As Atlassian’s biggest global event and user conference, the Atlassian Summit attracts users, teams and partners from across the world. Keynote speeches and training sessions from industry leaders aim to transform the way teams work, whilst showcasing Atlassian’s latest innovations. Of course, it’s also a fantastic opportunity to chat all things Atlassian with other industry experts and insiders.
When it comes to major developments and exciting talking points, the Summit never fails to deliver. Here’s a roundup of all the main takeaways to emerge from this year’s San Jose conference.
Introducing Stride
Atlassian has launched Stride, an entirely new messaging application designed to redefine how teams collaborate in the workplace. As a multi-functional solution, Stride simultaneously supports IM, audio and video communication, whilst tightly integrating with the rest of the Atlassian suite.
With the ability to host meetings via the team’s preferred method of communication, it is also possible to create Jira and Trello issues from within a meeting in Stride, and then implement agreed Actions and Decisions. Stride also allows both audio and video communications to be recorded, enabling users to revisit these key meeting takeaways at a later date.
It also introduces Focus Mode, a step up from simply being ‘Unavailable’. Focus Mode not only tells others when a team member is busy, it also tells them what that person is working on and when they will be free.
Stride is only available for cloud, and this is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future. So, what does this mean for Hipchat, which is similar in many ways to Stride? In short, HipChat Data Center edition is still available, but HipChat Cloud and HipChat server have been withdrawn.
The winning entry for this year’s ‘ShipIt Live’ competition was a proposed functionality for Stride that will allow it to transcribe a meeting in real-time. While this functionality has not yet been formally launched, we will hopefully see it soon.
Cloud-focused updates
Cloud has been a major focus for Atlassian in recent months and, accordingly, several cloud-focused product innovations and updates were rolled out during this year’s Summit. One of the most significant was the introduction of Identity Manager, a product which functions as a single repository for a user’s identity information in the cloud.
Aimed at large and enterprise-level customers that need Identity Management (IM) capabilities, Identity Manager supports security features such as two-factor authentication, and can also link with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) systems such as Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD). Its advanced settings enable it to regulate how groups are synced between AD and IM. While Identity Manager is not yet fully available, it will stand to remove one of the major obstacles to enterprise adoption of Atlassian Cloud.
In other cloud-related news, Atlassian has introduced ready-made Microsoft Azure templates for Atlassian Data Center implementations, just as they are available in Amazon Web Services.
Other product updates
Atlassian announced many incremental improvements to all products, with a common focus on improving ease-of-use. For example, Bamboo build plans are now stored in BitBucket, and these can be versioned just like ordinary code.
Following Atlassian’s acquisition of Trello back in January 2017, the web-based project management application is now available in desktop form through apps for Mac and Windows.
Add-ons available on the Atlassian Marketplace are now officially referred to as Apps, and can now be designated not only for server and cloud hosting, but also for Data Center. However, these Data Center-specific apps must meet certain standards of scalability, and will be available in the same user tiers as the Data Center applications they add onto.
Branding update
There has been a complete redesign of all of Atlassian’s logos. The former logo of a stylized Atlas holding up the world has been replaced with a simplified and stylized ‘A’. Similarly, the Atlassian product and partner logos have also been redesigned.
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