously had none.

• Introducing our connector blog series: Because connected context provides AI with more complete information and less fragmentation, it can help Rovo and external AI agents use tokens more efficiently and produce higher-quality outcomes. To explore these possibilities, we’re publishing a series of blog posts highlighting the value of individual Teamwork Graph connectors and the ways they can help teams work with more context.

  • How Teamwork Graph Saves Agent Tokens YouTube | 5.5 min.

  • How Teamwork Graph Helps AI Agents YouTube | <5 min.

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Apps & Collections

Platform Apps

Administration

• A smarter way to understand which Atlassian Cloud changes need your attention: We’re adding AI-generated impact ratings to the new Release Notes on Atlassian Community to help you quickly understand the likely significance of each release note.

• Space policies give teams autonomy with admin guardrails: Space policies are now available in open beta to customers across Jira, JSM, and JPD. Space policies let teams create and manage team-managed spaces within guardrails you define once.

• An improved audit log experience for Jira and JSM: With this release, eligible admins will see a more consistent audit log experience directly in Jira and JSM, with expanded coverage for product activity.

• Teamwork Graph (TWG) connectors now have a top-level home in Atlassian Administration: From Atlassian Administration → Connectors, admins can start setup, review connector-specific details and settings, reauthorize connections when needed, monitor connector health, and disconnect apps when appropriate.

• Share your experience with managing Atlassian licenses: We’re looking to speak with administrators to learn about your current license management workflows, including challenges, manual steps, or issues you encounter along the way. Sign up here. 60 min. | $100 digital gift card | Feedback Opportunity

Atlassian Teams

• New Features: Custom Field, Rovo Skills, JQL improvements and more! We’re excited to share a bunch of new features and Rovo skills designed to make Atlassian Teams even more powerful and easy to use. From smarter automation in Jira to AI-powered cleanup, here’s what’s new.

Goals & Projects

• Now available: restricted goals, plus an upgrade for projects: We're rolling out restricted goals to limit an individual goal or project to specific people, so sensitive work gets tracked properly without being visible to everyone. Restricted goals and projects use the same Can view and Can edit permission levels you already know.

• More accurate metrics: You can now record a value as of the date it was true rather than the day you entered it, remove values you don't want, see who added what, and have your goal's progress automatically update.

• 🎯 Stop Drowning in Spreadsheets: How to Actually Track Goals & OKRs in Jira: You don’t need a mountain of spreadsheets or a maze of projects to keep your team aligned. You can track your goal progress in a simple, lightweight way directly within Jira.

Teamwork Collection

Confluence

• 🚀 Confluence Slides is here: Simply describe what presentation you want, and Rovo pulls context from across Atlassian and connected third-party apps to create impactful, visual presentations. Then, share your slides directly in Confluence without having to switch between different apps.

  • Your next presentation is already in Confluence

• How to Create Accessible Articles in Confluence Cloud: Accessible documentation helps people with permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities, as well as readers who are multitasking, using mobile devices, reading in a second language, working in bright or noisy environments, or relying on keyboard navigation. This guide includes practical steps for structuring, writing, formatting, and reviewing Confluence articles so they are easier to access with assistive technology and easier for all readers to understand.

• The Confluence/Rovo Cheat Sheet You Didn't Know You Needed: Here are some of the most common, actually-useful ways people use Rovo in Confluence day to day.

• Offline Mode for Confluence Mobile: Offline mode lets you save content ahead of time and read it later without Wi‑Fi or cellular service. We will continue to improve on this functionality, so add comments to share feedback and help steer the future of this feature.

Jira

• Stop exporting your work to figure it out. Jira now does it for you. We just shipped a batch of updates to Jira that we're really excited about, especially if your team has been managing capacity, budgets, or reporting outside of Jira. Explore formula fields, custom dashboards and work items types, business team templates, and more.

  • Individual capacity planning Premium/Enterprise

• Create Jira work items right from Trello: Now you can use a Trello card to create a new Jira work item without switching tools or starting from scratch. If you used the Jira Power-Up before it was retired, this is the new native functionality.

• Turn any Microsoft Teams conversation into Jira work with natural language: The Jira Cloud for Microsoft Teams app now understands natural language. Your team can create, update, and assign work to teammates or AI coding agents without leaving the chat.

  • Using @jira in Microsoft Teams to create, update and assign work from chat YouTube | 1.5 min.

• Bulk Fetch Gets a 10× Boost: We've raised the ceiling on the Jira Cloud POST/rest/api/{version}/issue/bulkfetch endpoint. Where a request could previously return 100 issues, eligible requests can now return up to 1,000 issues.

• Multiple field contexts per space is coming to Jira: We’re getting ready to introduce support for multiple field contexts per space, and we’re looking for customers to help us test it through an Early Access Program. Participants will test this on their sandbox site (only), and new field schemes must be enabled on the site. Sign up here. EAP

• Introducing Jira Planner: now in early access: Jira Planner is particularly useful for tech leads, senior engineers, engineering managers, and PMs working on architectural decisions, multi sprint features, or any work where the team needs to agree on scope before implementation begins. You will need Rovo enabled, Teamwork Graph connected, and Confluence available on the same site. Join the waitlist. EAP

Loom

• Loom Migration Guide: Transitioning to Atlassian Workspaces Safely and Seamlessly: This guide will help you use the self-serve path to move from a Legacy Loom workspace or to consolidate across Atlassian sites, while keeping your content safe and your workflow uninterrupted.

Rovo/AI

• What’s new and what’s next to securely scale Rovo: Our goal is simple: help you unlock AI’s value while keeping the controls, visibility, and safeguards your organization needs.

• Introducing Studio Templates: You can browse a curated gallery of ready-made agent and automation templates, customize them in seconds with guided setup, and activate them directly from Rovo Studio.

• Rovo Agent Reasoning: choose how your agents think: Agent Reasoning gives you a practical way to match your agent’s effort to the work in front of it, meaning you can keep everyday agents fast and focused, while giving more demanding work the extra reasoning capacity it needs. It’s control over both the depth of the work and the model powering it.

• Rovo Skills are available in Rovo Agents! Rovo Skills are now available for all customers building custom agents in Rovo Studio. You can now add Skills directly to your agents, giving them access to the same reusable, opinionated workflows that already power Rovo Chat. Open Beta

  • Turn Rovo into a practical teammate with skills: In our first public session on Rovo Platform Skills, we recreated a release-readiness scenario and show how platform skills can turn scattered work context into a researched next step.

  • Did you know there are 40+ Rovo Platform Skills ready to make your workday more efficient? Community Champion

• Why is my Rovo Agent saying that? Let's Debug Smarter. You built your Rovo Agent, tested a few prompts, and something feels off. Try these tips to improve your Rovo responses.

• Create with Rovo for Automation: We know that getting started is often the hardest part of building an automation. Instead of building a flow component by component, simply tell Rovo what you’re trying to do in natural language.

  • From blank page to better work with Rovo: During the Generate and improve content with Rovo session, we explored practical ways to use Rovo to get started faster, improve work you have already drafted, and uncover useful information across Jira, Confluence, and connected tools. Find the recap and links here!

• Rovo app for Microsoft Teams is now live! 🎉 Mention @rovo in a channel, a group chat, or chat with it one to one, and it answers using the full context of your work: Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, Google Drive, and the other tools you've connected to Rovo.

• New research shows AI polish makes it harder to spot problems. But there’s a quick fix. Adding an “Early Draft” label on an AI-polished doc increases your chances of receiving better feedback on your work, according to a recent Atlassian Teamwork Lab study revealing an “AI polish effect.”

Service Collection

Assets

• Display Names Update for Assets and What It Means for Your CMDB: We've introduced Display Names for all Assets configuration entities: schemas, object types, attributes, statuses, and reference types. Every entity now has two identifiers.

• From Chaos to Control with Assets: In this upcoming webinar we’ll share how Assets can help teams build a more reliable view of the things they run, own, and support. We’ll explore how a unified data foundation, hardware lifecycle management, and a more intuitive data-management experience can help IT teams move from reconciling records to acting on trusted context. Register here. September 16 | 11 AM AEST/CEST/PDT

• Common Data Model and Hardware Asset Management (HAM) GA in JSM: The CDM gives teams a standardized, out-of-the-box foundation for cleaner, more consistent asset data across your Atlassian stack. The new Hardware Asset Management console (Premium/Enterprise), connects hardware schemas, workflows, reporting, and lifecycle processes to a shared data model built for scale.

• What's New in Assets Data Manager: This September 2026 release brings a significant set of improvements to the new admin journey, and a new wave of capability additions covering Lansweeper, bulk operations, saved search, default attribute mapping, and a new cloud-enabled data source → for flat files. Premium/Enterprise

• AI-Powered capabilities in HAM: Asset managers can now see proactive risks like expiring warranties and dormant devices, query inventory in plain English, and configure HAM rules in just a few clicks. Premium/Enterprise

Jira Service Management

• 🎉 Case Management in JSM is now GA: Case Management gives HR and Legal teams a native, structured and secure way to handle sensitive cases directly inside JSM. Whether you're managing an employee misconduct investigation, a legal matter, a grievance or a complex employee case, Case Management offers purpose-built structure, granular access controls, and case note capabilities.

• Help us shape JSM Headless: We’re looking for feedback on JSM Headless, a new way for agents to work on JSM requests from Slack, Teams, Rovo, Claude and other tools without opening the web portal. Sign up here. EAP, Feedback Opportunity

• Sign-up for the new JSM AI Control Center: If your team is turning on AI across JSM and needs a single place to see it, control it, and prove its value, this one's for you. EAP, Premium/Enterprise

Software Collection

Bitbucket

• Monitor test health at a glance in Bitbucket: See a quick health summary for a test suite; use the Needs attention card to spot tests with high flakiness scores; open an individual test to review its execution history, failure details, and trends over time; and move from a Pipelines build to the related test details with the View in Tests action.

• Bitbucket Repository Attributes Now Use Workspace-Scoped Search in Assets: This change affects commercial JSM Assets Cloud customers who use Bitbucket Repository attributes in their Assets schemas. Bitbucket Repository attributes will search only the Bitbucket workspaces configured for that attribute. This update helps Assets continue to work with Bitbucket Cloud’s current API model and gives admins more control over which workspaces are available for each attribute.

• Help shape the future of AI Safety Net in Bitbucket: We’re exploring how software teams use AI across the software lifecycle, and how they build trust, governance, and safety as AI becomes more autonomous. We’re opening a research study so you can share your experience and help shape the design of AI safety and governance features in Bitbucket. 15 min. | $20 digital gift card | Feedback Opportunity

• Bitbucket multi-region architecture and EU data residency coming soon: These changes will help us meet GDPR and regional data sovereignty requirements. Data Center customers can migrate to the cloud with confidence, knowing their data is hosted in their region of choice.

Strategy Collection (Premium/Enterprise)

Goals and Projects capabilities in Strategy Collection: Starting in August 2026, some new capabilities in Goals and Projects will require a Strategy Collection license. Currently, these include the following capabilities:

• Manage app permissions at the group level: Centrally control user permissions across Goals and Projects using groups, simplifying governance and permission management at scale.

  • Manage Goals app group permissions

  • Manage Projects app group permissions

• Adding and editing metric period targets: Set targets by months or quarters for metrics on goal success measures.

Focus

• Prepare your Focus area updates with Drafts! You can now jot down notes throughout the week to keep track of what’s happened; prepare your updates in advance; and allow for multiple contributors to draft the update together.

Jira Align

• You're Invited: September Jira Align Customer Forum: Our monthly Jira Align Customer Forum is returning! Starting this month, we’ll host one session per forum and alternate the meeting time between AMER/EMEA and APAC-friendly hours every month so more customers can join at a convenient time. This month’s forum will include a Team Amsterdam preview; Jira Align roadmap updates; and a live discussion with product. Register here. September 24 | 8 AM PDT/11 AM EDT

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Additional Updates

Community and Learning

• How We Gamified Jira, JSM, Confluence & Bitbucket to Drive Adoption: Rather than write "here's how Confluence search works" as a wiki page, we built it as a Confluence Ninja Quest: a self-guided challenge where completing each step actually requires using the feature, not just reading about it. Community Champion

• Interview With an Expert: How Chris Rainey Found His Place in the Atlassian Community: This article is part of an ongoing series that features real-world Atlassian professionals and their helpful insights. This particular article is a departure from its predecessors because in this case, the expertise Chris had to share wasn’t solely about using the Atlassian Service Collection, it was also about the importance of embracing the Atlassian Community. Community Champion

• Upcoming changes to the Jira Cloud Administration exams: As part of the ongoing effort to keep Atlassian credentials current and valuable, the Managing Jira Projects for Cloud (ACP-620) and Jira Administration for Cloud (ACP-120) exams will be merged into a single exam in January 2027.

Data Center

• Secure Tunnels now built into DC–Cloud setup: Last year we introduced OAuth 2.0 and Cloud Connectors and today we’re excited to share the next step. If your Data Center instance sits behind a firewall, connecting it to Cloud just became dramatically simpler.

• Application Links via Cloud Connector for Jira and Confluence Cloud: You can now set up Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud application links to Data Center via Cloud Connector, with OAuth 2.0 handled automatically and no manual credential copying.

• Moving from Data Center to Cloud? Don't let silos slow you down. 🛑 In a self-managed environment, silos often feel like a natural byproduct of infrastructure. But in Cloud, those same silos can become invisible blockers that prevent you from leveraging the full power of AI and analytics. Join the live session Unlocking Momentum: Leadership Strategies for Cloud Transformation to help you bridge that gap. Register here. September 16 | 11-11:30 AM EDT

Trust & Security

• A practical IAM reference architecture for Atlassian Cloud: Identity and access management is the foundation of a secure cloud environment. To help customers navigate this landscape, Atlassian has published a new white paper, IAM reference architecture for Atlassian Cloud in the Atlassian Trust Center.

• Vulnerability Management at Atlassian: We've published the second one-pager in our Trust series: a concise, exec-ready overview of how Atlassian finds, prioritizes, and fixes security vulnerabilities across 29,000+ repositories and every layer of our cloud infrastructure.

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Events

• See the full Class Calendar of upcoming live sessions

• 6-8 October 2026 | Register today for Team '26 Europe!

• October 27-28, 2026 | Build IT Together (BIT) Conference | Dallas, Texas: This is a FREE Conference with two days of sessions and activities to make you a better a Jira admin! Each presentation will show you real use cases for how to leverage the power of Forge, Rovo, or AI. Atlassians will be on site with Forge and Rovo workshops to expand your skills, and there will be stations for you to take Atlassian Certified exams.

• More upcoming ACE Events in List and Calendar views