Your Voice in the Higher Ed Atlassian Community: Past Insights, Future Topics

[#1]

Hello Higher Education Community!  We wanted to share some background for this group and begin a conversation as to what sort of topics we’d like to tackle in our meetings.

Historical context:

I’m aware of at least two working groups which began meeting in 2022 and concluded in 2023, the Atlassian EDU Community Group which started on Educause (May 2022-December 2023) and the Education Sector Roundtable directly from Atlassian (July 2022-April 2023).

The focus of many of these meetings were to discuss the end of Atlassian Server licenses and share details about migrating to Data Center and Cloud products. 

These meetings, along with the Public Sector meetup and Braindates at Atlassian Team conferences were very helpful for discussing common issues we were facing and there had been some work during the past year to create a working group in the same vein. 

Shaping our future discussions:

The higher education community truly shines because of our collaborative spirit. To ensure our upcoming meetings are as valuable as possible, we want to hear from you!

What topics are most relevant to you?  Are there specific Atlassian features you're eager to dive deeper into, perhaps with a presentation from an Atlassian expert?  Or maybe you have a success story or a solution to a common issue that you'd be willing to share with the group?

Please share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions in the comments below.  Your input will directly shape our future discussions and help the community thrive.

[Erik Wieland]

In no particular order

• Contract terms, including data security and HIPAA business associates agreements - Atlassian has been negotiating terms with the University of California system for ~9 months, redlining the crap out of our terms. It would be nice to get more higher ed-friendly terms from Atlassian.
• Pricing - Atlassian did the higher ed community a favor by increasing the Confluence Cloud discounts to the non-profit level. I would love to see them do the same across the board from their other products (starting with Jira).
• AI - More transparency on Rovo tenancy and models. Even better, give us the option to have a truly isolated AI environment.

[Matt Spangenberg]

@Erik Wieland Those are a great start!  Our school has been attempting to get terms added to our contract regarding Atlassian Intelligence for more than a year.  I think this may be important to bring up during the meeting next week.  It may be helpful for a future meeting to have an account executive or someone more familiar with the process hear what we're collectively experiencing with contracts.

Again, these are all great topics and I'll try to see how we can get the ball rolling on these!