nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Education kick-off and configuration

Brian Chabot

First off, thanks to Atlassian to listening to us and creating a Community Interest Group for Education.

I'd like to start us off by asking what products are being used. This should help us gain an understanding on what people are using and for what purpose.

I’m Brian, lead application developer for the Atlassian products here at Syracuse University . I’m part of a team that maintains the systems for the entire campus. I build and maintain the custom plugins we have in-house and help develop standards across the systems. Other team members monitor the servers and databases and perform any maintenance and upgrades. We have three environments: Dev, Test, and Production.

Currently the university uses Confluence (server) for documentation and collaboration. Confluence has about 180 total spaces using about 220,00 content pages. We also use Jira (server) for tracking issues and tickets across many departments on campus. We have a few plugins, which include: Team Calendars and Zen Foundation.

Jira currently has about 700,000 issues across 207 projects. We have a number of Jira plugins, which include: Email This Issue, ScriptRunner, Jira Agile, Tempo Timesheets, and a few from Bob Swift.

Both systems are available to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and external non-university customers. This total user count is about 150,000. We are developing a road map to bring Service Desk into the campus in the future.

Please reply and let the community know what Atlassian products are being used.

Comments

Brant Schroeder

I would really be interested in the resources that are used to support each instance as well. How many servers? What are the server specs? How many full-time staff members and their responsibilities? Who is responsible for the stack? How is it funded?

Brian Chabot

@Brant SchroederFor our Jira and Confluence environments, they are both server and not cloud based. They are running from Linux virtual servers. Jira is built with 6 processors and 24gb of memory. Confluence has 4 processors and 12gb of memory. These servers point to a virtual database environment where the data is housed. Each instance has its own database.

We also have DEV and Test environments. These environments run in a similar configuration, but have less hardware resources, (Jira with 2 processors, 16gb memory, and Confluence runs with 2 processors and 6gb).

This is all funded by the IT department to support the entire campus. Just one of the many items we handle for the university. We have other departments within IT, but the team I work for is made of 1 manager, 3 system administrators, and 1 developer. One of our tasks is to run, maintain, and upgrade all Atlassian products.

Monique vdB

@Matthew Debelak, @Frank Frank and @Cindy Hoskey, would love your thoughts!

Cindy Hoskey

We are not using it enterprise-wide at Farmingdale College. We have four sessions of a single class (Senior Project) that are using Trello. Student groups within Senior Project use Trello to organize their projects, which use the Scrum framework. We use the Burndown for Trello, Trelabels, Scrumcoon (for Planning Poker), and Excel Export add-ons for Chrome.

Matthew Debelak

I wish I had more to contribute but unfortunately, we are just launching the Atlassian product suite next week. We spent a good chunk of last year paying thousands of dollars to an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner and ended up with no functional products.

Thanks to another Atlassian Partner, we are now ready to launch Jira Service Desk, Software, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, and Crowd. The plan is to use them within Student Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Assuming everything goes smoothly, we will then offer the services to others at the university.

The goal for now is to launch with three departments that service all of Student Affairs: IT, Marketing, and HR.

-Matt

Monique vdB

@Matthew Debelak wow, sorry you had such a bad experience with a Platinum Partner! That's surprising. If you want to give me more details offline I can pass them on to the team -- I'm at communitymanagers@atlassian.com.

I can't wait to hear about how your launch goes and hope it's wildly successful -- please lean on this community as much as you need to!

Brian Chabot

@Matthew DebelakI'm curious to see how the launch goes as well. We are thinking Service Desk could help us, and Crowd may help tie the systems together.

Can you go into detail on how the departments will use the products?

Theresa Fulton

Hello!

We have been using JIRA and Confluence for approximately a year in our IT department for a company that supports two Universities. We saw a lot of change in our organization, not only by introducing these tools, but we also were shifting from Waterfall to Agile. As mentioned, we are a year into this, and it has been great! I oversee a team of analysts who use Confluence to build additional requirements pages. We use JIRA to enter User Stories which are monitored, tracked and delivered by having successful Scrum Ceremonies. We also have some kanban teams running as well.

Thank you for this group! I'd love to hear more and learn from everyone!
Also, many members of our team enjoy going to the Atlassian User Groups to learn more about other Atlassian Products!

Have a great day!
Theresa

Cindy Hoskey

You're all making me jealous! My school has no real comprehensive platform for use either internally by professors or as a shared platform for use by students. We're all over the place, and it shows. Our CIS students would really love to have academic access to Jira and Confluence and other professional-level tools from Atlassian. Is there a sales department at Atlassian focused on sales to academia that I can connect up with the IT department at my college?

unknown

Hi everyone,
For Education, The Agile Coach : https://www.atlassian.com/agile is killing the game ! Congratulation (free & essential) 🕵‍♂
xxx

Daniel Fietta

Hi Cindy, why not getting in touch with one of the Solution Partners to provide you the licenses and give you some support to set everything up based on your needs?

Let me know,
Daniel

E.L. Fridge

I'm E.L., a Web App engineer at the University of West Florida and a member of our Atlassian admin team. Our dev team uses Hipchat, Bamboo, Bitbucket Server, and Jira Software. We started using Jira back in 2011 for software development (anyone remember Greenhopper?) but our Atlassian usage has really spread to all parts of campus.

Inside our IT department we use Jira Service Desk to run our helpdesk operations and handle IT requests - we've written some custom addons to help with that. We are getting lots of requests from departments and workgroups across campus to help them implement Jira Service Desk to help them process requests and work with their customers. We've written some interesting integrations to move complicated processes to JSD using webhooks and the API as well.

We're also a heavy user of Confluence for several purposes, including as a knowledge base for students, internal IT app development usage, and most importantly as an enterprise-wide business process library. We document things according to topic and function rather than department, since many business processes involve many different groups on campus.

Anyway, if anyone wants to know about how we've got things set up just let me know!

Monique vdB

Welcome, @E.L. Fridge! I've only heard about Greenhopper from @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, one of our Community Champions.

Andi

Hey, I'm Andreas and I work for the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria.

Our first step into the Atlassian universe was Confluence, which we started using within our unit of the university's IT department in 2015 after we saw it at an external software developer. Before that, we had several other documentation wikis that didn't do the job. And Sharepoint - but very few colleagues are using that as most of them have developed a strong aversion only after a short period of usage.

We also introduced HipChat as a replacement for Skype - because of its integration with Confluence. Also, organisation-wide policies prohibit us from using cloud-services that store information outside the EU. With HipChat that was not an issue as one can choose from various regions. Subsequently, we also rolled out Crowd, Bitbucket and JIRA. JIRA is presently mostly used for classic Scrum-like software development projects and Gantt-charting business projects.

And just a few weeks ago, we kicked off a project to replace our current organisation-wide service desk solution with JIRA Service Desk. I'm totally looking forward to that.

Thanks for creating this group - I'd love to hear more and learn from you guys!

Cheers,
Andreas

Monique vdB

Welcome, @Andi!

ITS-Middleware ITS-Middleware

Hello,

Our names are Tony and Todd, we are part of the ‘ITS Middleware’ team at UNC Chapel Hill, which is under the ‘ITS’ central IT department. We currently run Confluence and Jira server on-site with Linux hosts. These Atlassian products have been used internally at ITS for a few years, but never adopted by campus as a central IT service offering. However, this is changing for us. There is campus interest, and hopefully we’ll see some of the campus groups running their own setups move to the central IT infrastructure. It makes no sense for duplication of services on campus. Currently we have 45 Jira projects, 6,378 issues and 267 users, most are internal to ITS with a few outliers from campus. Confluence has 152 spaces and 523 users, again mostly internal with a few outside customers. We run Jira and Confluence in a production and development environments, each sharing a single host. There are separate databases for Jira and Confluence on an external hosts. We’ll be moving each service to their own hosts in the coming months.

Confluence is used heavily by our team and the other infrastructure and development groups for internal documentation. The Middleware team uses Jira for managing our work load so we stay on track of what tasks we have for each of our service offerings. Software developers are using it for their development and maintenance of their code.

We are excited about the community and are looking forward to picking your brains on how you did things, and also what problems you encountered along the way so we can possibly avoid them.

Thank you again for this group and we look forward to sharing and learning new things!

Tony and Todd

Monique vdB

Welcome to the group, @ITS-Middleware ITS-Middleware!

Monique vdB

Welcome to the group, @Jira Atlassian, @Aazar saleem, @Brittany Wispell, @Ana Fetuli, @Pramod Kumar Sinha, and @Lakshmireddygari Srikanth! Let us know which Atlassian products you're using and a little about you below

Fernando Bordallo

Hello everyone!

Coming from the Cloud side of the Atlassian suite of products I'd also be very interested in knowing:

what ecosystem custom extensions (add-ons) you are using
if you have found the need to develop and maintain any adHoc extensions. If this is indeed the case, what was the use case you needed covered?

👂All ears

Esme Crutchley

Hi everyone!

I appear to be a little bit of an oddity!

I've just finished MSc Psychology and I'm looking at applying for my PhD, so I don't have a department in which to apply Jira or a school where I can share Trello boards with students' or anything like that. I'm a 40-year-old student who uses Trello for her studies. I organised 90% of my MSc on Trello and I've already got 3 boards going for my PhD preparation.

The company that I work for, although it's a university, uses Office 365 for everything on an institutional level, and I'm nowhere near high enough to change that or even suggest anything different!

I only use Trello (BC), without Confluence or Jira or any other Atlassian products, and I use it solo (apart from one board that's shared with Hubster). Everything that happens in my life, goes into Trello.

So, as I said, I'm a bit of an oddity and a bit sheltered in the myriad of uses for Atlassian products!

Brant Schroeder

That is impressive. Sounds like you have your system tuned very well.

Viktoria Popova

I use Jira Software for Accreditation purposes.

Here is an excerpt of the justification I have used in the Self-Study Design for our regional accreditor (Middle States Commission on Higher Education):

"The Self-Study process is an exceedingly complex process that requires a consistent oversight and a thorough coordination across multiple “variables” and University operations; it is subject to multiple cycles of assessment, involves a broad range of Institutional resources, it is driven by multiple stakeholders, it has multiple dependencies and contingencies, and is open to various viable solutions (versus right/wrong binaries).

To manage this complexity, the Steering committee has adopted a project management tool— JIRA. The Steering Committee Co-Chairs have customized the JIRA environment to support MSCHE Accreditation requirements. Thus, the use of the tool has stretched beyond planning and tracking timely deliverables; teams can view complex dependencies across tasks, set up alignments across standards and other “variables” such as strategic goals, identify gaps in planning, test for redundancies, and view coordinated actions across working groups. This list is not comprehensive and offers other features that will be explored and tested throughout the Self-Study process."

Will be happy to answer quesions/exchange tips

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

Quick Links

Find more posts tagged with

confluence

jira

app

configuration

education