Ask the CEO about IT service - Webinar with Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes

[Caroline Clark]

We’re excited to announce an exclusive webinar with Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes on how Atlassian does legendary IT service.

In this webinar, Mike will share how the Atlassian teams use JIRA Software, JIRA Service Desk, Confluence and HipChat to tackle service management across both external and internal customers. He'll talk about how prevention, self-service, automation, and swarming helps you deliver better service - rather than phone and email - and the critical role that innovation plays.

The webinar will take place on Thursday, February 18th 11 AM PDT, CEST and AEDT. Register for the webinar here!

Got questions for Mike? Please post them on here and upvote the ones that you want to hear answered. Mike will do his best to answer them during or after the webinar!

UPDATE: We have sent the questions to Mike and he will be answering them during the webinar. We are not taking any new questions at this point. 

[Dennis Poort]

Are there any further plans for JIRA Service Desk to provide (better) support for external customer contact?

At this time Service Desk's main focus is internal (IT) support and processes. However being able to connect an external customer directly to your JIRA instance in some form of an extra layer (communication vs. actual tasks) is missing at this moment, which forces us to use a third party tool as a Ticketing support platform and try to connect this to JIRA, undoing JIRA as our single point of truth/information.

[Maya Hocherman]

Hi Dennis,

Can you share your solution? 

Thanks

[Deleted user]

What phone and chat systems (that support pooled queueing) do your tools fully integrate with and do we need a rocket scientist to achieve full integration?

[Scott Selberg]

I've been developing plugins for Confluence for just over a year.  I've found the learning process exceptionally difficult as the developer documentation usually describes how things used to be done rather than how they should be done today - resulting in lots of wasted time trying the wrong thing then reverse engineering the source to figure out the right thing.  (I've spent several days trying to figure out Transformerless plugins which are so strongly recommended and yet without a single example in the documentation!)

We do pay for support for Confluence; however, that doesn't seem to cover much as any development questions gets pointed to Atlassian Answers where I have to hope that some other poor soul has already reverse engineered Atlassian's work and is willing to take yet more time to help me out.

My end result was purchasing support from Brikit - which has been very helpful.

How does this demonstrate Atlassian's legendary IT service?

[MattS]

That seems like a question for Developer Relations, not service management.

But I will note for Atlassian that products such as JIRA Service Desk that don't provide source code are much more difficult to change, so don't get as much traction in the developer ecosystem. And there are large areas of JIRA that are undocumented, e.g. how does JQL work under the covers, that make it hard to be confident that your add-on doesn't have performance problems

Glad to hear Brikit was helpful.

[wadey]

Hi @Scott Selberg, first thanks for engaging with the APIs and the dev platform. Second, you're right in that older documentation that is still relevant for our Server software is somewhat mingled with newer documentation that is coming out for our Cloud products, or tinged with stale areas. You can still build a transforming plugin, but we do talk about transformerless and yet we didn't publish content on that yet. There's a few spots like this. We're aware that it's suboptimal and have put a new doc program in place to fix it. It's early and will take some time, so bear with us - but we already know that onboarding ›› intro / overview ›› examples ›› API references paths need to be clear and fresh. 

We've also got a couple of roles open to strengthen our direct dev support in Developer Relations when you run into hard problems like this one, where our internal content hasn't made it onto developer.atlassian.com so far. If you know of anyone that might like to join us and help, please do point them here at our Developer Evangelist jobs: https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-jobs

Thanks, -nick wade
Head of Ecosystem 

[wadey]

Oh and Scott Helberg I forgot to mention; we run a yearly developer event called AtlasCamp and I'd love to invite you to it. Three days of training, and direct access to lots of Atlassian developers and peers in the external ecosystem. We'll announce the dates and venue (Europe) soon. Can you ping me a note on nwade at atlassian com so I can tell you a bit more about it?

[Andre Lehmann]

Do you think that there is any usecase or any tool missing in the Atlassian toolchain?

[GabrielleJ]

Ah. I like this. I'm curious too if they will cover the whole CI/CD world with a centralized Pipeline stuff.

[Tobias Cieplik]

Hi Mike, think about the biggest fails of IT service management in the past 
and the possibility to use a time-machine - What would you do better?

[ben]

Hey Mike, can you discuss how Atlassian's commitment to legendary service comes to life generally and through its products? 

[Feico Mol]

What does Atlassian do to bring a personal touch to self-service?

[Cathy Rivard]

For self-service, what amount and level of detail in the knowledge base articles do you find you need to really start deflecting requests? I'm in the process of building a customer facing knowledge base for my organization and I'm not sure whether I have the right content yet.

[Caroline Clark]

Great question! We'll have Mike address this in the webinar, but in the meantime - here is a blog that was just published on the topic. 

Essentially the advice was "just enough" and to err on the side of simplicity instead of exhausting detail. If you aim is to deflect requests, it's better to have five articles that would deflect 80% of requests. 

Another option is that you can "beta test" it. You can share these first drafts with some colleagues outside of IT and see if they were able to solve the question on their own. 

I hope that helps, and see you at the webinar!

[ben]

How does JIRA Service Desk help both the traditional IT Service Teams and beyond to non-IT Teams within Atlassian? Can you comment on how this extends to other products like Confluence & HipChat?

[Roy Chapman]

How do Atlassian plan to support Enterprise users in their products?  For example JIRA has global statuses, roles and priorities - these need to be configured locally.  The permission scheme doesn't allow project admins to change the configurations of their projects unless they are granted system admin access - and therefore access to everyone's projects and the ability to break everyone's projects.  Enterprise users consolidating multiple instances into one re dependent on 3rd party plugins to migrate configurations and manual checks, Atlassian offer no solution.

[GabrielleJ]

I'm not Mike, but you might be referring to this Suggestion (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3156). 

[Nik Dammermann]

Hi Mike, please could you describe how Atlassian will improve the user base community?

As an example, it was only accidentally that I discovered a good friend from uni was an Atlassian hard core user and we could have shared ideas with each other over the previous 10 years. I've been using Atlassian products for 14 years at different companies yet have never interacted with the user community. Would like to be forced to create an individual profile with Atlassian where I list my Atlassian skills and companies I've worked for using Atlassian (basic fields - I'm not talking about replicating LinkedIn), and be able to see these details for other people. Currently my Atlassian profile is linked to my work email address so when I change companies I setup a new profile with new email address. I'm sure tools exist for this, indeed you may already support these features, but it's not 'in my face' enough for me to take advantage of it. Perhaps some accreditation program for users would also allow us to demonstrate our skills to future employers. We all know our individual usage of JIRA is sub optimal as most of us are not making best use of all the features, so attending training to become an accredited user would highlight the best practice.

[GabrielleJ]

I'm not Mike, but take a look at the Atlassian Certification Program (ACP).

[Nik Dammermann]

That looks excellent, but I only see links to 'administrator' certification.  I'm talking about being able to demonstrate to other employers my ability to use the tools effectively and know how they apply to real world use cases within my team.   I guess the administrator certification will be far more technical than this.  The 'expert user' certification would be a one or two day course exploring  how to setup a JIRA project, workflows, fields and then how best to use the agile functionality and how JIRA should best be used within a team structure and used by management (how to produce productivity reports effectively) etc.

[TomC]

If I could, I'd upvote Nik's comment. I would like to see this same time of 'expert user' type of certification on the Confluence side as well. Admin cert is great for admins so it's good to see that movement take place, but those of us who expand the use of Atlassian tools inside companies - like we are in our company even within business teams, and that simply wouldn't happen without us with the knowledge and passion - help 'embed' the tools in our companies.  Admin cert doesn't help that. Today, we have only our mention of our Atlassian tool expertise in a profile or resume, which is far less impressive than accreditation.

[Nik Dammermann]

Hi Mike, how can you help make experienced Atlassian users the new salespeople for your products?

As an example, I've worked for several companies most of which use Atlassian products in some divisions, however the user base is primarily developers and analysts whereas the benefits of these tools would be far greater if the entire organisation was enabled to use these tools, and it would stop other departments using other sub-optimal expensive tools. At the moment it is difficult to see who the Atlassian product decision makers are within my large organisation - a company page listing these details would help - so I can lobby them to increase the user base.
Similarly, I see friends at other companies managing issue lists in spreadsheets etc. and just know they would immediately benefit from using JIRA yet there is no mechanism for me to refer them to a salesperson within Atlassian. Atlassian has no idea who I am, what my Atlassian skills are, or that I am a massive fan of your products so my request for salesperson referral would be treated the same as any other person accessing the website.
Basically - you have an incredibly loyal and passionate user base for your product, so how can you use their experience for the benefit our your company?

[Jim Bethancourt]

What do you see as the next step in the evolution of IT service?

[Alli Campofranco]

Hey Mike!  Of these four products, which one of them saves you the most amount of time in your day-to-day tasks?  (Or, which one helps you to be the most efficient?)

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

I would bet on Hipchat!

[Timothy Yates]

Mike,

How long until JSD is going to be able to do cc and bcc email correspondence? I have been grappling with this for weeks as part of our set-up and my CEO won't let me go live with JSD without it. 

[Dan Hellings]

Hi Mike,

We are looking at a social platform to get our employees engaged closer together in more of social way. You always here of these solutions being discribed as the "facebook for the enterprise" (profile page, news feed, comments, likes, groups, follows etc.). From an Atlassian view point what tool do you see as being the solution for this area?

It's becoming increasing hard to define a tool for a purpose, when so many solutions out there are muddying the water between different solutions - e.g. trying to be a social, instant messaging and a collaboration platform (e.g. Salesforce Chatter).

How do you work at Atlassian and what tools do you use for the various areas of Instant Messaging, Collaboration and a Social platform?

• JIRA for Projects and Service Desks
• Confluence for Collaboration
• HipChat for instant messaging and group chat
• Social ???

Your thoughts would be really appreciated.

[GabrielleJ]

Ha! A good one. We have the whole Atlassian suite and then we use Yammer for Social stuff. 

[BenjaminW]

Will you consider changing your approach to fixing bugs in Atlassian software from optional to mandatory?

It would be great to see verified bugs prioritised with some kind of guidance/SLAs provided as to when a fixed version would be available.

The current approach is pretty demoralising.

[BenjaminW]

Are you committed to continue supporting enterprise customers who would like to run the Atlassian stack on premise, or do you think you will move to a cloud-only business model? Here is an example of a ticket that has been fixed in JIRA Cloud but that it has decided will not be implemented for JIRA on premise:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-29149

These decisions to implement changes in JIRA Cloud but refuse to implement them on premise seems to set a dangerous precedent for those of us using on premise software. 

[Robert Ortner]

Hi - at the moment we are generating Release Notes for products by generating Wiki pages using the CLI command line tools. The content for the release notes is taken out predefined custom fields out from jira, translated in two languages and well formatted. Is there better idea to get this stuff done?

Thanks from Austria to Australia - Robert

[GabrielleJ]

I love how that rhymes 

[Ketan Dudhane]

What kind of reports are available from Atlassian Marketplace for free plugins that are being distributed using Atlassian Marketplace?

From the Atlassian Documentation, my understanding is that Marketplace generates reports only for Paid-via-Atlassian plugins.

Regards,

[ckwan]

Hi Ketan,

I'm a PM on the Marketplace team, allow me to address your question.  As a vendor of free add-ons, you can see the following metrics on your dashboard:

• Active Installations 
• Downloads

Hope this helps,

Connie

[Ketan Dudhane]

Thanks Connie. This is really helpful.

Would I be able to download these reports from dashboard?

Can I use the REST API (sales report API) to get the reports?

Regards,

Ketan Dudhane

[ckwan]

Unfortunately it's not possible to download that info.  We have a documented API for Sales and License reports only which at present does not include the stats mentioned above.

Connie

[Ketan Dudhane]

Thanks Connie.

[Ruslan Shlain]

Whats next for Bamboo? Seems like development for this product slowed down lately. 

Thanks

[jon-paul.cameron]

Hi there - email is the bane of any medium to large scale company, given the constant deluge into mailboxes and the need to manage multiple folders and queues for alerts and priorities. What future state development do we expect to see with the Atlassian tool-set to integrate non-email based comms and alerts for traffic on issues on JIRA core and updates in JIRA Service Desk? Would love to hear other people's views on the comms dialogue situation.

[Michelle Pavel]

Hi Mike, I am a tech startup in a different niche however I was wondering what you put in place to help you manage the rapid growth of your member base? Thanks Michelle

[Jeanne Howe]

What plugins are being used at Atlassian to enhance JSD functionality and customer experience?

[Nik Dammermann]

Hi Mike, what steps are you taking to help your products self diagnose and report issues?

As an Atlassian user at a large organisation, who frequently finds myself accessing our Australia based central JIRA / confluence server from regional offices, I find the performance is frequently poor.  My guess is that a competent technical administrator using the right hardware could dramatically improve performance, so why not highlight this to end users within the products showing in a simple link on the page (similar to the warning that index needs to be updated) that the performance of the product could be improved by following these <link> steps.  The end user who continually sees poor performance could then use this information to lobby administrators to make the necessary improvements.  Currently end users suffer in silence and many might simply give up on trying to use the product, assuming this is an Atlassian software fault not a solvable internal configuration issue.