November 2019 update: An insider look at what’s coming next with Server and Data Center

[#1]

G’day Atlassian community!

We’ve been listening and understand that the more insights you have into our product investments for Server and Data Center the better.

We want to be proactive and more regularly share details about what we’re planning for the future. After the last Summit, we shared a Community Post with the investments we’re making to the Server and Data Center platforms. And now, we want to give you the latest.

We’ve been up to a lot and are continuing to make investments in three key areas: 1) next-level team productivity, 2) visibility at scale, and 3) solving challenges for enterprise.

Keep reading to learn more about each of these areas, and how our different product lines contribute to this vision with features we recently shipped and a sneak peek at what’s coming soon.

(Note: all features are for both Server and Data Center unless they appear in the Data Center section.)

1) Next-level team productivity

At Atlassian, we’re all about unleashing the potential of every team. That’s why we’re making investments to boost your team’s productivity with features that increase the speed of service for your IT agents, improve developer workflow, and enable better collaboration across all teams.

JIRA SERVICE DESK

We’re hard at work improving the speed of service for your agents, simplifying the portal experience for your customers, and helping your operations teams manage and resolve incidents faster.

• Better queues: We’re helping your agents be more efficient with improvements to the queue experience that simplify sorting and filtering. We’re also looking at in-line comments, bulk edit issues, and star commonly used queues for quick access.
• Simplified customer portal experience: We made improvements to the customer portal to provide a customizable experience that can be branded to best reflect your company. Based on positive feedback, this will be the default customer portal view going forward.
• Opsgenie and Statuspage integrations: Our seamless integrations with Opsgenie and Statuspage let you coordinate your incident response/recovery efforts. We’re now planning ways to allow for data flow between tickets created in Opsgenie and Jira Service Desk, as well as ways to surface Statuspage learnings within Jira Service Desk.

BITBUCKET

We’re committed to keeping developers happy… and productive. That’s why we’re investing in integrations that let developers build, test, and deploy without context switching. We’re also making the pull request experience better by improving usability, accessibility, and performance.

• Atlassian-supported Jenkins integration: An Atlassian built and supported connection for Jenkins CI is now available! It provides admins and developers a seamless way to configure a Jenkins job to clone and fetch from Bitbucket’s primary or smart mirrors, and to automatically provide feedback from builds to commit and pull requests. Check out this post for more info and for tips to install the plugin.
• Atlassian-supported VS Code integration: With this integration, we’re bringing pull requests and issues right where they should be –  in your team’s IDE alongside your code. Goodbye context switching!
• Atlassian-supported Slack integration: Chat is a key tool for developer productivity and overall team happiness. That’s why we’ve also introduced Slack integrations for Bitbucket. This integration will help teams save time and work better together, in the tools they prefer. 
• Suggestions in pull requests: We’ve introduced pull request suggestions to help teams deliver high-quality software faster, by making it easy to fix small, trivial mistakes. Rather than describing simple changes in comments, such as typos, reviewers can now make a suggestion which developers can accept and apply with one click.
• Git LFS file locking improvements: We previously introduced support for Git LFS file locking, which allows you to lock files to stop them from being edited while you work on them. Since then, we've added a lock button to the source view and made it easy to see if a file is locked.

CONFLUENCE

We have big plans for the Confluence 7.0 era that make it even easier to connect people and ideas, getting everyone on the same page.

• 7.1 release: We’re excited to present Confluence 7.1. To build off of 7.0, this feature release helps your teams manage content at scale with improvements to macros, Java 11 support, and extended support for Edit in Office.

JIRA SOFTWARE

We’ve been focused on helping you accelerate your team’s momentum, with recent investments in mobile to   keep your work moving from anywhere.

• Jira mobile apps: Native apps for Jira Software Server and Data Center are available for iOS and Android. Now your teams will never miss a beat- no matter where they are. Learn more about the apps and how to get started.

2) Visibility at scale

As many of us know, the next frontier of agile is scale. You’ve scaled your teams horizontally- but how do you communicate a big-picture view of the work happening in Jira to stakeholders and other teams? To help you visualize work and get your teams on the same page, we’re investing in features that make it easier to share with stakeholders and that help with capacity planning by providing more visibility into team availability.

PORTFOLIO FOR JIRA

We’re focused on giving your team the ability to plan for a future in an agile world. For Portfolio for Jira, this means making it easier for you to share plans with stakeholders across your organization and providing additional tools to plan work around team capacity.

• Planned capacity and velocity: We’re making capacity planning even better. New features will enable you to customize future capacity, velocity or sprint dates for individual sprints to plan a more realistic roadmap.
• Compact roadmap: Sometimes all you need is a simple, graphical roadmap without any of the complex details from Jira. The compact roadmap will provide an attractive, high-level view of the roadmap perfect for presentations or wall-boards, with no interaction needed.
• Saved views: Portfolio enables you to customize the way you view a plan, choosing various grouping, filtering, and field layout options. We’re adding the ability to save a view and to easily switch between saved views so you don’t need to recreate the layout every time. These views are also shareable which is perfect for when you’re building a view for specific meetings or stakeholders.
• Export: It’s wild, but not everyone works in Jira. So, we’re making it easier to export plans to other formats such as PDF, PNG, and CSV.
• Confluence macro: We’ve introduced new sharing capabilities with the arrival of the Portfolio for Jira plan Confluence macro. Displaying a Portfolio for Jira plan in Confluence provides a window into your teams' work, allowing key stakeholders to stay informed, track the status and progress of ongoing work, and understand what’s planned for the future.
• 3.14 release: Portfolio for Jira 3.14 is our most recent release on the 3.x platform. We’ve used your input to make Portfolio for Jira simpler and more intuitive to use, flexible to varying planning style and process, and transparent for all users. If you’ve been running on an earlier version, check out this article to see what 3.x is all about.

3) Solving challenges for enterprise

We’ve also been working on improvements aimed at meeting the growing needs of our enterprise customers. To help you to continue to be successful at scale, we’ve been investing primarily in new features and capabilities for Data Center (our self-managed enterprise edition) and in Enterprise releases so you can achieve enterprise-grade stability and assurance regardless of platform.

DATA CENTER

We’re continuing to invest in Data Center’s core promises of performance, stability, and scale – while also investing in other areas like automation and infrastructure, security and compliance, and improving the Data Center apps program – to give you a robust enterprise offering.

Performance, stability, and scale

• Support for CDN: CDN support is now available for Bitbucket, Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence, allowing you to speed up the experience of your remote users. We’ve made it super easy by adding a single-line configuration in our templates for AWS CloudFront, but you can use any CDN you’d like.
• Rate Limiting: With appropriate self-protection mechanisms, you’ll have greater visibility and insights into what is happening in the system, the ability to customize configurations to ensure security and control, and ensure that the instance is stable and available. Rate Limiting is now available in Bitbucket and will be coming soon to Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence. Read this post to see how you can protect your Bitbucket Data Center instance from abuse with rate limiting.
• Mirror Farms: To reduce time spent waiting for build results, we’ve introduced mirror farms in Bitbucket. This is our latest evolution of smart mirroring, allowing you to increase CI/CD capacity. It also improves scalability, provides high availability, and boosts performance by clustering mirrors into “farms” grouped behind a load balancer. 
• Issue archiving: We’ve taken archiving to the next level for Jira Service Desk and Jira Software. You can now remove outdated content on an issue-by-issue basis, even from ongoing projects to keep a clean manageable backlog and improve performance. You can even create automation rules so that issues will be bulk archived if the status is “done” to get rid of those pesky outdated tickets that are slowing your system and users down.  

Automation and infrastructure

• Support for Amazon Aurora: We’re tackling database durability with support for Amazon Aurora, our first officially supported highly available database for Data Center. Aurora support is also enabled as a single line configuration option, so it’ll be easy to get up and running. It’s available now for Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Software, and Jira Service Desk!

Security and compliance

• OpenID Connect: We’ll soon be providing support for OpenID across our Data Center products. This will make it easier for you to implement SSO across your organization, making your instance more secure for you and your users.
• Centralized license visibility: With Crowd, you can now have better visibility into license consumption with a centralized license view across all of your Server and Data Center products. Learn more about this feature here.
• New permissions: Soon, we’ll be delivering three new permissions features for Confluence admins, so you can ensure the right people can see the right content. These include powerful new tools for inspecting/auditing permissions for a given page or users, the ability to troubleshoot access levels, and bulk editing space permission setting for users and groups.

Data Center Marketplace

• Improvements to Data Center approved app program: We want you to feel confident that the apps you integrate into Data Center are enterprise-grade, and that’s why Data Center approved apps follow a higher standard of testing. In fact, you’re 3x less likely to have a critical support issue when running a Data Center approved app. We now have over 700 Data Center approved apps on the Marketplace, and this number will continue to grow.

AVAILABLE FOR SERVER AND DATA CENTER

• Support for Docker images: We understand many of you, especially at the enterprise level, often need to deploy consistent instances that are cloud platform agnostic. That’s why we now provide and maintain official Docker container images for Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, and Bitbucket, allowing you to deploy virtually identical instances across architectures.
• Support for HTTP/2 : To further support distributed users, we’ve started to automatically enable HTTP/2 when your network supports it for Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Desk. So what does this mean for your Data Center application performance? Quite a bit- our experiments have shown that enabling HTTP/2 can reduce load by up to 20%! 

ENTERPRISE RELEASES

With Enterprise releases, we’re able to provide modern, feature-rich versions of our products- born from all the hard work we’ve put into performance and scalability, plus the hundreds of critical bug fixes and other small improvements that we regularly release- in a hardened package that’s ready for Enterprise.

• Jira Software 8.5: The Jira Software 8.5 Enterprise release is now available, allowing you to reap the benefits of the Jira 8 platform and everything we’ve delivered since, but with the assurance that everything you’re getting with this release has been subject to additional performance and scalability testing against both the platform and the past two Enterprise releases.
• Jira Service Desk 4.5: Jira Service Desk 4.5 is our fastest version ever and a certified Enterprise release from Day 1! Here are a few highlights: SLA recalculations happen 4x faster, viewing queues is 3x faster, and viewing service desk issues is 2x faster.
• Confluence Enterprise release coming soon: Looking forward to upgrading to the 7.x series, but want the confidence that you’ll be getting enterprise-grade stability? The next Confluence Enterprise release will be coming in the new year, stay tuned for updates!

We hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s to come. Share your thoughts in the comments below. How does this impact your work? Was this helpful? What do you want to see in the future?

Want more? Check out our recent webinar here for a deeper dive into these new features.

[hutcj]

When will the Bitbucket changes be available for Bitbucket server?

[Denis Zvonov]

We, your users, never asked for most of this and will never benefit from the most of this.

Instead, look up your JRASERVER project - there are bugs and issues with thousands of votes, staying there for years untouched. Please stop ignoring your community, cause it is us who sell your products to our companies. Please stop ignoring serious issues cause that is what important.

[Piotr Wegert]

That's a nice roadmap, but crucial features we already paid for remain unfixed. For years. Let me just mention two, that basically break the whole jira reporting functionality. 

• Issue removed from Sprint not showing in Burndown Chart or Sprint Report.
• Closing and Reopening Estimates Issues Incorrectly Modifies Velocity in Version Report

[Alana Stoltzfus]

@hutcj I'm happy to share that many of the Bitbucket features mentioned in the post above have already launched. For example, Atlassian supported Jenkins, VS Code and Slack integration are available now from marketplaces (Jenkins, Visualstudio and MPAC respectively) while Git LFS file locking improvements are available as of Bitbucket 6.5.

For any features coming soon, we can't share exact timing at this time but as we get closer to launching these features we'll be sharing out more details. We hope that by giving you insight into what we're planning before having full timing details, that you're able to begin your planning and have a better understanding of how Atlassian thinks about future investment in our products.

[hutcj]

So the suggestions in PRs feature isn't available yet?

[Alana Stoltzfus]

@hutcj the list in my comment above wasn't comprehensive of all features that have already launched for Bitbucket, but the pull request suggestion feature is available as well as of Bitbucket 6.6. You can find more details about it in the 6.6 release notes: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-server-6-6-release-notes-975023322.html

[hutcj]

Ok, thanks.

[Kasia Derenda]

@Denis Zvonov, @Piotr Wegert, thanks for the feedback. We are consistently considering customer requests for features and enhancements as we develop our roadmap. We've detailed some of these efforts in past updates here and here. To give you visibility into recently resolved jira.atlassian.com issues, we’ve built the Jira Server and Data Center: recently resolved issues dashboard which displays bugs and feature suggestions resolved within the last 6 months and between the last two Jira Enterprise Releases.

In the near future we plan to improve the most frequently used reports in Jira Software. Among others, we’ll be addressing the problem of issues removed from sprint and not recorded in Sprint Report or Burndown Chart. The estimate for resolution provided in the previous status update on JSWSERVER-14984 has been long exceeded, we will post an update as soon as we start work on this issue. We have not yet prioritised resolving the problem with Version Report you gave as another example.

Katarzyna | Product manager, Jira Server and Data Center 

[Denis Zvonov]

@Kasia Derenda You do a lot of UNIMPORTANT stuff and you do not do IMPORTANT. But let's see the facts. Just look at the dates and votes. Amazing, is not it?!

Or this particular issue, what prevents you from delivering it? Using request type in dashboard, who would want it, right? We'd better "improve" something else.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-1914

[Pavel Petrov]

Hi all. It looks like a nice update for Portfolio for Jira. When can we see the planned capacity and velocity, compact roadmap and saved views? 

[P_D_ Foerster]

Totally agree with @Denis Zvonov here!
Fixing your product's bugs is your duty. I cannot understand why so many bugs (also with votes) linger in the backlog for years.

I know that you take into consideration other factors than just JAC and this community here but we as your customers mainly can see those two services and that's why we will always reference to issues / features reported there.