Problem with Atlassian tech support

Gregory Kremer June 24, 2021

I am here to vent my deep frustration with the way Atlassian NONE-supports its customers, while forcing them to move from self-hosting platforms into its own Cloud. We recently migrated our self-hosting Confluence system to the Cloud and have noticed a bunch of broken things. I had to contact Atlassian tech support on two occasions so far, and in both cases I've got NOTHING from them. In the first case they told me that the functionality in question just doesn't exists in the Cloud and provided a very bulky, unacceptable due to security problems, work-around, which involved using Google docs. In the second case, they just simply told me that this is not their problem and advised me to contact add-on vendor, because add-on works differently in the Cloud environment as opposed to self-hosting. And my thought was right away like, why would Atlassian certify an add-on that doesn't support migration to the Cloud, while forcing clients to migrate? Could someone please share with us his/her experiences with issues from self-serving to Cloud migration and how you dealt with it? We, as Atlassian clients, need to put a pressure on them to provide necessary support in this space, since very soon we will NEED to migrate to the Cloud. Please don't be passive, or Atlassian will ignore all of us. Let me know if you have any questions.

3 comments

Stephen Sifers
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
June 24, 2021

Hello Gregory,

I see your frustration here and want to let you know we hear you. We do take feedback very seriously at Atlassian, and we want to ensure we have actionable feedback here. With that said, I am able to see you've opened a few cases and do want to target the cases which didn't meet your expectations of our support. Could you please let me know the case numbers of those? (No link required, just the Jira issue cases, similar to JST-12345).

Once I have these, I'll ensure our team reviews them and also hears your concerns. Again, thank you for sharing your feedback and frustration here.

Additionally, (Open Company, No Bullshit), outside of this issue I did want to make you are aware of our Feedback for the Founders channel we have which is open to any customer. In the event you're wanting to provide feedback in the future and feel you're not being heard, please see https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers | Community Product Lead

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Gregory Kremer June 25, 2021

The latest case is JST-670409

Stephen Sifers
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
June 25, 2021

Hello Gregory,

Thank you for providing the case. I've reviewed the case and do see it's still in progress and has escalated by your supporting engineer internally already.

From reviewing the notes in that case, I did want to ensure you're aware of our Cloud Migration content which allows you to approach migrations with an Assess, Plan, Prep, Test, Migrate, and finally launch process. Within our Assess phase, we do have an "Audit and Assess apps and integrations" to ensure you're server-side apps are available in Cloud. This will apply for 3rd party apps and even in-house developed apps.

There are also functional differences between Cloud and Server that you should be aware of before you migrate, more on this can be found at Compare cloud and server.

One call-out I would like to make would be from our Support Offering:

Add-ons

Atlassian offers support for certain add ons as listed in our supported add-ons list. For unsupported add-ons, issues should be raised with the provider of the add on. Each add-on's supported status is listed on its page in the Atlassian Marketplace. If you're doing development work, visit the Atlassian Developer Network.

Specifically, within our Atlassian Supported Apps, I do want to help clarify why some apps are not OR won't be available within Cloud:

Many apps in the Atlassian Marketplace are free and open source, developed and donated by our community of generous app developers. Other apps in these libraries were written by Atlassian developers to serve some specific purpose or experiment with something new, but have not yet been brought up to the quality standards we prefer. Most of these apps work well and provide interesting and useful enhancements to our products.

However, because we have not yet been able to ensure all apps meet our quality standards outlined below, Atlassian only offers technical support for a specific list of the most widely used and useful apps developed by Atlassian. You can recognize these apps by looking for the "Supported" icon on the app listing. Hovering over the "Supported" icon will include more details on who to contact for support and a direct link to "Get support" as well.

The rest of the unsupported apps may be used but at your own risk. Our support engineers will not be able to answer questions about their usage. And should app inadvertently cause problems with our software, our support engineers may ask you to uninstall it.

With Cloud and Server products being different, this also implies that apps that work on Server will function differently (If even available) within Cloud products. Some apps that allow for great flexibility may work great on Servers but be completely incompatible with Cloud due to how they're access data. These features and functionality are controlled by the app Vendors, the only control Atlassian has here are what we make available for Vendors to consume/use/access within their apps. More on how Confluence Cloud apps may be used can be found at Confluence Cloud Developer | About Confluence Cloud

With this said, there are some instances where the App vendor is available to be brought into your support request, but this won't apply to every vendor and every case. We do have further information about the Atlassian Marketplace (Where Apps are made available) at Marketplace App Licensing.

To answer your question about if we review apps, within the linked Marketplace page, we do list how we review apps within the marketplace:

Atlassian checks entries in the Atlassian Marketplace to ensure that app information is as complete as possible. However, we don't actively monitor or guarantee any code posted in this space. If you find dangerous or malicious code posted here, contact us immediately so we can take action.

While not exactly what your ask covers (Ensure compatibility of a server app in Cloud), we do review apps when they're submitted. The responsibility of the app's functionality and platform differences is up to the app vendor to control.

I hope the above information is helpful in answering your questions. We will continue to work on your support request. I will personally escalate to see if the vendor is available to assist on this, but I can't make a guarantee on their behalf.

Again, THANK YOU for sharing your feedback and we do hear your frustration here on your migration to Cloud and the sentiment of our Support.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers | Community Product Lead

Deleted user June 24, 2021

@Gregory Kremer I'll tell you my experience, started on the Cloud just when it was announced by Atlassian. First of all it's important to remember that on the cloud things don't work exactly like on "server", they are configurations that have to fit everyone, let's say so to simplify, and it's not easy to deploy a change. It is also not easy to develop a plugin for the cloud. There are many constraints to be respected, technological ones I mean, not Atlassian's. Having said that, I'll tell you my experience. Only in the first months I opened almost 100 tickets to technical support. I have always reported everything, from the detail of the inconsistent interface to the most serious problem. Sometimes, it must be said, but rarely, the engineer happened to handle the request superficially. All I had to do was thank him, close the ticket and reopen it. Luck helped me and someone more meticulous answered. But again, only rarely. In the rest of the cases I have always dealt with people who care about the problem and try to solve it as best they can. What you say is right, you have to make a number, report it, and not be afraid to report the problem. That's the only way I think Atlassian can realize the real use cases and work on them to solve the problems.

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Nicole June 28, 2021

@Gregory Kremer: You are preaching to the choir. I've been vocal, submitted many, many requests, met with various Atlassian teams and team members over the years, participated in focus groups, requested that Confluence sites be made accessible, the list goes on. I've even once used the Feedback for the Founders channel. We've had a persistent issue for over a year now where users can't access our knowledge base without logging in, even though all permissions on the site should make it available to the public (anonymous users). I've spent hours recreating issues, supplying Atlassian support with screenshots and screencasts, with no solutions. Very frustrating. 

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