Atlassian has gone from strength to strength in recent years, and its annual conference has become correspondingly more exciting. Atlassian Summit is one of the most anticipated events on the software lifecycle calendar, and for the 2,600 attendees, 2015’s sold-out show justified the considerable hype. If your company is among the 5,000 using the Atlassian Enterprise solution, or if you’re interested in implementing it in the near future, here’s what you need to know.
Jira – redesigned and redefined
During his keynote talk at Atlassian Summit, Mike Cannon-Brookes mentioned that, before Atlassian Enterprise , he would often watch happy customers leave for competitors. They’d believe that the software suite was suitable for smaller entities, and accordingly, would “upgrade” to something bigger.
To counter this, Atlassian introduced its scalable Enterprise solution for large organisations and businesses that are outgrowing their current software suite. Announcements at the 2015 Atlassian Summit included several developments designed to improve and expand this offering. An important strand of Atlassian’s enterprise offering is made up by the “Data Center” editions of its products, which allow them to be run on clustered architectures.
Data Center editions are available for Jira Software, Jira Core, Confluence and BitBucket. At the Summit it was announced that Jira Service Desk is now offered as a Data Center edition; the at-scale performance of Jira is now 30 per cent faster than it was a year ago; Bitbucket Data Center has increased functionality for large-scale R&D organisations by introducing active/active Git clustering; and nearly all Jira and Confluence plugins are now compatible with Data Center.
Add-ons and compatibility
To elaborate on the improved compatibility of plugins, Atlassian has the biggest enterprise add-on marketplace: 300+ are available for cloud products, and over 2,000 are available in total. Atlassian Summit’s keynote talk emphasised recent improvements to speed and compatibility for Enterprise’s first and third-party plugins.
Atlassian Data Centre was a particular focal point: 24 of the top 25 Jira add-ons are compatible, and 23 of the top 25 Confluence add-ons now work seamlessly with Data Centre. This is important because the larger plugins can be resource hungry and the additional performance and resilience offered by Data Center is needed for those plugins.
Atlassian goes mobile
Development teams are more mobile than they’ve ever been, so in order to facilitate flexible and remote working, it’s necessary to ensure that they can access vital Atlassian apps wherever they are – and on whatever device they happen to be using.
The announcement of iOS apps for Jira and Confluence at was therefore quite timely – and some might say, overdue. The apps, designed to filter content by relevance and increase the pace of work, are currently in beta – only 500 slots were made available, all exclusive to Atlassian Summit attendees. News of a full rollout is pending.
Automation Consultants has over a decade of experience across the software lifecycle, including Atlassian deployments and consultancy. To discuss Atlassian Enterprise and other Atlassian solutions, contact us today.
