You + one app + a desert island...

[Miles B.]

Hi all! My name is Miles and I work on the Marketplace team. We’re looking for better ways to recommend and suggest apps that are truly crowd favorites, so of course we wanted to poll the Community.

I’ve included a couple prompts below, and would love to know your answers to any or all of them!

1. What is the FIRST Marketplace app you would recommend to a new team just getting started?

2. What is the BEST Marketplace app that your teams can’t live without?

3. If you could only bring one Marketplace app to a desert island, which one would you choose? You can interpret this question however you'd like 🙂
   
   

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

1. Jira Toolkit - I still don't get why it's not been drawn into Core!
2. Predictably - ScriptRunner.  But I'd say that even if I didn't work with Jamie
3. ScriptRunner again.  I'm pretty sure I couldn't script a nice new ship to escape with, but at least I could try!

[Julius Davies _bit-booster_com_]

But for which product !?

For Bitbucket Server, my personal "install immediately" choice is my own free "Commit Graph for Bitbucket Server" app.  It's been the #1 trending app for Bitbucket Server for the last 3 months (averages +37 sticky installs per week, and that calculation includes all customer uninstalls).

This week we even cracked the top-10 trending across all Atlassian products!  9th place!   Which is harder for Bitbucket apps, since the install base is so much smaller compared to Jira or Confluence.

So to bring things back to your question:

1. FIRST:  Commit Graph (free, for Bitbucket Server)

2. BEST:  Control Freak (free, for Bitbucket Server).  I cannot run a git repo (even on a team of one!) without this installed.  But, yes, again, I am somewhat biased, since I developed it.

3. DESERT ISLAND:  Gliffy (paid, for Confluence), since a drawing tool might be useful to document a life of loneliness and survival alone on an island.

[April Daly]

For Jira:

1. ScriptRunner: Why even start Jira without ScriptRunner? (Hi Nic!) Seriously though, ScriptRunner makes so many other add-ons unnecessary, and admin life sooooooo much easier, that running Jira without it is just plain silly. Even if you never write a script, the built in scripts are worth their weight in gold for administrators and workflow designers. Before buying anything else, check if ScriptRunner has a way to fulfill that need; 95% of the time, the answer will be yes.
2. Shared Manager: Give your associate admins, who may not be especially technical, an easy GUI way to see which saved filters are used on which boards, and who owns them. This little gem is free!

For Confluence:

1. Team Calendars is a gotta have if your user base is larger than three people. We have everything in these calendars from vacations to Jira issue dates, and they really help with IT project management as well.
2. ScriptRunner: The thing to get as soon as you're done setting up your calendars. Again, the built-in scripts are so incredibly useful, and for Confluence, many additional tools can be downloaded for free to manage labels or to get users to create pages with the correct template or to add page information functionality.
3. SmartDraw Diagrams: If you build it, you probably need to diagram it. SmartDraw is so much better in Confluence than Visio file attachments; you get the page versioning and all the other Confluence benefits, with no expensive per-user licenses. And bonus, it has an API you can call from ScriptRunner :)

Desert Island:

1. ScriptRunner! I just can't figure out how to run it without installing those Atlassian pre-reqs first...

[kg4ysy]

JIRA:

- Zephyr for JIRA - We use this a lot for our QA Team. We're able to perform and log testing using this tool.

JIRA Service Desk:

- doitbetterCalendar - We use this company-wide to manage PTO, installations, and other events that the company should be made aware of.

Confluence:

- LucidChart - This is a great replacement for Visio. We stopped using Visio and started using LucidChart company-wide.

[Leo Diaz _ DEISER]

• What is the FIRST Marketplace app you would recommend to a new team just getting started?:

  • Profields for big companies
  • Agile ranking for Agile Teams

• What is the BEST Marketplace app that your teams can’t live without?

  • Probably the best app for new Jira administrators: Automation
• If you could only bring one Marketplace app to a desert island, which one would you choose? You can interpret this question however you'd like 🙂
  
  • I 😍 Profields

[Susan Ostreicher]

For new teams (Jira): Automation. It's easy to get started and lets you tailor a project to your needs. 

Can't live without (for Confluence): Google Drive & Docs. It's especially great if you already have documents organized on Google. I love the way embedded folders are displayed on Confluence pages. 

Desert island (for Confluence): Multiexcerpt. Falls into the category of "Not sure why it isn't built in, but I'm sure glad there's a plugin!"

[Dzmitry Hryb _Deviniti_]

What is the FIRST Marketplace app you would recommend to a new team just getting started?

If you're new to Jira, you'll definitely benefit from Issue Templates. It takes some time to build a decent template repository, but after that, creation of repetitive issues (and even Epic structures with lots of Stories and Sub-tasks) takes as much as 5 clicks.

What is the BEST Marketplace app that your teams can’t live without?

For my team, it's Team Calendars for Confluence. Can't imagine planning content efforts without it! I've already praised this one in this article, and I can't stop doing it :)

If you could only bring one Marketplace app to a desert island, which one would you choose?

Provided there's an access to the Internet on the island, I'd love to have Jira Service Desk with the Extension app. Then I'll be able to request a helicopter to take me out and see who and when will come for me :)