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Key Updates of Atlassian Products 2024 (what to know)

The world of work is changing, but based on everything seen at Atlassian’s Team ‘23 conference, the company is taking challenging times in its stride. Appropriately enough, the event was geared around bringing teams together: “Working Differently Together.” And Atlassian has several major launches which are designed to do just that.

So, here are some of Atlassian’s key launches and customer updates for 2023.

What is covered in this blog post:

Hello to Atlas and Compass

The ever-growing Atlassian product range has two new major additions: Atlas and Compass. Both launches came out of Atlassian’s Point A program – creating products in collaboration with customers, meaning that the user perspective is built in from the start. And for the time being, both products are free!

atlassian updates

Atlas (formerly running in private beta as Team Central) is a teamwork repository that joins together teams, apps, and work. The product is specifically geared to allow open sharing and meaningful communication within and across teams. And it’s already in use by Canva, LaunchDarkly, and Warby Parker.

“Atlas brings together people, goals, and communications; making work as easy to follow as a Twitter feed,” said Scott Farquhar, Atlassian Co-founder, and CEO. “You get all the signals and none of the noise.”

With Atlas, every project gets a homepage, providing immediate context for anyone seeking information, as well as a clear sense of the project’s requirements and goals. All this is intended to cut through the chaos, keeping teams aligned and removing the need for time-consuming status update meetings. Effectively, Atlas should bring together Atlassian’s customers from across the spectrum of agile/DevOps, IT service management, and work management.

Users get regular personalized updates on their projects and goals, available by email and within the platform. All this makes project objectives and the day-to-day crystal clear.

Updates are capped at 280 characters (the length of a modern tweet) and can be posted directly to Atlas or from Jira or Trello. There are also integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams which can be used to share updates and get reports and reminders.

Atlas asks teams to post updates on their work at least once a week, and these updates can include images, GIFs, and videos.

A notable feature is that users can add Smart Links to project and goal homepages. These provide embedded previews of documents from work management tools like Google Docs, Figma, Loom, and Confluence. And you can use Smart Links to provide live previews and updates on projects and goals on any Confluence page, Jira issue, or Trello board.

atlassian update

Compass is a dev directory that unifies information about software systems and the teams working on them – helping organizations overcome the complexity of distributed software architectures. It should answer key questions about ownership of your organization’s systems and help you to manage the sprawl.

“Compass is designed to simplify and contextualize,” explained Tiffany To, Atlassian Head of Product, Agile & DevOps. “Our goal is to accelerate the learning curve. Your teams have a holistic view of all your components and their health. Automated scorecards are the missing link in your software chain.”

The product comes in three main units:

  • The Components catalog forms a map of all the components (across services, tools, and open-source libraries) used to make the organization’s software and the teams that own and work on these elements (with all the required technical documentation included). Separate to this, there’s also the new toolchain page, helping you map, manage and connect your tools.

 

  • Scorecards, a DevOps health tool allowing the team to evaluate the organization’s architecture against baselines and security and compliance requirements – highlighting operational issues and performance problems. This allows organizations to run system-wide auditing practically in real-time, rather than annually.

 

  • Apps, a platform to install apps (built on Forge and using Atlassian’s computational resources and storage), collating information from developer SaaS tools (ranging from code, observability, CI/CD, APM, incident management, and security) to assist teams in selecting new tools.

Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analyticsatlassian upate

A major landmark on Atlassian’s product roadmap is the Data Lake launch. This will provide a single point to access pre-modeled and enriched data across products and instances.

Initially plugging into Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence (and eventually all your Atlassian products), the utility, built on the Atlassian platform, will give admins rapid access to powerful insights. 

And down the line – expected in the second half of this year – Atlassian is adding a direct connection for Data Lake to BI tools such as Tableau and PowerBI (with export also available to your provider of choice).

Atlassian Analytics, meanwhile, connects to the Data Lake and allows users to obtain insights across projects, instances, and products. 

Without having to use code, users can call up reports and access interactive and customizable dashboards to analyze data. The technology comes from Chartio, a cloud visualization and analytics tool bought by Atlassian last year.

Dinesh Ajmera, Site Lead and Head of Engineering, India, summarized the impact of the launches, saying, “Imagine a future where every team gets tailored recommendations on how to improve velocity, and every leader gets insights into how to improve overall team health – so work gets done smarter and teams unleash their full potential.”

Atlassian has predicted that these two features will boost developer productivity by 20%, based on the new capacity for automation.

Jira Product Discovery

atlassian update

As if Atlas, Compass, Data Lake, and Atlassian Analytics weren’t enough, Team ‘22 also saw the announcement of Jira Product Discovery.

Aimed at product managers, this new launch is intended to put customer needs square and center, and to take the team from ideation to customer delivery within a single platform. The product comes with an expanded roadmap (with list, matrix, and board views available) which makes it simpler to organize and prioritize work, as well as set priorities as a team and drawing input from external stakeholders and other tools. This ensures that all the necessary information is in one location and that product plans are kept up to date and in sync – and aligned with customer requirements.

Data residency and financial service industry compliance

Atlassian was also keen to promote the headline-worthy innovations that have been laid out for enterprise customers in recent months.

  • Cloud Enterprise editions of Atlassian products now meet the stringent standards of financial services industry compliance for the European Banking Authority (EBA), the Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin) in Germany and HIPAA in the US (and with FedRAMP and bring-your-own-key encryption on the roadmap).

 

  • Enterprise customers now have the option for data residency in Australia, the US and the European Union (with the UK, Canada, and Japan coming in 2023). Jira Service Management is also getting improved data residency support, and Atlassian is building in data residency for apps.

New features for Jira Service Management

A number of new JSM features were also put on display. JSM is getting:

  • A simple form builder, native to the platform, that comes with over 300 templates.
  • A built-in knowledge base, replicating some of Confluence’s functionality within the platform.
  • Change Management Scheduling features, allow managers to quickly or automatically approve low-impact changes.

Conclusion

Atlassian’s major launches this year underline the company’s understanding of customer pain points – and Atlassian is rising to the challenges of serving both dispersed workforces and transformed workplaces. It’s all about the teams!

Indeed, the company is always evolving and the Atlassian ecosystem is thriving.

It’s also worth mentioning that Atlassian is very much a cloud-first company today, with new products primarily geared towards cloud delivery – something that obviously makes sense when catering to today’s remote workforce. Atlassian is keen to make the process as painless as possible, and there’s wide-ranging support for businesses looking to migrate.

And a deadline is now at hand, with 2 February 2024, set as the termination date for Server hosting support. There’s also a question mark over the future of Data Center for the time being.

In the meantime, Atlas and Compass products are bringing teams together and changing the way we work, while the Atlassian Data Lake will unlock enormous amounts of potential for admins.

That’s not to mention the fact that Confluence has recently gotten a whole range of updates to add new options and make the platform simpler to use. And at the same time, the new Trello Standard plan is making life easier for teams and access to unlimited Power-Ups is boosting Trello’s potential for everyone.

Given all this, it seems like Atlassian’s future is only getting more exciting!

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