Recap – Atlassian Team ’21: Improving Teamwork

Formerly known as the ‘Atlassian Summit’, Atlassian’s flagship annual event was reimagined as an entirely digital event this year – Team ’21. We had a fantastic experience at last year’s Summit, where the Atlassian team revealed exciting new features to improve remote collaboration and announced major updates to Atlassian Cloud.

At this year’s event, hosted on April 28th and 29th, Atlassian announced multiple new and exciting products as well as some much sought-after updates. The event also provided an opportunity to hear from founders, CEOs, and CIOs of organizations like Slack, Zoom, and Peloton, as well as celebrities like Malcolm Gladwell, Jill Ellis, Katie Sowers, and Daniel Pink.

Let’s check out the highlights from the event.

Day 1 of Atlassian Team ’21

The first day was dedicated to “all teams” – be it IT, DevOps, or Business. It started with the keynote “Humans at the heart of teamwork” by Mike Cannon-Brookes (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Atlassian). In this session, he shared details of the investments Atlassian is making in 3 key areas:

1. Improving the human element within their tools.

Atlassian has been rolling out features like reactions and emojis across their products. They have made improvements in the people and team profile pages, header images, and display of contact information to help the teams and individuals better express their personalities.

Confluence workspaces now allow you to add cover images and emojis at the page level. Atlassian has also made improvements to image annotation and edit features. Video upload and playback features have also been added, with more fun features to be rolled out in the coming days.

With all these improvements, the Atlassian tools now have more human elements to help you show much more than just the data.

2. Improvements and progress on the cloud platform.

The Atlassian Cloud platform now serves over 10 billion network requests a day, and that number continues to grow rapidly. The performance of Jira and Confluence has increased by up to 60%.

Their Cloud Enterprise edition (for Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence) supports unlimited instances, 99.95% uptime guarantee, and 24*7 support. The early access program now allows up to 20k users per instance. This will be available to all customers in June.

Their next goal is to surpass 35k users by next year.

The Data Residency is expanding and will be enabled later this year across all the paid editions (standard, premium, and enterprise) for Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management. The geography in which the data can be hosted is also being expanded to more locations and will include Australia, Canada, Japan, and the UK.

There have been updates on meeting various compliances, and by 2022, HIPAA Compliance for health care and Financial service standards applicable in the US, Europe, and Australia will be supported. Atlassian has already achieved FedRAMP for US govt customers of Trello.

Powerful cross-product and cross-instance search is now available when using multiple products. This is very helpful if you use multiple instances of Jira or Confluence!

Smart links are now available to connect over 100 external apps. These smart links allow you to connect to and view remote objects (from services and platforms like Twitter, Youtube, and more) as seamlessly as if they were native.

3. New products built natively on the cloud platform.

Atlassian has introduced “Point A”, a program to roll out new products. It includes 5 new and exciting products:

Halp: Halp is a modern ticketing help desk that integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams and helps in making request management more conversational. Halp turns Slack into an internal help desk solution and can turn any message into a ticket that tracks the progress and outcomes of inbound requests. It can be integrated with Jira Service Management and Confluence to provide a powerful and seamless solution for service management.

Jira Work Management: The all-powerful Jira is designed and built for business teams like marketing, HR, finance, legal, and others. Jira Work Management extends Jira from Dev and IT teams to every team and employee in the organization.

Jira Product Discovery: Built specifically for Product Managers, this product will help Product Managers capture all product ideas, insights, and data in a single place. It will help Product Managers build what matters by prioritizing impactful assets, delivery planning, and execution.

Compass: Compass is a developer portal that helps teams understand and improve all the things involved in building modern software. It brings disconnected information about engineering output and the teams collaborating on it together in a central searchable location. Compass helps developers stay updated about all their software components and their interdependencies, from microservices to mobile applications. It consolidates teams, software components (services, APIs, documentation), insights, and policies, all in one place.

Team Central: Team Central is a tool to track every update from project progress to goal tracking to team health. This tool can act as a single source of truth for every project. Team Central allows you to create and share progress and status reports reliably and consistently across your teams.

More details for Point A and these products are available here: https://www.atlassian.com/point-a

The keynote was followed by some other interesting sessions like “The evolution of modern work” by Mike Cannon-Brookes, Eric Yuan (Founder and CEO, Zoom), and Stewart Butterfield (CEO and Co-Founder, Slack) where they discussed how the way we work and collaborate is fundamentally changing in the current situation, and how their organizations are adapting to these changes. This session was insightful and resonated with us at Modus Create – having been a remote-native company for over a decade.

Day 2 of Atlassian Team ’21

The second day at Team ’21 was mostly about DevOps and IT Teams and started with the keynote “Transforming the modern enterprise” by Scott Farquhar (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Atlassian). In this session, more details about Jira Work Management and Compass were shared. There were several other sessions such as “Conversation with Shobz Ahluwalia, Peloton CIO” and “How high-velocity Dev and Ops teams fuel digital transformation” that were largely related to DevOps and IT teams.

Another new product was announced on day 2: Open DevOps. Open DevOps is a platform that helps your team build, ship, and operate software while enabling you to integrate Atlassian tools with external tools and services. It helps you build an easily configured toolchain based on Jira.

These are only a few of the important and exciting updates shared by Atlassian during this event. For more information on any of the updates and products announced during Team ’21, or for any help related to Atlassian tools, or migration to the Cloud, contact our team of Atlassian experts. We’d be happy to support your team in managing your tools and processes for a successful Atlassian journey.

An interesting update to end this blog: Team 2022 will be in person and in Las Vegas. Looking forward to seeing you there next year!