The Fullest News Report from Atlassian Summit Europe 2018, Pt. 2 - Product News

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The Atlassian Summit is the biggest annual live event dedicated to the worldwide user community of Atlassian software. We're proud to have been sponsoring it for the third time in a row and debuting under the new Deviniti brand this year. During the recent event in Barcelona, plenty of new product launches and major updates were announced by Mike Cannon-Brookes, Scott Farquhar and Atlassian product managers. If you couldn't make it to the event, or just want to have all the information in a single place, here's the comprehensive report on these breaking news.

Jira Software Server 8.0 has been announced

During the past two years, Atlassian has been focusing on shipping features that represent over 30,000 votes in their own Jira, including shared dashboards and filters, priorities per project with 2,500 votes and Kanban backlogs with more than 500 votes. At the Summit in Barcelona, Jira Software Server 8.0 has been announced with lots of changes underneath the user interface (including Lucene, Spring and Guava upgrades), having a goal of improving overall performance, along with a couple of features for users and admins. Most importantly, Cameron Deatsch introduced customizable batch e-mail notifications and a native mobile app for Jira Server coming along with 8.0 version. On Data Center, improved project configuration and custom field lists' UX have been introduced recently, which will also be shipped to Server. In Jira Cloud, tables are coming to the rich text editor, and Jira Roadmaps are on their way for future releases. The early access program is already available, and the public release is set for late 2018.

Jira Roadmap feature mockup. Image source: Valiantys Blog

Update: Jira Roadmaps is already available for all the Cloud users, along with improved Next-gen project experience. Read this article on the Atlassian Blog for more details.

A feature aiming at developers is the extended Bitbucket Pipelines and Jira Software Cloud integration. Information from Bitbucket and Bamboo will be available in Jira Software - on the issue view and also with an improved JQL and quick search. What's more, while you could previously pull a branch in Bitbucket from Jira, now you can also create a Jira issue directly from Bitbucket, which is useful for instant bug reporting.

Jira Service Desk is focusing on self-service

The Atlasssian ITSM tool has also gained many highly demanded improvements. As Product Manager Vincent Wong stated during his Summit talk, by leveraging the "shift left" approach to service management, Atlassian has focused on knowledge base integration and self-service capabilities of Jira Service Desk. With a new look and feel on Cloud, articles from a related Confluence space are put on the Customer Portal homepage, the Search button is available for users at any page, and even suggestion of articles upon filling in the request form is on the roadmap. The Customer Portal selection is easier with neat cards on the homepage, and the request forms themselves became shorter and simpler by introducing new dropdown menus. Another improvement is assets integration on the request view, which is done with the help of Riada's Insight, Device42 and Oomnitza. The assets selected by customers are tied to Jira issues by agents, which gives them more context and simplifies their work a great deal.

What's more, service teams can manage knowledge base articles directly from Jira Service Desk - among others, the view counts are displayed there, allowing to spot the areas that cause most trouble easier. In the Data Center option, new automated approvals and synchronised statuses of linked Jira Software issues are helping save up agents' time. To ensure that the SLA will never be exceeded, Jira Service Desk for Mobile integrated into the native Jira Cloud app allows support specialists to stay updated at any time.

The new Jira Service Desk Cloud UI. Image source: Atlassian Blog

Confluence will feature better editing and searching experience

The knowledge management software has got several major UX improvements and new features as well:

• The number one feature request with 750 votes was CalDAV support in Team Calendars, which allows to sync Team Calendars with the ones by Outlook, Google and Apple.
• Tables are now easier to manage, with seamless adding of columns and rows, resizing and drag-and-dropping (maybe that's why Awesome Tables attracted Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar's attention and won the ShipIt! hackathon).
• Also, it’s now possible to edit attachments directly within the software, and live macros will be included into the editing view, basically making them WYSIWYG.
• On Cloud, simpler editing was introduced with optimized layouts, in-context toolbars, new templates and even emojis.
• On Server, the searching mechanism is being completely redesigned, meaning it will be easier to filter results by space, contributor, labels, content type and date.
• Read Only mode was introduced as an option to zero-downtime on Confluence Data Center, letting admins upgrade their environments without disrupting end users.
• As part of the Slack partnership, an integration with Confluence Cloud has been developed in addition to the existing Jira integration.

Bitbucket and Bamboo have more administration capabilities

Developers and admins also received a couple of facilitations for code management in Atlassian software:

• In Bitbucket Cloud, UX for pull requests is being redesigned with a "code-first, single-page" approach, which showed 21% lower time-to-approve in user tests.
• Bitbucket Deployment was introduced to help teams keep track of Continuous Delivery - even without having to use Bitbucket itself.
• The new diagnostic tools in Bitbucket give admins an overview of the system’s health with a summary of alerts and events for the previous 30 days.
• The Data Center migration tool will allow to merge pull requests, permissions and attachments from multiple Bitbucket Server instances to a single Bitbucket Data Center instance.
• Both Bitbucket and Bamboo will enable project level administration to have new repositories' settings inherited and save up admins' time.
• The upcoming Code Insights integrations in Bamboo will provide information from all build stages for review and merge check purposes.

The new pull request view in Bitbucket Cloud. Image source: Atlassian Blog

Other Atlassian software

A couple of changes will take place in Crowd, the Atlassian identity management tool. Admins will be able to delegate groups management permissions, and the new audit log allows them to monitor all the changes that have been made within last 30 days. Portfolio for Jira will feature a new functionality, allowing to easier manage "teams of teams". During the first even Trello Day at the Summit, Trello founder Michael Pryor boasted their user count, as they scored 25 million users since inception, and presented some fresh features such as a desktop app, embedded cards and boards in other Atlassian applications or even external websites, and related cards view in the Attachments section.

For even more Summit knowledge, read the first part of this report, and watch the session videos on Atlassian website.