Many companies, to support social distancing measures and restrict the outbreak of COVID-19, were forced to cancel or postpone major events this year. However, Atlassian was able to quickly shift and make this past week’s Atlassian Remote Summit 2020 happen virtually, emphasizing co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes’ and Scott Farquar’s focus on the cloud as an enterprise solution. During the live and completely remote event that boasted more than 25,000 online attendees, Atlassian pulled back the curtain on what they’ve been working on and announced a number of jaw-dropping tidbits that revealed one common theme. Atlassian is ready to take on the task of not only being the creator of your team’s favorite tools, but also host the applications themselves, guarantee a 99.9% uptime, and deliver more exciting features to empower teams of all sizes and at any point in their respective journeys.
Historically, Atlassian Cloud was a one-size-fits-all solution that was meant for organizations smaller than 1,000 employees, but that world is gone now. Atlassian doubled down on its cloud offerings during Summit with a number of product announcements, exciting new features, and major developments that will shift how we think about the possibility of cloud-based enterprise tools.
So, if your team…
- has never used Atlassian, but are looking for new tools for this remote reality;
- has been using Atlassian Cloud, but need more features, security, and control of your environment;
- has been using mature, highly customized instances of Jira and Confluence Server (or Data Center) and have never considered moving to cloud, due to security concerns, restrictions, user limits, or migration nightmares;
… I have some interesting news for you.
For the Atlassian Cloud “New Comer” Teams Learning to Work Together When You’re Not Together
Remote Tools at the Perfect Price
The daily-life-changing impacts of the novel Coronavirus have hurled people and organizations around the world into whirlwinds of problems in simply trying to figure out how to live and work. Remote work is obviously possible, as scores of companies (Trello, Modus Create, to name a few) have built their successful organizations around majoritively remote employee bases. But, how do they do it?
In March, JP Quesada and Drew Falkman from Modus Create shared detailed insights for companies shifting to a remote first model. There’s a difference between an organization that fully engages its employees and one that allows (or is forced to allow) employees to take their laptops home. As JP and Drew point out, the work environment is more than just a physical location and selecting the right tools to support your team is incredibly important.
Teams that have been using Jira, Confluence, or Trello already understand the benefits of using tools that are designed with collaboration, communication, and teamwork in the forefront, especially when working remotely. That’s why Atlassian’s announcement that it is now offering a new 100% free tier of all its cloud offerings for teams under 10 people (or 3 agents for Jira Service Desk) is so exciting! This is not a trial, but actually free to use now and into the future. That means you and your team can start harnessing the power of Jira Software, Jira Core, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence today for zero dollars and zero cents.
I know what you’re thinking, that does sound crazy… But, you can see the details for yourself here.
For more information on how Atlassian tools support remote work, navigate to https://www.atlassian.com/remote.
For the Atlassian Cloud “Need More Features” Teams
Cloud Premium Starts to Feel More… Premium
This past September, Atlassian announced its brand-new Cloud Premium offering for Jira Software and Confluence. Cloud Premium offers everything available to teams using the Standard plans and enables some game-changing features, like 99.9% uptime SLA, 24/7 Premium Support, and unlimited storage. This week, to meet the needs of its ever-growing base of cloud users, Atlassian has announced it has expanded both the width and breadth of their Cloud Premium offerings. Teams currently using either Atlassian Cloud Standard or Cloud Premium will be thrilled with the new applications and features being rolled out.
Here’s a few of the highlights:
JSD Cloud Levels up to Premium
First, Jira Service Desk has been added to the list of applications available in the Cloud Premium suite! Jira Service Desk is a fantastic tool that features a customizable portal that customers love and incorporates the flexibility and power of the process management features and customizable workflows in Jira. Organizations who opt for Jira Service Desk Cloud premium will now be able to take advantage of all existing Cloud Premium features listed above (don’t forget unlimited storage) in addition to Global Automation Rules, to help scale your service team’s automation processes. There’s also some new features coming soon, like ‘IP allowlisting’, which allows Cloud Premium teams to secure application access through providing specific IP ‘whitelist’ ranges (i.e. restrict access to computers connected through your organization’s network or VPN).
Jira Software Cloud Premium Gets Advanced Roadmaps
As Project Managers will tell you, the ability to communicate plans, expectations, and progress updates to stakeholders is essential for any high functioning organization. Roadmaps are the perfect tool for this scenario! Atlassian is no stranger to them as Jira Software Cloud has already included roadmapping abilities natively in the ‘Next Gen’ Projects for the past several years.
Atlassian Article: Why you need roadmaps in Jira Software
This week Atlassian announced that Jira Software Cloud Premium users will have access to Advanced Roadmapping capabilities for all software projects. Many users will be familiar with Atlassian’s plug-in Portfolio for Jira Cloud that enables automated Roadmapping tools for all your projects in Jira.
Atlassian understands how impactful this feature has been to so many teams. So, starting soon, all the features of Portfolio for Jira Cloud will be built-in for all Jira Software Cloud Premium projects, at no additional cost, no plugins required. Project planning made easy.
Jira Software Cloud Premium Get Automated
Jira Software is liked by so many teams because the process management capabilities have an immediate and lasting impact for the teams using it (among many other reasons). Teams can create workflows to design, control, and audit their own custom processes which offers immediate boosts to productivity and ensures a consistent process understanding across your team. But, when you add in a dash of automation into your custom workflows and configurations, your team’s productivity can really start to soar.
Jira offers some automation functionality out-of-the-box through workflow post functions and triggers, but traditionally teams have had to rely on third party plug-ins to enable full control of what they want to automate and when. Additionally, many of these plug-ins require intermediate to advanced development skills to truly utilize.
Last October, Atlassian purchased a company called Code Barrel, the maker of one particular Jira plug-in, called Automation for Jira. Automation for Jira is a “no-code rules builder that enables customers to build if-this-then-that rules based on criteria in Jira.” Atlassian has made some changes and announced this week that Jira Software Cloud Premium users will be able to unleash the power of automation in their projects, with no additional configuration or 3rd party applications. These new features open up a world of opportunities for any team using Jira Software to build complex automation rules without any development experience or a line of code.
Learn more about Cloud Premium offerings here.
For the Atlassian Cloud “Naysayer” Teams
While Atlassian has been offering Cloud based products for years now, many organizations have not considered moving away from self-hosted solutions due to serious concerns surrounding security, user limits, support availability, and customization options. This week, Atlassian showed that its Cloud offerings are no longer just an option for small companies and startups.
Introducing Atlassian Cloud Enterprise
Among all the announcements this week from Atlassian about the Cloud that everyone is (or will be) talking about, is the introduction of Atlassian Cloud Enterprise. This new offering fundamentally shatters the boundaries of what is even possible while using Atlassian Cloud products.
As the name indicates, Atlassian Cloud Enterprise is the new ‘top shelf’ cloud offering for largest organizations, with the highest level of security requirements, and who want the most control and availability from their tools. Cloud Enterprise teams will enjoy all of the features and benefits of Cloud Premium, but with brand new capabilities.
There are a TON of exciting aspects coming from Cloud Enterprise, but here’s just a taste:
- Enterprise Sandbox – Enterprise Cloud customers will be able to take advantage of secondary instances (or copies) of their applications to use for testing new plugins, system updates, or major configuration changes. No additional cost or setup.
- Unlimited Horizontal Scale – Just like it sounds. Unlimited. Scale. Organizations can now connect an unlimited number of cloud instances together and manage them centrally. (For availability of Unlimited Scale and Unlimited Storage for your hosted applications, please reach out to your local IT Manager.)
- Release Tracks – As you customize your applications, Administrators need to be able to control how application updates are applied. With Release Tracks, Administrators who are managing multiple Cloud instances now have fine tune controls over which application (or which instance of an application) gets updated and when.
This new truely enterprise-level cloud offering is a shift in cloud-based tools and organizations have so much to consider when making such a decision. As an Enterprise solution partner with Atlassian, Modus consultants can help guide you through this journey. Feel free to contact us and one of our certified specialists will be more than happy to assist. c
The New Atlassian Cloud Suite
The changes Atlassian has made over the past year along with the announcements this week have completely altered the landscape of Atlassian Cloud offerings. Where teams (this time last year) had only a single option when considering a cloud-based toolset in Jira, Confluence, and/or Jira Service Desk, they now have four.
While all the news surrounding the many updates to Atlassian Cloud would be plenty to fill the time of the two-day event (and we only hit the tip of the iceberg), these changes are only a portion of the exciting news shared by Atlassian this week.
