Cable cars, crazy weather, and Atlassian Summit 13! I have to say, my first trip out to San Francisco (or the west coast in general) was nothing short of amazing. With all the excitement of the summit and related events, my only wish was that I could’ve stayed in SF a little longer with the fine folks at Atlassian.
Atlassian product announcements
So what’s new!? What was so “exciting” about Summit?! Atlassian was proud to announce plenty of new goodies they’ve added to their line up of already stellar products.
JIRA Service Desk
If I had to choose one favorite announcement from Summit, it would have to be JIRA Service Desk. JIRA Service Desk leverages JIRA’s already powerful workflow and triaging capabilities, combined with an intuitively designed customer facing interface to bring powerful SLA reporting and metrics to IT service teams. The JIRA Service Desk was well received by the audience of both new and veteran JIRA users. In fact, we’ve had clients already requesting demos of the new product.
A few key features of JIRA Service Desk include:
- Customizable fields
- Customizable queues
- Automated triaging
- Customizable workflows
- Real time reporting & notifications
- Extendable via REST API
Confluence Questions (BETA)
Second on my list of announcements is Confluence Questions. For those who are familiar with Atlassian Answers or Stackoverflow, Confluence Questions brings a very similar knowledge gathering engine to your Confluence instance. Ask a general question to your entire team or organization or invite specific individuals to answer. In the same way great answers would be voted up by users in Stackoverflow, great answers in Confluence questions can be voted up so that the best answers to your question are quickly seen. Things don’t stop here. Confluence Questions saves and archives your questions and answers so that others in your organization who have the same questions can also quickly find the answer they’re looking for.
Confluence Knowledge Base
In addition to Confluence Questions, Confluence Knowledge base was also announced. Confluence Knowledge base is brought to Confluence users via a space template. Using this template you can create a space which, operates a hub for knowledge. Create ‘How to’ articles, trouble shooting guides, and more for your team to find quickly and easily. To make things even more fantastic, the knowledge base can be integrated with JIRA service Desk, therefore turning your service desk into a “self-service desk”.
HipChat Server (BETA) and Video
If you dont already know how awesome HipChat is take visit to their website. HipChat is an instant message application for business teams.To date, over 1 billion messages have been sent over HipChat. What separates HipChat from other instant message apps is that it natively integrates with the Atlassian suite. Even better for business teams now, HipChat can be downloaded behind the firewall via HipChat Server (BETA) which you sign up for and try today. Furthermore, Atlassian announced that HipChat now supports video chat and conferencing. Two more reasons, your team should get started using HipChat asap.
Atlassian Connect
Atlassian announced a new plugin development model, Atlassian connect. Atlassian Connect is good news for plugin developers and marketplace vendors. With the new model, plugins can now be written in any programming language where previously they were all required to be written in Java. Traditionally, plugins operated within Atlassian’s applications; now, through Atlassian connect, plugins operate remotely over HTTP.
What else?
Expert product demos
Plenty of Atlassian Experts and Marketplace vendors came out to showcase their plugins and other applications. Atlassian products are great out of the box, but the enhancements and extensions that are possible make Atlassian tools infinitely versatile. It was great to see and learn what others have done to enhance the Atlassian user experience. Of course, product demos weren’t the only thing out on the floor. Plenty of games, AUG finger rockets, food, and good conversations were also present, giving Atlassian Summit 13 an enjoyable atmosphere of fun and knowledge gathering/sharing.
Workshops and Training Sessions
JIRA developer, Confluence admin, scrum master…no matter who you are, there were seminars and and training sessions for you. Discussion provoking classroom settings, and hands on training made for extremely fruitful learning experiences. It’s just a shame, I couldn’t attend every seminar and workshop.
And Of course…plenty of beers and partying!
Atlassian folks sure know how to throw down! Great food + Great venues + Atlassian = Good times. Not much else to say here other than, “you should’ve been there!”.
Overall Summit 13 was a blast. Kudos to the Atlassian team for the continued success over the years and holding an awesome Summit 13. I can’t imagine how now, but I know next year they’ll pull off an even better Summit event, and Addteq will be sure not to miss it! See you next year!
