Atlassian Summit 2017 Recap

Atlassian Summit 2017 Recap

Every year the Atlassian community comes together for a 2 – 4-day long Summit, depending on whether you are a partner, vendor, or a user/developer. This year Ascend Integrated attended the 2017 Summit hosted in San Jose, CA. We wanted to put together some of the cool and interesting features/aspects we observed and attended.

Keynotes

The keynotes were excellent, highlighting the corporate values of the firm but also keeping it lighthearted and the audience engaged and participating. We especially enjoyed the smoothly bit. The keynotes introduced new integrations between Trello and Bitbucket, Stride, and support for Microsoft Azure. Check out the keynote: here.

1% Pledge

The 1% pledge allows companies and individuals to give back 1% of profits / employee time / equity to the foundation. Ascend Integrated, being a member of the 1% pledge, was humbled to be mentioned in the Partner keynote and featured on multiple screens throughout the summit. We look forward to continuing to give back our time and improving our community. Learn more about the 1% Pledge and how you your company can contribute: here.

New Logos and Re-Branding

During the summit, Atlassian introduced its new logos which can now be found on your Cloud instance and on the Atlassian website. The corporate logos and the underlying tool logos (JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, Bitbucket, etc.) were re-designed for the Atlassian Tool Suite moving forward.

Stride

With Slack’s continued growth in popularity and its growth in valuation to over $5 billion, Atlassian has responded by creating Stride, a new communication tool aimed at improving the way teams communicate through video chat, IM, voice, organization, and integration. The Atlassian team provided frequent demos of Stride at Summit and had a dedicated stride booth set up in the Summit exhibit floor. You can view the Stride Blog from Atlassian.

New User Interfaces for Cloud Products

The Atlassian Tool Suite for the Atlassian Cloud is getting a face lift. Over the next several months, new user interfaces for many of the tools in the Cloud (specifically Confluence, JIRA Core, JIRA Service Desk, and JIRA Software) will be released. Booths were set up near the entrance of the Exhibit Hall for users and passersby to test and provide feedback for the new user interface. While these new User Interfaces are not making it to the server instances yet, it paves the way for a redesign of the Atlassian User Interface.

Sessions and Classes

Breakout sessions were informative, and provided insight into many aspects of the Atlassian Tool Suite, from tools and techniques used at large tech firms and systems such as Netflix and LinkedIn, to developing custom add-ons, integrations, and improving performance in JIRA and Confluence. You can check out over 10 hours of recorded breakout sessions here…just don’t watch them all at once: Wednesday Sessions and Thursday Sessions.

ShipIt Live

The now famous hackathon pits five teams against one another to develop a new tool or feature that works within the Atlassian Tool Suite in a small amount of time. This year, we saw many excellent candidates, but what really impressed was the ability to record and transcribe meetings on-the-fly in Stride. A great way to incorporate new functionality into an excellent new tool developed by Atlassian! Watch it again here: ShipIt Live Keynote.

Will we see you in Barcelona next year (2018)?

We hope you had a great time last week. Find us on Twitter and share your favorite experience at Atlassian Summit. We look forward to seeing everyone again in Barcelona for the 2018 Summit!

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Jira’s Scalability: What to Expect

Jira’s Scalability: What to Expect

As 2017 came to a close our team at Ascend Integrated asked ourselves a simple question: How does the Jira ecosystem exist within a small team? As many project management solutions have gone all-in on Enterprise solutions, Atlassian has maintained that Jira is prime for small teams while also possessing supreme scalability through the SAFe methodology within Jira. In this blog, we’ll explore how small teams can utilize Jira to its fullest extent.

Price

One of the most important features that make Jira small-team-friendly is cost. As many agile teams look to transition from the sticky-note on the whiteboard phase over to a project management tool, cost becomes a major factor. The cost for the cloud instance of Jira for 1-10 users is only $10 per month. Plus, adding users is quite easy and will cost you an additional $7 per user up to 100 users. As your team grows, your cost per user actually decreases. We would also recommend you go with annual pricing if you know that you will be using Jira for the foreseeable future.

Flexibility

Agile teams need the ability to work with speed, cohesiveness, and autonomy within the context of a single platform. Jumping between different project management tools wastes time and can cause confusion between departments. With Jira as your central hub, you have the ability to connect to products like Confluence and BitBucket. Jira’s seamless integration with these tools will allow your team to store development documentation, decompose team silos through open communication, and track development issues throughout the development lifecycle. Working with project managers, back-end engineers, and designers has never been easier thanks to these integrations.

Functionality

We’ve discussed price and flexibility, including two great integrations with Confluence and Bitbucket, but how does Jira itself standout from a user perspective? Jira’s custom workflows, JQL functionality, and personalized Kanban and SCRUM boards allow for members from all teams and skill levels to utilize Jira in a way that best suits their team while simultaneously tying back to the same projects. The beauty of Jira is that you can make it as simple or complex as your team needs, meaning once you of understanding vast amounts of customization at your disposal, you have complete autonomy over your workflows, visualizations, and tracking initiatives.

The Case for Collaboration

Jira certainly isn’t the only project management tool with flexibility and scaling ability, however, it is the best tool currently available with added documentation and repository integrations and some serious out-of-the-box usability for a small-team budget. If your team is looking for a low-risk project management solution to start off the new year, then we strongly suggest giving Jira a try!