Sneak peek: Improvements coming to Server and Data Center

[#1]

Good Morning Atlassian Community!

I'm Patrick Richardson, and I am the Group Product Manager for Data Center here at Atlassian. I had a great time meeting many of you at Summit in Las Vegas last month and speaking about what investments we're making to the Server and Data Center platforms. In the spirit of openness, we decided that what happens in Vegas should not stay in Vegas, but be shared with all of you. I'm excited to start a broader conversation today around what we're shipping in Server and Data Center over the next several months. 

We've heard your requests for high availability and performance, and we're happy to announce we are working on the following features to help you manage your users and data at scale for Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk, and Bitbucket Data Center:

• CDN support: To support better performance for distributed teams, we are introducing content delivery network (CDN) support for our core Data Center offerings. By enabling CDN support, you can accelerate the experience of your remote users as they interact with the UI of our products and reduce peak load on your primary application instances. You can use any CDN you want or a reverse proxy setup. We'll also provide easy integration with AWS CloudFront in updated quick start templates.
• Support for Amazon Aurora: We will be enhancing one of the core promises of Data Center, high availability, by introducing support for Amazon Aurora as our first supported highly available database across all of our core Data Center offerings.
• Improved AWS and Azure templates: More than 35% of Data Center instances are deployed on a major cloud platform today, and we know this is the future for many of our enterprise customers. Scale your deployment quickly and minimize overhead with new AWS and Azure templates for Data Center. These templates are full of best practices from Atlassian, AWS, and Azure, with recommended guidelines for achieving optimal performance, resiliency, and security. You can pick from quick-start templates with pre-set defaults or customizable templates built to support your organization’s unique environment.
• Enterprise infrastructure guidelines: To help you find the right infrastructure set up for your Data Center deployment, we’re introducing several reference guides based on hundreds of performance tests, which were run across a variety of instance types and on different configurations of AWS compute-optimized virtual machines. See how different setups impact different factors like performance, cost, and reliability, and how they can help you determine the best hardware configuration for your organization. We're launching this in Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence with Bitbucket soon to follow.
• Data Center app improvements: We now have more than 380 Data Center approved apps on the Marketplace, including 85% of the top 100 apps that are currently used by our customers. Plus, we’ve found that customers who are are running a Data Center approved app are 18% less likely to raise a critical support issue. We'll continue to expand this program to bring more apps onboard and help vendors deliver higher-quality and more secure applications.

The future of Jira is looking bright with a powerful mobile app and another Enterprise release in the works. Here are a few things we're excited to ship and highlights from recent releases in Jira Software Server and Data Center:

• Jira Server mobile: With the mobile app for Jira, users can stay connected with their work, get updates on important tickets, and search for important information. Check out the Jira Server mobile app beta to take the app for a test drive.
• New dashboard for future Jira improvements: Stay on top of bug fixes and feature suggestions that we are currently working on with the new Jira Server and Data Center: current work and future plans dashboard.
• Enterprise release: We recognize that it's critical for large customers to have early notice of Enterprise releases, which is why we have designated version 8.5 (releasing later this year) to be the next Enterprise release. Another change we're making to ease the planning process is certifying the feature release, so you don't have to wait until a subsequent bug fix release to take action. Check out this post for the latest update or this page for general information about Enterprise releases. 
• Flexible boards: You can now resize the 'Issue details' panel as you see fit, and we've added horizontal scrolling to boards with many columns so everything fits nicely, even on small screens. If you haven't seen the new flexible boards in 8.1 yet, be sure to check out the release notes here.
• Better email notifications: Fight inbox overflow with better email notifications that shipped in 8.0. You now have the ability to group issue updates, comments, and edits made within 10 minutes into a single email. Soon, we'll also be providing admins with more time delay options and the ability to control email notifications for your users.
• 8.0 platform release recap: Get details on other improvements like decreased load times and new advanced search options released in 8.0 here. 

Jira Software Data Center

• Issue archiving: Archiving whole projects can be too broad, especially when you have really large or long-lived projects. This is why we expanded on project archiving by adding issue archiving in 8.1. Admins can now archive individual issues with either bulk actions or via an API. Customers will also be able to export a list of their archived issues and related issue data. We're not done yet - we will be extending the functionality to include archive browsing soon. 

We're excited to ship the next Confluence platform release this year. We will also continue to invest in small improvements like bug fixes and improvements to the performance and stability of your Confluence instance.

• Confluence 7.0: The upcoming platform release of Confluence will include platform upgrades to deliver better performance, front-end improvements, and shorter page load time.
• Enterprise release: In alignment with our approximately 12-month cadence between Enterprise releases, the Confluence team plans to release an update about the next Confluence Enterprise release in late 2019. 
• Permissions improvements: These updates will ensure that the users you are sharing with have the correct permissions and will help resolve any issues prior to sharing. For example, we’ll be making updates to the ‘Share’ dialog by surfacing access issues before users share a page with their teammates.

Confluence Data Center

• Advanced permissions improvements: In Confluence Data Center, we’re excited to be adding three new permissions features that will help reduce administrative overhead: permission auditing, bulk editing, and troubleshooting. For more details, read the blog post here.

Jira Service Desk continues to evolve quickly and we have no intention of slowing down. We're investing in IT teams big and small - from improving self-service and agent productivity to managing your incidents and assets.

• New customer portal: We took all that goodness from the improved customer portal experience in Jira Service Desk Cloud and now offer similar customization in Server and Data Center. You can now customize your portal to represent your brand using banner images, colors, and themes, as well as add an announcement to your login banner to help users gain access with ease. Plus, the search bar is strategically placed in the banner to encourage self-help.
• Knowledge centric support: Customers have come to know and expect self-service now more than ever. That’s why we are adding new ways to put knowledge front and center in the customer portal, so customers can find what they need without raising a ticket. We're also improving queues with better sorting and filtering, so agents can find the information they need more quickly. 
• Integration with Opsgenie and Statuspage: Jira Service Desk now seamlessly integrates with Opsgenie and Statuspage to help you respond to incidents faster and keep your customers in the loop. The SaaS architecture ensures that your incident response software runs on a separate infrastructure from your other systems, so they are up even when your systems are down. As we introduce new cloud-hosted IT solutions, we’ll continue to support integrations with Server & Data Center.
• Enterprise release: We know that large customers need time to prepare for an instance upgrade, which is why we have designated version 4.5 to be the next Enterprise release (shipping later this year). Another change we're making to ease the planning process is certifying the feature release, so you don't have to wait until a subsequent bug fix release to take action. Check out this post for the latest update or this page for general information about Enterprise releases. 

Jira Service Desk Data Center

• Issue archiving: Last year we introduced project archiving to reduce clutter and make Jira more performant. This year, we're extending our archiving capabilities to include issue archiving. 
• Azure deployment: In response to customer requests, we're expanding our deployment support to include Microsoft Azure.

We've got a bucket full of enhancements coming to Bitbucket that will help improve developers’ quality of life and velocity while maintaining a streamlined development process at scale. 

• Git LFS file locking: To help protect your team's time and sanity, we’re introducing Git LFS file locking in Bitbucket. With this, teams can now see when a file is being worked on and prevents others from pushing changes until the file has been unlocked again.
• Atlassian-supported Jenkins integration: We heard your feedback and are shipping a built-in, first-class integration with Jenkins, the leading CI/CD tool on the market. With this integration, admins and developers can take advantage of a simple setup, easy configuration, and zero maintenance costs. This is just the beginning - we're excited to build on this with more Bitbucket features in the future. 
• Commit graph: Trying to understand the history and impact of a stream of related commits is difficult if not impossible at times. So to make this easier, especially for newer developers, we introduced a built-in commit graph in Bitbucket 6.1. Developers can now visualize repository’s history, understand the relationship to commits, and easily find relevant commits right within Bitbucket.

Bitbucket Data Center

• Smart mirror farms: To help large, distributed teams avoid the traffic jam that can come from an increasing number of CI builds, we’re building smart mirror farms in Bitbucket Data Center. By allowing smart mirrors to be clustered into “farms”, software teams will be able to increase their CI/CD capacity and improve the quality of life for distributed teams by reducing their time spent waiting for build results.
• Rate limiting for REST APIs: Wouldn’t it be great if your systems would self-protect from automated integrations and untrained users? To solve for this, we’re introducing rate limiting for REST APIs, which will allow you to configure self-protection mechanisms by setting thresholds for the number of requests allowed in a specified time frame. 

Now that I've shared what we're working on, I have an ask for you: share your thoughts in the comments below. How does this impact your work? What is helpful? What do you want to see in the future? 

Hope to see you in Vegas next spring for Summit 2020.   

Cheers, 

Patrick

[Kat Warner]

Quick question - does the Better email notifications  mean jira Service Desk customers will no longer get separate emails for the comment and status updates?

[Vineet Gandhi]

Hello Kat,

By default, the Jira Service Desk notifications will be separate as this is an 'opt-in' feature. Admins will be able to turn this feature ON after which notifications (updates, comments, edits) will be grouped.

Notifications for "mentions" will be sent immediately.

Thank you.

[Tarun Sapra]

Ability to have "Project archiving" and "Issue archiving" in Jira server will benefit lot of customers, especially the ones having less than 2 million issues in their server version and are happy with it's performance and currently not planning to move to Data center.  

[Shana]

Hi there @Tarun Sapra, thanks for your comment - and glad to hear the archiving features we've been working on for Jira Software are interesting to you!

We take great care when prioritizing new features in Server and Data Center editions of our products. Our rationale for which features belong in each edition is outlined in this blog post.

With archiving, we've made a conscious choice to make these features available in Data Center because they help customers using Data Center to ensure they can maintain high availability and performance at scale, along with greater administrative control.

Server customers can archive and remove excess data from their instances if they choose, but the process is manual and requires some creative workarounds. This article has a few suggestions. 

Thanks again for the feedback and request!

[Robb F Watkins]

We would REALLY like to see a built in JIRA / Jenkins integration in Jira.  I see above that the Bitbucket built in is in the works.  What about Jira?

The current combination of add-ons is not optimal.   

[April]

I appreciate your thought to create an improvement dashboard for your customers. 

However, the current iteration lacks the means to distinguish between Server and Data Center, which significantly degrades its utility. 

Is there now, or could there be,  any reliable means of determining which product an issue is intended for?

Since most Jira server issues I watched over the years were only released for Data Center,  I would like to be able to stop watching irrelevant items, and also to locate items of interest. 

[Steve_Gase]

Good to see this forum to discuss tools and its future directions. 

After the recent Summit, it seemed that Cloud was getting a lot of the energy, and while some features made their way to Data Center it seemed that the Server product was being left out.

• I'd like to see archival features available in server.
• I'd like to see the permissions improvements available in server.

A big unmet need are custom field limits.  We maintain multiple instances because custom field usage prevents the teams from sharing a common instance.

[Guillermo _DEISER_]

when can we expect some of these improvements. Aurora support is a must for some DC customers and we would like to reduce the uncertainty. 

We assume that the dashboard mentioned will contain part of this information. We any further feedback is welcome

[Gosia Kowalska]

Hi @April, thanks for your suggestion to make the distinction between Server and Data Center more visible on the dashboards. We do have a separate filter for Data Center only suggestions and bugs on this dashboard: Jira Server and Data Center: recently resolved issues. We will explore the possibility to include a similar filter to the dashboard with issues which are currently in progress or planned for the near future.

Please make sure you add the dashboards to your favorites.

Once again, thanks for your feedback!

[Gosia Kowalska]

Hi @Steve_Gase, as Shana has already mentioned, we've made a conscious choice to make archiving available in Data Center only. It helps customers using Data Center to ensure they can maintain high availability and performance at scale, along with greater administrative control.

To improve custom fields experience for admins we have released custom fields optimizer In Jira Software Data Center. 

Our rationale for which features belong in each edition (Server or Data Center) is outlined in this blog post.

Server products are by no means left behind. On top of what is already mentioned in this article, we have also addressed some of the highly voted suggestions on jira.atlassian.com including:

• archiving components
• improvements to JQL search (search by linked issue, search by "updated by")
• OpenJDK support
• performance and usability improvements to boards.

Moreover, Server customers gain from the improvements we make to Jira, for instance, the recent improvements to Jira 8.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

[Maggie]

Hi @Guillermo _DEISER_ - thanks for your feedback! Although we can't share exact timing of Aurora support at the moment, providing support for Amazon Aurora is a top priority for us. We will certainly keep you posted as we get closer to solidifying timing. Please let us know if you have any other questions. Thanks again for your feedback!

[Amorita van den Heever]

I have been working in the Information Technology industry for almost 40 years. During this time I've worked in many different roles, developer, programmer, business analyst, systems analyst, test analyst and system designer.  The largest part of this long career was spent working for various IT service providers, like IBM, etc. And in all my years, I've never had to work with such rubbish tools as Jira and Confluence. 

The organisation that I work for bought these two products a while ago, before I joined them. I have been working for them little over a year now and each day part of my duties include that I have to update issues in Jira, log time and update documentation on Confluence. And every day I dread having to log on to any of these tools because they are frustrating, featureless, unfriendly, illogical, utterly useless and a complete waste of time. It takes me longer to capture my time for the day than the actual hours that I worked. Nobody in this organisation knows how to use either of these tools correctly or properly. These tools were installed in their vanilla version and nobody knows how to configure them to make them at least halfway useful.

To make things worse, there is no decent or affordable training on either product available in my country, so one cannot even get some training to help you understand how to configure and use these tools properly. 

The recent upgrade to Jira 8 has literally driven me around the bend. I feel like pulling out my hair every time I have to do something on Jira.

[Kat Warner]

@Amorita van den Heever  - wow, your experience does not sound fun. I understand your frustration is you are using a vanilla set-up of Confluence and Jira without Admins to finetune things to suit your organisation and work processes.

I have also used many tools but had admin access early on so perhaps it is the ability to configure and learn from other administrators that make me prefer Atlassian tools over many I have used elsewhere.

This community is a great place to ask questions. Try describing one of your challenges in a relevant section (Jira/Confluence/etc) as a discussion post and find out how other people and organisations have tackled that challenge.

For example, logging time can be made easier by adding the work log fields to all transition screens. There are apps and browser plugins to help track time spent on a ticket. Tempo is a popular app to make logging time and all things timesheets easier.

As for dreading the process of logging in, maybe you should remove that dread with single sign on? (<--- cheeky reference to TechTime's EasySSO).

[Shana]

@Amorita van den Heever first of all, I'm so sorry to hear that you've had an unpleasant experience so far with Confluence and Jira. That's the last thing we would want for any customer!

I second @Kat Warner's comments on the resources available here on the community - many experts who can help address specifc questions if you find that other resources aren't specific enough for you.

If you haven't come across them yet, our Atlassian University courses are offered for both Jira and Confluence administration and may be helpful.

If you'd prefer some on-the ground help, it looks like we have several partners located in your country - you can find them with the country filter on our Atlassian Partner Directory.

Finally, if you have specific product feedback, we are always happy to hear it! Just leave a comment here and we'll make sure the product management team takes a look.

Thank you for joining the Community and sharing your experience!

[Amorita van den Heever]

Thank you to both @Shana and @Kat Warner for your helpful comments. 

However, I am not the administrator of Jira or Confluence in our organisation.

The tools have been implemented across the complete enterprise without any insight into how they can be customised / filtered for the various departments, sections, areas, teams and individuals that work with it. The administration function is controlled by our Project Management Office, who are only interested in seeing the complete holistic view of work being done by the whole organisation.

For instance, when logging on to either Jira or Confluence, it shows the most recent updates, which can literally be from anybody in the organisation, which consists of approx 165000 employees, divided into 16 departments, which again are divided into 3-4 sections, each comprising of maybe 4-5 areas which can have anywhere from 1 - 6 teams, where I work in 1 of those teams, that employs only 12 of those 165000 employees and are the only people who's work I'm interested in.

The organisation have adopted the Agile work methodology about 30 months ago, however things are moving extremely slow. There are still many departments working waterfall and the project managers feel they need to justify their continued existence in the Agile world, by deploying tools that they are the sole custodians of and making it impossible for anyone else to get anything useful from these tools.

[Kat Warner]

@Amorita van den Heever - I have some good news for you. You do not need administration permissions to change your default dashboard (the page you see wen you log in) in Jira. You are also able to create a private dashboard or a dashboard you share with your team. 

Configuring dashboards in Jira

You may also be able to use the Confluence network and follow users option to more easily see changes by your team in Confluence. Network Overview and Search the People Directory

[rgoossens]

@Patrick Richardson: Any idea when we can expect the Atlassian-supported Jenkins integration? It would reduce our costs for buying the 3rd party plugin.

All other mentioned features have already made it into the release.

[Imran Khan]

Hi @Ruud Kok 

Jenkins integration is under development however I cannot share the timeline. Let me know if you're interested and I will send you the alpha/beta versions of the Jenkins integration as soon as they are ready.

Cheers,

Imran Khan

Product Manager - Bitbucket Server and Data Center

[wm_glozito]

Hi @Imran Khan looking forward to the built-in jenkins integration. And very interested in any alpha/beta version you can share so we can test it in our bitbucket datacenter test environment.

Kind regards

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

Project Archiving is one of the best feature so far for an Administrator.

[Imran Khan]

Hi @wm_glozito 

Here is an alpha version of our Jenkins integration - https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-articles/Atlassian-supported-Jenkins-integration-for-Bitbucket-Server/ba-p/1148326#M151. 

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers,

Imran

[Joaquin Fernández Morales]

Amazing new features !

Regards, Joaquin

[Azfar Masut]

Any Atlassian partners that have the experience in setting up a custom locally hosted CDN solution (Apache/NGINX)?

[David Willson]

Bridget Sauer requested feedback on this page on the following 2 questions

1) Is the content format helpful?
2) Is the information is useful?

--

1) I like how the data center only stuff was called out at the top of the post, but then found it confusing when the article wasn't about datacenter stuff. I like that it was there, maybe just call out in bold what software is being talked about

2) YES! Its great to see whats coming up.