What’s New in Jira Software Server & Data Center: Remote Summit 2020 Roundup

[#1]

Hi Everyone,

I hope you’ve all had a chance to participate in our first-ever Remote Summit. We virtually laughed together, heard exciting product updates, conversed in the chat rooms, and watched some incredible presentations– all from the safety and comfort of our homes. If you haven’t had a chance to catch up on all the updates, I have good news...

You can still watch all of the Remote Summit keynote and breakout sessions online (it’s free!).

I’d recommend starting with the full keynote session called “Business Transformation” and grabbing your second coffee (or drink) at minute 48:50 for the "Atlassian Data Center: Building for change and scale” presentation with Alison Huselid and Junie Dinda.

And if you’re a fan of quick bullet points (like me), here’s a roundup of everything we shared for Jira Software Server and Data Center:

• Anonymizing users for GDPR compliance (available now): Anonymize user data in Jira, including personal data from user profile, issues, user key, mentions, comments, custom fields user picker type, and other places where Jira stores personal information.

• Dates for future sprints (available now): More accurately forecast planned work and ensure the alignment of multiple teams' work with the ability to create sprints with future dates. 

• Personal accessibility settings (available now): Color-blind and other visually-impaired Jira users will be able to navigate Jira faster and without unnecessary hurdles with new accessibility settings that every user can personalize! The first two settings we introduced are:

  • underline all links in UI, and

  • add patterns to issue statuses. (We love the new issue status patterns so much, we’ve all switched to using them internally!)

• Mobile device management (MDM) support (available now): Deploy the Jira Server mobile app to company-approved iOS and Android devices and pre-populate your Jira site URLs.

• Jira <> Jira Align Connector (coming soon): To help you achieve business agility throughout your organization, we are building an Atlassian-grade integration between Jira and Jira Align. With the new connector, we are ensuring that the Jira Align and Jira Software connection is easy to set up and painless to maintain.

• Improvements to the release process (investigating): We know that release management at scale can be very tricky, with release managers coordinating across many teams and departments. When you have thousands of projects and dozens of products, it becomes very difficult to coordinate, as releases cannot span across multiple projects. That’s why we are looking to make your release manager's lives easier by freeing releases from the project structure and introducing improvements to make the release process even more natural.

• Renaming epics in Jira (investigating): We are exploring how you can make it easier to stay in sync by calling certain types of work the same thing. For example, if you’ve implemented some full or partial SAFe, and you want to rename Epics to Features, we want you to be able to do that natively in Jira Software.

As the usage of Jira expands within your organization, Jira Software Data Center provides additional enterprise capabilities across scale, performance, security, and compliance. Here are the latest capabilities you can take advantage of:

• Advanced auditing: We've revamped the audit log and introduced advanced auditing capabilities. We’ve added many new events so you can know exactly what’s happening on your instance.

• Single node support: We’ve recently made some changes so that you do not have to deploy Data Center in a clustered architecture. We’ve created new guides to support you with quickly deploying Data Center to take advantage of all of the new features without the hassle of setting up a clustered architecture.

• Open ID Connect: We've extended the range of supported authentication options (like SAML 2.0), to make it easier for you to achieve single sign-on for users across your organization in a more secure and frictionless environment.

• Cluster monitoring: We've extended the capabilities of the Atlassian Cluster Monitoring plugin that was so far bundled with Confluence and Crowd to monitor Jira clusters as well. This way you have now more tools to manage your data center nodes. We're displaying all your clustered nodes on a separate page with the information on node uptime (since last restart), ID, load and memory.

• Rate limiting: Without protections in place, automated integrations and scripts can hammer your Jira instance with huge bursts of requests, leading to drops in performance and downtime. Rate limiting changes all this by giving your Jira 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.

Which features are you most excited about? Which ones do you have questions about? We're here to answer your questions below!

[Pablo Silva]

How/Where do you configure dates of futures sprints?

[Jess Seitz]

Hi @Pablo Silva great question. Future sprints were recently released in Jira Software 8.8, so you'll first need to upgrade to the latest version of Jira. Then, whenever you create a sprint a pop-up opens allowing you to enter dates for the sprint. 

You can find more details in the release notes here. Let us know if you have any more questions! 

[Pablo Silva]

My bad, I'm using Jira Cloud, didn't notice this was a Jira Server feature.

[Thomas S_]

Is an implementation of Open ID Connect also intended for Jira Software Server?

[S A]

I wish there were some UI changes for Jira Software (Server version). Interface is still very primitive for Users as well as for developers.

[Jess Seitz]

Hi @Thomas S_thank you for the question! Similar to SAML, OpenID Connect support is only available in Atlassian Data Center, our self-managed enterprise edition. Read our blog if you'd like to learn more about how we prioritize features for Server and Data Center.

[Jess Seitz]

@S A thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it. If you have any specific UI requests, please be sure to add a ticket or vote for current ones on our public issue tracker: jira.atlassian.com.