May 2020 update: What’s next for our self-managed enterprise products

G’day Enterprise Community!

We really appreciate how many of you joined us for our Remote Summit last month. Whether or not you were able to make it, we want to go one step further, and give you even more insight into the investments we’re making for our self-managed enterprise customers so you can plan better (and also be the first to know of some cool things we’re shipping).

In this post, I’ll lay out our key priorities for Data Center, Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Jira Align, and Portfolio for Jira. You’ll also be getting some highlights of recently shipped features and some sneak peeks into what we’re planning to release in the near-ish future (which is noted as “coming soon”).

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Data Center

Data Center continues to expand beyond its original focus of performance, scalability, and availability to add even more value for enterprises. Building on your feedback, we’ve identified new opportunities to meet your needs with features that help you comply with new security regulations, and scale or enhance the ease and security of managing users in your Data Center products. And we’re not just making improvements to the platform– we’re also committed to ensuring the apps connected to your instance are just as reliable and performant at scale.

Here are some of the latest investments we’ve made into our core Data Center products:

Security, compliance, and governance
  • Advanced auditing: Advanced auditing equips enterprises with the visibility and security-relevant digital records needed to help demonstrate compliance, strengthen security, and improve workflow. With event coverage now extended to include user actions, and new admin capabilities such as file externalization, audit delegation, and an enhanced UI, advanced auditing is an exciting new tool for your enterprise toolbelt. Learn more in this webinar.
    • Confluence Data Center (7.5), Jira Software Data Center (8.8), Jira Service Desk Data Center (4.8), Bitbucket Data Center (coming soon)
Advanced user management
  • OpenID Connect: Way back we added SAML support to all of our Data Center products and now we’re adding a new authentication option through OpenID Connect to enable seamless integration with 3rd party identity providers. Supporting OpenID Connect not only makes it easier to comply with security standards and requirements set by your organization but provides an interoperable way, similar to REST, to incorporate security identity management in a frictionless environment.
    • Bitbucket Data Center (7.0), Confluence Data Center (7.5), Jira Software Data Center (8.7), Jira Service Desk Data Center (4.7)
  • Just-in-time provisioning for SAML/OpenID: We’ll streamline the user provisioning process by enabling just-in-time provisioning so that user accounts are created automatically when a new user authenticates for the first time using SSO. (coming soon)
  • Multiple IdPs for SAML / OpenID Connect: For those of you who deploy disparate services through different identity providers (IdPs), we’re building the ability to integrate with multiple IdPs, giving you more flexibility in what can become a spaghetti pile of services. (coming soon)
Apps and extensibility
  • Data Center Marketplace: Since we launched the Data Center apps program over 18 months ago, we have seen close to a 7x drop in high priority tickets for customers who run Data Center apps. And we now have over 860 approved Data Center apps with coverage for 97% of the top apps used in Server.

See Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Software, and Jira Service Desk sections below for more product-specific Data Center details.

Bitbucket

Cloning and fetching large repositories in Bitbucket is now 2x - 5x faster and we’ve been making significant investments to expand instance scaling capabilities. We’re also doubling down on our commitment to developer happiness (and productivity) with features that boost the developer experience and integrations that let developers build, test, and deploy without context switching.

Scale and performance
  • Removing Network File System (NFS) performance bottleneck: We want to help our enterprise customers further scale Bitbucket Data Center, so we’re solving the Network File System (NFS) performance bottleneck that some of our largest customers have experienced. (coming soon)
Developer experience
  • Pull request filtering: It's not productive to have to sift through a large list of pull requests in order to locate a comment you've left or to see why a change was made, so we've made it easier to find a pull request by refining your search. You can now locate pull requests by searching for text and/or selecting a reviewer. (Bitbucket 7.2)

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  • Push logs: The push log allows repository admins to quickly see how the branches in a repository have changed over time. It includes details like who, when, and how the change took place, for example; pushing new commits, merging a pull request, and editing a file in a browser. (Bitbucket 7.1)
  • Outdated comments and comments on other diffs: We want to make it easier to keep track of conversations/comments on files your developers are reviewing. So we’re providing a better way to surface these comments on the file in the Pull request diff. What’s more, we’ll also show outdated comments from other diffs into the pull request diff so developers can easily see if their comment/feedback has been incorporated. (coming soon)
  • New code review workflow: To ensure the relevancy of comments and improve the review experience, we’re allowing comments to be stored as drafts and submitted once at the end of the review. This will be in addition to the existing code review workflow. (coming soon)
Integrated CI/CD
  • New builds page: We’re working on a new builds page that will allow you to go beyond Bamboo and Jenkins posting build status commits in Bitbucket. With this new view, you’ll start seeing richer build metadata in the context of your work and there will be an ability to take quick actions (e.g., re-run builds). (coming soon)
  • Templates supporting config as code: We want to make it super easy to create and configure a CI/CD pipeline inside Bamboo, Jenkins, and other CI/CD tools. (coming soon)

Bamboo

As part of our developer productivity toolset, like Bitbucket, we’re heavily focused on integrated CI/CD and on improving the developer experience for Bamboo. In the future, you can expect to see further improvements to branch configurations and even better-performing logs with friendlier UI.

Integrated CI/CD

Improved branch configurations: We’ve added the ability to define and maintain branch configurations that differ from the master branch. This gives developers the flexibility to update build configurations as often they need in line with the corresponding code. (Bamboo 7.0)

Developer experience

Better logs: We’re making it easier to locate failures inside logs in Bamboo so developers can diagnose the build failures more efficiently. (coming soon)

Confluence

We’ve been hard at work to improve compliance and have improved performance across all major actions with mean latency cut in half. Looking to the future, we’re investing in more enterprise features, accessibility improvements, improved archiving and editor experiences, and upgrades to further modernize your experience.

Compliance, governance, and security
  • Advanced Permissions Management: Once your site reaches a certain size, permissions management can be a challenge. We now provide you with the tools you need to manage, troubleshoot, and audit permissions. Head to Inspect permissions to learn more, or check out our new Permissions best practices guide.  (Confluence Data Center 7.3)

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Scale, performance, and availability
  • Rate limiting: Rate limiting gives your instance the power to self-protect. Admins can now control how many REST API requests automations and scripts can make, and how often they can make them, meaning increased performance and team productivity (and hopefully for admins, more sleep too). (Confluence Data Center 7.3)
  • Re-indexing improvements: The new Confluence Data Center re-indexing process will enable admins to run the re-indexing process by just clicking a button. To prevent any cluster downtime or performance impact for your users, the cluster will automatically choose one node to re-create the index while the other nodes will continue to serve user requests. What’s more, the new UI will also allow admins to track the re-indexing progress and replication to each of the cluster nodes. (coming soon)
Experience improvements
  • More control when editing files: We’ve made it easier to keep track of the files you’ve opened for editing with Atlassian Companion and have improved the way Confluence launches Companion to support it in more environments. Make sure you upgrade Companion to get these great new features! See Atlassian Companion app release notes for the latest changes in Companion. (Confluence 7.3)
  • Mobile device management (MDM) support: You can now distribute the Confluence Server mobile app to your team using your MDM solution. This is especially great if you need to restrict the app to company-approved devices, or a particular set of users. Learn more about how logging in has never been easier here. (Confluence Server iOS app version 1.8.0 / Android app version 0.4.3 or later)
  • Confluence 7.4 Enterprise release: We’re pleased to present Confluence 7.4, the latest and first Enterprise release on the new 7.x platform. Since the last Enterprise release (6.13.0), we’ve shipped a huge amount of value and resolved just under a thousand issues. To learn more about this release, check out this Community Post.

Jira Software

Our investments in performance and scale have been paying off for Jira. Between our 7.13 and 8.5 Enterprise releases, we’ve increased the speed of viewing boards by 34% and viewing backlogs by 70%. But we’re also focused on helping you scale agile beyond the team level and are modernizing our platform (shipping new features and fixing bugs that impact enterprises most, and improving accessibility and reliability).

Agile at scale
  • Refreshed Velocity Chart: Say hello to a completely reimagined Velocity Chart, available for Scrum boards. The new chart shows up to 120 sprints, lets you choose a pre-defined timeframe or a custom date range, shows avg. velocity of your team, and has a new look-and-feel with some cool features like focus that lets you zoom in on the right sprint. To view the chart, navigate to your desired Scrum board, and go to Reports > Velocity Chart. (Jira Software 8.9)

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  • Dates for future sprints: With the ability to create sprints with future dates, you can more accurately forecast planned work and ensure the alignment of multiple teams' work. Now, whenever you create a sprint, a pop-up opens allowing you to enter dates for this sprint. What's more, we're basing the guideline on burnup and burndown charts on the actual start date (not the planned start date as was the case) and planned completion date of the sprint. (Jira Software 8.8)
  • Jira Align Connector: With the new Jira Align Connector, we are ensuring that the Jira Align and Jira Software connection is easy to set up and painless to maintain. By making the integration seamless, you’ll accelerate your time to value with Jira Align and have minimal overhead keeping the two systems in sync. (coming soon)
Performance and scale
  • Cluster monitoring improvements: Now, no stale node goes unnoticed. With the new information we've added to the Cluster monitoring page, you can quickly track and remove stale nodes and fix the failing ones in your cluster. This is because apart from viewing the ID, and uptime information, you get the node status (active, no heartbeat, offline) and Jira status information (maintenance, error, running, starting). With this info at hand, venturing on any cluster clean-up task is way easier than it used to be. To view the information, go to Jira Administration > System > Clustering. (Jira Software Data Center 8.9)
  • Improved custom fields: We’re identifying and implementing improvements that will reduce the impact of custom fields on index size, reindexing time, and performance. (coming soon)
Platform improvements
  • Personal accessibility settings: We want every team around the globe to be able to use Jira with the least amount of trouble, and our new accessibility improvements are the next step towards this goal. As of Jira Software 8.8, every user can personalize their accessibility settings by going to User profile > Accessibility, and opt-in for two options: underlined links and unique patterns on issue statuses, which look so awesome that half of our office is using them (although most of us are perfectly fine with greens and blues). What’s more, we’ve added a new option to your personal accessibility settings allowing you to increase text spacing for better readability. (Jira Software 8.9)
  • Mobile device management (MDM): Now, you can distribute our Android and iOS apps to your organization’s approved devices using your MDM provider, and you can pre-populate your instance’s site URLs. This makes setup and login easier (and more secure) for individual users who want to take Jira on the go. (Jira Software Server iOS app version 1.3.2 / Android app version 0.7.5 or later)

Jira Service Desk

We’ve been hard at work to ship new features that increase agent productivity and make our ITSM offering even more robust. In addition, we’ve been continuing to invest in performance, stability, and integrations with other Atlassian products. A highlight: between our 3.16 and 4.5 Enterprise releases, it’s now 35% faster to view dashboards and 24% faster to view page loads.

New feature development
  • Improved queues- manage multiple issues at once with bulk actions: Ever wanted to select all issues at once, delete, and just go for a coffee? Well, now you can! (please don’t.) With the latest bulk actions in Jira Service Desk, you can manage and groom your queues like a pro, and get them in order in no time. (Jira Service Desk 4.8)

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  • Multilingual customer portal: The customer portal will display in the local setting of each user - so each and every employee can request and receive service seamlessly. (coming soon)
  • Opsgenie integration: All major incidents in Opsgenie will be automatically pulled in to Jira Service Desk, providing a holistic view of all current and past major incidents. Say goodbye to jumping between your ITSM tool and your monitoring & alerting system! (coming soon)
  • Further improvements to queues- Make changes inline and add a star for commonly used queues for quick access. (coming soon)

Portfolio for Jira

We’re committed to giving you even more insights to improve the predictability of your plans and take the guesswork out of your scoping decisions while also making it easier for you to share your plans with stakeholders and refer back to your plans over time.

Realistic roadmaps
  • Edit dates for future sprints in Jira: The ability to edit dates for future sprints is now available with the release of Jira Software 8.8. In addition to planning future work, you have control to set specific start and end dates, allowing you to put space between sprints, or change the duration of a sprint. (Portfolio for Jira 3.24)
Core usability
  • Saved Views: You can now save multiple view configurations of a plan (containing filters, fields, scope, color groups, etc.) so that users can quickly switch to the views they regularly need to access. (Portfolio for Jira 3.23)
  • Roll-up Dates: For some fields in a plan, you can choose to display a preview of rolled-up values from child issues, in the parent issue row. This is now available for dates. When switched on via View settings, rolled-up dates will appear with a roll-up arrow icon beside them to indicate that they're a preview of the child issue dates below. (Portfolio for Jira 3.23)
Shareability
  • Export to CSV: You now have the option to Export plan data, making it available to work with using external tools. For example, you might want to import to Microsoft Excel to analyze or visualize the data in ways that aren't currently available in Portfolio. The exported data can also be used to support third-party integrations. (Portfolio for Jira 3.23)

Jira Align

We’re invested in helping those of you in large scale agile transformations improve the ability to make all work visible, get it aligned to strategy, and hone your ability to adapt and innovate faster than before.

Business outcomes
  • OKRs in Jira Align: We’re adding a new dashboard to display real-time OKR scores and all the work connected to the OKR. By measuring the progress against KRs in real-time, you empower teams to make decisions and align their own work to strategic objectives. (coming soon)
  • AI in Jira Align: We are bringing predictive analytics to Jira Align that look at historical and current working trends, in order to provide better warnings when your work is off track and likely to miss the objectives you set out at the start. (coming soon)
Improved integrations
  • Jira Align Trello Connector: We’ve added a connector to bring the work happening in Trello into Jira Align. By tracking work from Trello in Jira Align, you can see the progress towards your quarterly increments, and see how the work happening in Trello rolls up to your company’s strategic objectives and direction. (Jira Align 10.69)

Please share your thoughts in the comments below. How does impact your work? Is this helpful? What features are you most excited for? Looking forward to hearing from you!

12 comments

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LarryBrock
Community Leader
Community Leader
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May 18, 2020

Wow, that's a lot of exciting news and a lot to digest - thanks @Patrick Richardson !!

Now to contemplate how some of these changes are going to impact my various customers so I can make informed and well-reasoned recommendations....  :-)

Cheers!

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Deekshith Musthyala May 19, 2020

Wow those are nice improvements in roadmaps. 👍

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Jamie Rogers May 19, 2020

Thanks @Patrick Richardson 

This is a good read and provides a little bit extra detail on some things that wasn't covered on the call so I appreciate the insights into what is coming up next for data center.

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scott_boisvert
Community Leader
Community Leader
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May 19, 2020

So, Jira Align is self hosted? I thought it was cloud based? Interesting, that might make it a more viable product for us.

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Anshul_Gupta May 19, 2020

Thanks for the update on the Jira Align roadmap. Looking forward to the improvements and let me know if you need a pilot client to assist.

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Lisa Kaufman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 19, 2020

@scott_boisvert - While Jira Align is primarily cloud-based, we do have an on-premises version for customers with strict regulations that can't host certain data types in the cloud. For more information, you can either reach out to your EA/TAM or submit this form: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/align#contact. Thanks!

Bora Turgut May 21, 2020

Nice article, and great way of summarizing these updates. Keep these coming please! I know others may not be giving feedback to you directly...but these are extremely helpful.

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Dave Liao
Community Leader
Community Leader
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May 21, 2020

The Confluence permissions enhancements are much-appreciated. I just wept in delight 😁

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Anoop Wilson
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May 21, 2020

Nice article,expecting more on Bamboo 

Peter Giglinger May 25, 2020

Reindexing improvements for Confluence just sound great - can't wait to try it out and hopefully finally get rid of all these bugs around it. Thanks!

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Martyna Wojtas
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 26, 2020

@Anoop Wilson Thank you for your feedback!

Here are more details on what has been delivered in Bamboo recently: improvements to branch configurations - it’s finally possible to create feature-specific configurations that allow for custom build plans; updated platform - improved security as well as support for new databases and repositories; customizable headers - ability to modify the color of the header and adding a custom logo. Release notes: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bamboo/bamboo-7-0-release-notes-989760226.html

Could you please elaborate on your expectations - what more do you think Bamboo could do and why?

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Mirkeya Capellan (CAPELLM) May 26, 2020

Nice improvements! I wonder what all these changes will bring.  With that said, Atlassian team has a lot of testing to do.  

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