Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 25, 2022 edited
Hi @Dan C . Sorry to hear about some of the challenges you’re having with Insight data integrity. The upcoming Jira Service Management 5.0 release (and accompanying marketplace app update) will include performance and stability improvements which should help decrease the chances of data becoming corrupt in cases where data is incorrectly saved due to indexing issues.
We don’t currently have plans to build an integrity check feature, but we do have a beta feature to cleanup duplicate data which is worth taking a look at.
Also, thanks for all your questions, really appreciate the time taken.
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Plugin developer, here. Will Atlassian’s commitment to performance, scalability, and security on DC mean that we get some major platform updates soon? I know Platform 6 is landing with Jira 9 (and presumably Confluence 8, etc.), but it wasn’t quite as ambitious as some of us had hoped. Specific things that I would like to see sooner, rather than later:
Dropping support for Java 8 (Java 11 already ships by default with most DC products)
Adding support for Java 17
Updating the Servlet API / Jersey dependency. Servlet 6 is out and we’re all still on Servlet 3 with async features effectively disabled. It seems like there are legitimate scalability improvements to be had there.
Further, reducing the number of platforms we have to support while giving us access to modern language features and libraries would be a boon to those of us still building apps for DataCenter.
It would also help in keeping our own libraries up to date, something the DC readiness program pushes for pretty hard.
Obviously, these are cross-cutting concerns, but I expect they would lead to tangible benefits for customers & ecosystem developers, including your own!
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"Customers have told us are the most important areas for them: performance and scale, security and compliance, and infrastructure and operations."
I keep hearing this line repeated over, and over, and over, and over again. It's been given as a justification for not investing in new features for DC. But seriously? That's considered the bare minimum most companies do with a product line they want to keep relevant.
It might help if Atlassian shared with us what research they did to come to this conclusion. Was it an extensive survey, or just interviews with just a few people? Basically, show us the numbers that lead to the conclusion.
@Rodney Nissen - ReleaseTEAM unfortunately i think the numbers that matter the most are prefixed with dollar signs.
Atlassian could have come out with a big bang this morning, shown a half decent plan for the future, they had weeks to prepare for this AMA. But all we’ve gotten is repeated statements and more cloud references.
I've been watching this thread since it started, and have been preparing for today. I've already told Atlassian via my TAMs that I will be writing a follow-up based on what I've seen. So I'm going to let Atlassian say way they will, read it all again, and write my honest opinion based on what I've seen.
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We need to improve the governance model around certifying plugins for Data Center, only plugins that respect the Jira project context for custom fields should be certified for use. Even Atlassian Advanced Roadmap plugin has an issue in this regard which has been open since 2021.
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If there is such a large investment in infrastructure, can this be something that receives attention sooner than later? It causes frustration during upgrades and does not allow for true zero-downtime if users are on a node that needs to be rebooted or rebuilt for any reason.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 25, 2022 edited
Hi @lstlaurent , we are not currently planning to offer lower user tiers for Jira Software and Confluence Data Center, though we continue to capture feedback from customers and partners in this area.
We continue to invest in our Atlassian Cloud platform to make sure that we meet security and compliance requirements of majority of our on-prem customers to enable their migration to Atlassian Cloud. Examples of our recent and upcoming investments include Data Residency, BYOK encryption for Jira and Confluence, HIPPA compliance and more.
With Atlassian Cloud products we offer customers full flexibility with per user pricing. We see many of our smaller on-prem customers successfully migrating to Atlassian Cloud. We have over 200,000 paying customers on our cloud today.
We would like to understand what is a remaining blocking factor to enable you to chose Atlassian Cloud products. Thank you!
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 25, 2022 edited
Hi @Dave Thomas. Thank you for your feedback. Over the last years we have invested in identity management both in Crowd as well as individual Data Center products. We have shipped support for SAML, multiple IdPs support across DC products and more. Our focus was indeed on strengthening the authentication story for individual products but we continued to address high voted features for Crowd e.g. Built-in delegated directory pruning or Access based synchronizations.
As you have noticed we are investing in centralised authentication and authorization with Atlassian Cloud and we will continue to do so. We believe that our current user management and authentication solutions available for Data Center customers address most of the problems, although some use cases have to be served by third party plugins or workarounds.
We are currently reviewing different future approaches in the space of authentication and authorisation for Data Center products, in the context of an increasing number of on-prem customers choosing Atlassian Cloud products. We will keep you posted on any future developments in this space on our public roadmap.
I think it's most disappointing that throughout this whole AMA, the answers seem to include "on Jira Cloud we have this".
Well that's great, but it doesn't impress the customers of Data Center solutions.
Companies CHOOSE to stay on Data Center and I doubt by looking at these comments people actually want to hear about Cloud solutions. It's supposed to be an AMA for Data Center, not an advertisement for Jira Cloud.
I sense an alternative strategy from Atlassian on this one which is disappointing.
We had a meeting last year with the Crowd development team (they are in Poland).
The questions on SCIM were not answered. In addition, the team had no idea that some of their assumptions on how AD integration would would be used were totally off from ours. An example of this is the hardcoding of the attributes between Crowd and AD.
Atlassian has very little strategy around authentication and IAM for enterprise DC customers. Our experience with this topic has been abysmal.
Another comment on Crowd: The API is very hard to work with and the documentation is poor. The use of application records to interface to Crowd is not standard (compared to a service acct) and is hard to manage.
@Partha wow you’re really missing the point here. We’re all here with concerns over the lack of features coming to DC and a lot of people here feel that Atlassian is trying to force us all to move to cloud, and are not being forthcoming with that info.
Your comments are so heavy handed on the “move to cloud” side of things that you’re only going to raise even more doubt in the minds of customers.
I will point to a link posted earlier to the company values, and specifically point to the following items:
1. Open company, no bullshit
Openness is root level for us.
2. Don’t #@!%the customer
Customers are our lifeblood. Without happy customers, we’re doomed.
If Cloud has, or nearly has, everything we need, (and based on the fact that @Gosia Kowalska responses to all our questions is to migrate to Cloud) why hasn't Atlassian migrated to Cloud?
Support Portal - On-prem
Community - On-prem
Knowledgebase - On-prem
Documentation sites - On-prem
Care to share your roadmap for migration to Cloud?
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 25, 2022 edited
Hi @Angela Gaida. Thank you for raising your concern about accessibility in Macros. Accessibility is a key focus area for our Data Center product teams and we’re actively working on improving it across our products.
We have recently refreshed the VPAT documents for our primary Data Center products to reflect recent improvements and we've updated these on atlassian.com/accessibility. These reviews have provided a comprehensive accessibility backlog for us to work through, which we’re doing at the moment.
While we are currently focused on accessibility in our Data Center products, we are aware that keyboard navigation for macros is another important function for users with disabilities. We plan on shifting attention to Confluence Macros in the next stage of accessibility improvements.
Until these updates are released, there is a workaround to reach Confluence macros in edit mode via the code shortcut {status}.
@Partha thank you for your reply, I appreciate it. Here is my reply to you.
Each company who chooses self-hosted software will give you a different reason why they won't switch to the Cloud. The Cloud vs Self-hosted debate does not only apply to Atlassian customers.
If you ask me why my company does not move to the Cloud, it's because we used to run Jira Cloud back in 2018, and we had so many problems that we moved to Jira Server (R.I.P.). Since then, everything runs perfectly and we have full control over our software, its security, etc.
Unfortunately, nothing will convince us to move back to the Cloud.
That being said, we do not have 500 users, and will not pay the price for 500 Jira DC users. We may be forced to evaluate alternatives that are on the market in the next few years if we can't get a licence for 100 or 250 users with Jira and Confluence Data Center editions. The solution exists, but it's Atlassian's decision not to create lower tiers. We really feel let down.
Also, you may have missed my question, and I think it's relevant: Why does Bitbucket DC start at 25 users but not Jira/Confluence?
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@lstlaurent , I believe the case is that, they may never admit to it, a lot has been invested in BitBucket development and it never really panned out in scale compared to Jira/Confluence. So to entice more enterprises to adopt it or integrate it in their workflows they created lower user tiers.
Jira/Confluence has already proven itself as enterprise-grade so they expect companies to pay premium for it. If your org requires on-prem, then pay the premium. If that premium is too much because you only have 50 users, then you should be using Cloud. Just my interpretation but it piggy backs on the on-going theme of the DC AMA, "Use the Cloud version it's better" :-(
Not gonna lie, this whole AMA feels like a big waste of time. Not only did we barely get any questions answered, half of those were answered by telling is what cloud offers.
@Gosia Kowalska went MIA hours ago, @Partha missed the mark on what the DC community wants, and I’m tired of asking about the future of DC and not getting a straight answer.
This is a great example of how NOT to run an AMA and how to add additional frustration to an already frustrated user base. Atlassian is in desperate need of an experienced communication person to help with these kind of things.
It’s time for Atlassian to be open and transparent with us about the future of DC without spitting out info about cloud.
Why are there zero plans for new features? Pretty sure I know the answer, but I wish someone from Atlassian would stop tippy-toeing around this and for once give us an honest answer.
There is next to nothing in the DC roadmap outside of security and infrastructure, which is a given for any piece of software and should never be promoted as “what we’re doing for you”
Cloud gets everything, that’s so incredibly obvious. But what is also becoming obvious to me is that as a DC user, I shouldn’t get my hopes up for anything new. After todays AMA i stand firm on my belief that while DC may never fully go away, it will only be maintained at the absolute most basic level and the migration to cloud will continue to be pushed down our throats.
@Matt Not saying I disagree with you, but I think it's a short sighted plan. Even VMware - who it could be said has established themselves as "Enterprise Grade" while Atlassian was still young - has a program to allow for reduced cost licenses for people to learn with.
For example, the VMware User Group (VMUG) allows you access to licenses for virtually all their software for $200 per year. This is how I power my home labs to learn more about being an Atlassian SysAdmin.
There is an argument that as long as Data Center exists, Atlassian should be doing more to help people learn to run it, not less.
Then there is the fact that there are small companies who - because of regulations, laws, and other factors - cannot run in cloud, and now they are just priced out of Data Center. These companies will have no choice but to go to a competitor, likely involving a costly migration in the process. It's for the customer to decide if they will "Use the Cloud Version" - not Atlassian. And Atlassian is slowly taking that choice away. One size fits all is most often actually one size fits none.
Are there any plans to improve accessibility features for Data Center? I work on a government contract that requires us to be section 508 complaint, and there are some outstanding issues on Jira Service Management Customer Portal pages that we get dinged for such as inconsistent tab order for focus objects and missing attributes for assistive technology to read.
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