The feature makes using Slack a lot easier as you can greatly optimise your usage of it and ensure slash commands remain visible to only you. Here are a few key features you can use in your workspace:

 /msg @person “message” from any box

Send direct messages to anyone from any channel by using /msg and @ the person you want to talk to.

Placing reminders in Slack makes it easier to have a set schedule as you can generate reminders at any stage to keep track of your time. 

This command is very useful when joining a channel for the first time. It allows you to see which co-workers are in your channel, and DM them through that.

By simply typing / in your message bar, you can see all commands and add more using integrations which allows you to easily use those integrations.

Slash inefficiency in half with the Slack Slash

Slack Commands are quick and easy to use and enable users to spend less time on Slack and more time working. 

Ctrl k or command k: This lets you search conversations between channels. You can even search keywords from different channels, allowing you to find those words faster than checking all the channels individually.

Up and e: You can edit an existing message by pressing “up” and “e” at the same time. If you mistyped something in your sent message, or want to include some more information, use this command. You do this by going on the message bar, then pressing “e” to edit the message. Note that it only works for your messages. 

Shift alt down for the last unread message is very useful in order to quickly switch between different unread messages.

Ctrl or command ? shows all the keyboard shortcuts so you can see them if you forget or want to know more.

Command your workspace with these Slack shortcuts

Integrations provide the ability to connect and interact with other apps and services, meaning you no longer need to switch between different apps to get things done. Many say this is their favourite Slack feature, it certainly is ours!

Integrations are also an efficient way to connect various apps you use in your workspace into one area, as long as they can be found in the Slack apps directory. Adaptavist uses many integrations from Google Calendar, Zoom, and our own inventions such as Everyday Toolkit and SearchMy.

There are over 2,200 apps that you can use within Slack which can either help you with your work, add some fun, or both!

The essential integrations are Google Calendar and Zoom, allowing you to sync your calendar and meetings, plus join them through Slack.

Interact with your essential apps without leaving Slack

Here are some handy hacks that you can use to call on your apps from any Slack chat window:

With Zoom, it is very convenient to start a call by typing “/zoom” in Slack, giving a link that lets you start a Zoom call immediately for your Slack channel recipient(s) to join.

With Google Calendar you can view and make changes to your schedule using “/gcal today” or “/gcal tomorrow”.

Find out more about Adaptavist Slack Services

Did we mention that we have created our own apps for Slack? This latest addition is a toolkit that came from our last company Hack Day; Everyday Toolkit. 

At the Hack Day, we discovered that people wanted to check the meaning of a word in the chat, couldn’t remember colleague time zones, needed to share Google images with the channel, and wanted to convert a currency or metric. All everyday tasks that required them switching away from Slack, completing the task, then switching back. 

So we built a bundle of 12 micro-apps that will allow you to switch less and do more in Slack. According to research from Slack, most of us waste over 30 minutes every day switching between apps. To combat that, we built ‘Everyday Toolkit’ to reduce those numbers. Here’s a quick list of the everyday tools it offers:

/tools-define            Check a word's definition

/tools-synonym        Browse synonyms to improve your text

/tools-stockimage    Find and share royalty-free images

/tools-googleimage  Find and share images

/tools-gif                   Find and share gifs

/tools-sticker            Find and share animated stickers

/tools-text                 Find and share animated text

/tools-worldtime     See the local time for Slack colleagues

/tools-wordcount    Count all the words, impress all the people

/tools-convert         Convert distance, time, weight and more

/tools-currency       Convert global currencies

/tools-percent         Calculate percentages quickly

/tools-password       Create insanely strong passwords

/tools-random           Pick a random number or word

/tools-lorem              Create filler text for design drafts

/tools-gif		Find and share GIFs with Next/Previous functionality

Whether it’s getting better value out of your daily Slack use, or helping you start an efficient remote working company culture, we hope these Slack hacks will help you go further with Slack.

If your organisation is looking for specialist support with your Slack ecosystem, Adaptavist can help.

An everyday app that helps you with your everyday needs

4 quick and easy to use Slack Hacks. Each command enables users to spend less time on Slack and more time working.

Slash Slack inefficiency and optimise usage with Slack Slash

That’s how we feel at Adaptavist in regards to Atlassian’s latest announcement that they will be slowly sunsetting their Server products in favour of their Cloud (SaaS) and Data Center (self-managed) deployment models.  

Atlassian has long shared its mission of becoming a cloud-first company, and this announcement reinforces their position and confirms their absolute commitment to investing in cloud solutions that are the right choice for almost everyone. 

As Atlassian put its Server products out to pasture, options abound with Data Center and their renewed focus on building their Cloud for everyone. In the words of Steve Jobs, “Focus means saying no."

Covid-19 has accelerated digital transformation across industries, and we’re witnessing cloud technology play an important role in that journey. Atlassian’s announcement to phase out its more basic self-managed option is a bold, but timely step in meeting customers on that path. It’s a commitment to focus on reducing complexity in a rapidly changing world.

Remote/home working is now the norm for many, a paradigm shift that happened virtually overnight. End users are consuming services outside the corporate firewall as a matter of course, accelerating the change of the security model from all on-premise, to a more deperimeterised world where offerings like Atlassian Cloud and Adaptavist’s Enterprise Cloud are a natural fit.

Atlassian’s laser-focus on its multi-tier Cloud (SaaS) offerings will bring many benefits for customers, including more investment and focus on enhancing usability, integration, and security of all their products. 

For many, cloud is the present and the future of Software

Atlassian will no longer sell new perpetual server licenses from February 2021 and will cease new feature development on server products. Support will be available through to February 2024 as the products are deprecated.

However, some customers operate in heavily regulated sectors and simply can’t move to the cloud. Luckily, Atlassian will continue to invest in its Data Center platform, offering customers the ability to leverage the same deployment options that are available for its discontinued Server products, including the private cloud. 

For those already using or planning to use Data Center, we are confident it will continue to have a long future ahead. 

So what does this announcement really mean for customers?

While this news was not unexpected, it does leave customers with an existential question: What comes after Server?

Do we upgrade to Data Center? Do we have to migrate to the cloud today? Can we take a hybrid approach over time? Where do we start?

These decisions will depend on the size and complexity of the organisation, the shape of its IT infrastructure, and - ultimately- what’s best for teams that use these tools everyday. At Adaptavist, we’re experienced in helping our customers weigh the options and make the switch. 

Whether it's helping ARM move 10,000 employees to cloud, supporting John Lewis Partnership's Atlassian goals with managed services or showing ScriptRunner for Jira users how to move from Server to Cloud, we know that it’s about more than just a technology choice. We can help you take the opportunity to evaluate the health of the attendant business processes.  

We know every organisation is different, with different needs and priorities, so no matter what the shape or size of your organisation, we are committed to helping you navigate through this change and ensure you make the right decisions.

We appreciate for some this announcement may bring concern, as well as uncertainty on how best to proceed. We assure you that we are here to support you through this transition and are committed to ensuring you put the right solution in place for your business and minimise any unnecessary disruption. 

Whatever your next step, we have an upgrade path for you 

To focus on the world-class cloud experience, Atlassian are simplifying their self-managed offerings

Atlassian simplifies self managed suite; reaffirms belief in the Cloud

Atlassian simplifies self-managed suite; reaffirms belief in the Cloud

The way we communicate has changed significantly in the last few months. With the recent lockdown restrictions in response to COVID-19, instant messaging, video conferencing and documentation tools have become mission critical for keeping teams aligned, collaborating and productive. 

Atlassian’s overhaul of how Confluence Cloud looks and feels, coupled with its integrations have really set all teams up for success by making it more accessible than ever before. 

So if you're new to Confluence or have hundreds of pages under your belt, how do you create better and more engaging content for your team?

One of the most visible changes you may have noticed in the last year has been the introduction of the new page layout and editing experience. This new content experience has had a particular focus on making content the hero, that is, making content easier to create and consume. 

The days of having content look lost on a wide page are over. Now, by default, Confluence’s page layout is centered with lots of padding around it, drawing attention to your content. While this certainly will get your reader’s focus, it also makes it easier to slip into creating lengthy content that can just as easily reduce focus. Here are a few suggestions to keep your audience engaged:

Confluence Cloud has made it really easy to call out important content with built-in macros. You can highlight decisions (insert macro link), call out warnings or important notes for your reader and generally avoid the missteps of assuming that the reader will interpret the most important points of your arguments.

If you’re able to express your argument with a video or image, do. It’s now easier to manipulate the size and positioning of images than ever before, allowing you to embed them into your arguments. Confluence’s widget connector also makes it easy to add other rich media like videos from Youtube or Vimeo to your content. 

The Atlassian marketplace has recently seen an explosion of apps that are offering an even more powerful content experience on Cloud. Our app, Content Formatting for Confluence introduces tabs, allowing you to drastically cut back on page length and allow you to focus your readers attention on specific themes. 

One of the most valuable things you can do for your reader is to create a repeatable content structure. When your audience knows where to look on a page for the information that is most important to them, they’ll be more efficient in consuming it and you’ll get your point across more clearly. Confluence page templates allow you to do just that, and the recent expansion to have templates like Hubspot Creative Briefs, Mural Brainstorming pages and team plays from Atlassian’s team playbooks series have given your teams an even easier way to get started creating more powerful content. 

One of the missteps that I’ve seen happen in teams is when templates become completely static. A template, like most content, should be a living piece of work that’s updated over time to accommodate the message that you’re trying to get across. Templates get abandoned when they’re not easy to use or make users complete fields that aren’t mission critical. The remedy to this is often not to agonize on creating a ‘perfect’ template and to allow for revisions over time to allow for your team to communicate content effectively.

Don’t agonise over creating the perfect template

Adaptavist's recent digital etiquette study surveyed over 2800 global knowledge workers on what some of the biggest challenges were in getting work done in a completely digital world. One of the key findings of the study was that the inefficient use of digital channels was increasing the complexity of tasks and threatening productivity. So, how can we counter this trend with Confluence? 

A significant portion of survey respondents said that they spent a considerable amount of time going between different tools, attempting to find the relevant information to them. Some of the improvements that the team over at Atlassian have been hard at work on are integrations with their other products and third-party apps. 

Recently I’ve found myself going back and forth between Slack and Confluence fairly regularly. If you’re a team that’s focused on creating content in Confluence then you might want to consider setting up a few automations in Slack that will reduce this kind of tool switching. 

Take a look at Atlassian’s blog for more details on how to set this up

In Slack, you can set up a notification that will message you about changes to important pages in a Confluence space ensuring that you navigate to important content quickly. You can also set up an automation that will allow you to respond to comments inside of Slack, keeping you focussed.

Work often starts out as ideas or suggestions on a Trello board, if this sounds familiar to you, then consider bringing your Trello content into Confluence. 

You can choose to display a single Trello card that will allow a reader to easily get more context about your topic or navigate to that card directly showing all of its detail. You can also choose to add an entire board to a Confluence page, this can be useful if you’re running retrospectives on Trello and want to explore any of the topics raised. 

If your team finds that they work more in Trello then you can also add the Confluence Power-up to Trello, link pages to cards, and comment directly on pages from Trello simplifying tool switching further. 

Confluence and Jira has always been a classic integration but one that’s popular for a reason. The ability to link a work tracking tool like Jira to Confluence has helped teams across all different verticals to achieve success and communicate the progress of initiatives. 

Being able to visualise the state that work is in and to easily navigate to work in progress from Confluence saves teams a huge amount of time. Equally linking a page to a Jira ticket allows for teams that are Jira centric, like developers to easily navigate to a Confluence page to get more context.

If you want to integrate one of your other mission-critical tools into your Confluence content but can’t find a built-in feature or an app for it on the Atlassian Marketplace, consider making use of Confluence’s Iframe feature. This feature allows you to embed a fully functional web page in the content that you’re creating, meaning that the reader of your content or your team doesn’t have to navigate away through a link to get more context. 

So, as we continue to move forward in this evolving remote working world, it’s really important to focus on our audiences and make content that’s easier to consume. By integrating existing tools, focussing content, and creating flexible templates we can drive towards making more engaging content.

Boost productivity by syncing your content across multiple communication tools

The Adaptavist team is looking for feedback on our recently launched cloud app, Content Formatting for Confluence. If you want to shape the future of the app, add your feature or improvement suggestions on our nolt.io board.

How to create more meaningful content in Confluence Cloud

If you're using Confluence Cloud, how do you create better and more engaging content for your team?

<p>The vast proliferation of APIs has enabled applications in the digital space to become increasingly interconnected. Automations and integrations allow us to create seamless workflows that operate across many products from multiple vendors. We use apps to automate actions on our behalf, such as scheduling our social media posts. We use integrations to share our data between multiple platforms, like when we check the status of our Jira tickets in Slack.<br><br>These examples all have a golden thread: security. How do we delegate authority by allowing apps to take actions or access our data on other platforms on our behalf without giving them access to our secret passwords? In this blog series, we provide answers to this burning question from both a non-technical and technical perspective. By the end of it, you will have a far greater understanding of OAuth 2.0 and why it is changing the face of the Internet.</p>


OAuth 2.0 and its vital role in application data security, explained simply.

<h4>OAuth 2.0 as an office analogy</h4>
<p>OAuth 2.0 is the industry standard that most modern applications implement to allow you to delegate your access to an app to other apps, without disclosing your credentials. It is largely unrelated to OAuth 1.0a, which is often used when an app accesses another app without a user being involved to grant access.</p>
<p>In this blog, we’ll explain the fundamental concepts and actors of OAuth 2.0 with the help of an analogy based on the access control system in an office. There are several flavours of OAuth 2.0 that apply to different circumstances. We're describing the Authorisation Code Grant Flow, the most commonly variant (sometimes known as 3-Legged OAuth, or 3LO). In our next blog, we’ll provide a more technical overview, but we’ll follow the same structure as our analogy explanation so you can easily switch between the two. To set up the analogy, allow me to introduce Foo Corp, the company that sits at the heart of our analogy.<br><br></p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzYwMCwzOTBd/Overview.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Overview.png" alt="Overview"></p>
<p><br>Foo Corporation’s HQ is currently located at Bar Tower, where they lease 16 floors of prime office space including a restaurant, open-plan offices, an R&amp;D lab, a boardroom, and CEO Mrs Foo’s top-floor office. Foo Corp doesn’t own the office, but it does own all of the intellectual property and assets which are stored on the floors that they lease. Foo Corp employees have access to the office, where they carry out their daily work.</p>
<h4>Access the old way – the fumbly code and keypad (before OAuth 2.0)</h4>
<p>Back in the early days, when Foo Corp first took out the lease for the office in Bar Tower, security was pretty basic. There was a keypad next to the elevator in the lobby, and Foo employees would type in the secret code to gain access to Foo Corp. If the code was correct, the elevator would take them to any of the Foo Corp office floors in the tower. The code was like a front door key shared between all the employees. While this method worked, over time as the company grew, it became apparent that it had a number of drawbacks.<br><br></p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Key-Pad.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Key-Pad.png" alt="Key Pad"><br><br>Firstly, it wasn’t very secure, because the code to access the offices was shared between all the employees. If an employee ever shared it with a third party, say a client who visited regularly, the code became uncontrolled. Who knows who else the client might share it with? The code could also be lost through negligence when employees wrote it down, or even stolen by malicious competitors of Foo Corp. Enter industrial espionage. Also, if the code was leaked and had to be reset, all employees would be inconvenienced by having to learn a new code. <br><br>Secondly, anyone with the code could access any of the floors of the office, from the restaurant to the secret R&amp;D lab, regardless of their roles. Once in, they were really in and free to have a nose around at their leisure. This means Foo Corp had to trust employees to only access the parts of the office that were role specific. As always, in theory it would work, but in practice it was impossible to enforce. There was nothing stopping Paul, the receptionist, from popping into Mrs Foo’s lavish top floor office to get a coffee from her premium machine while she was abroad on business.<br><br>Lastly, there was no way for Foo Corp to track when the various floors had been accessed and by whom. The keypad system had a basic download that could show when correct and incorrect code entries had been made. But it couldn’t determine whether someone had been on the floor that houses Mrs Foo’s office when she was away, making Paul’s coffee pilfering completely undetectable.<br><br>For this reason, in time, as the company grew, Foo Corp decided to move to a more robust and secure system that would allow it to delegate access to individual floors of the office to employees according to their very specific needs.<br><br></p>
<p> </p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table cellpadding="10"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 1836px;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzg5LDEzNF0/Key-Pad-simple.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Key-Pad-simple.png" alt="Key Pad simple"></td>
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<p>This part of our analogy represents <strong>Basic Authentication</strong>, which was used before OAuth became prevalent. The shared key code which all the employees use to enter the office represents your password to an application, such as your Facebook account. Just like in our analogy, sharing your credentials with other parties is a security risk. You have to trust them to keep your password safe, and to only use your account as you intended.</p>
<p>While Basic Auth remains the norm for authenticating a user to a server, it’s not suitable when a third-party is involved. You use your credentials to sign into Facebook, but you wouldn’t give the Birthday Reminders app your Facebook password! This is where OAuth 2.0 comes in.</p>
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<p> </p>
<h4>The modern way – key cards (OAuth 2.0)</h4>
<p>Foo Corp has moved up a rung and is now a thriving modern business, and as such they’ve updated their security policies. All Foo Corp employees now carry a key card that only grants them access to the floors that are relevant to their specific role.</p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzk1NywyOTVd/Key-Card.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Key-Card.png" alt="Key Card"></p>
<p>When a new employee joins the company, they check in at the security desk in the lobby. On behalf of Foo Corp, the security team checks the new starter’s ID to confirm they are who they say they are, then sets up the employee’s key card. Key cards are coded to allow access to floors which individual employees need to visit in order to carry out their role, as determined by Foo Corp. The security team is the gatekeeper who sets up the key cards, but it’s Foo Corp that decides how it delegates access to the floors in the Bar Tower office to its employees.<br><br>Now when an employee taps their key card at the panel next to the elevator, they are offered a choice of the floors available based on their role, rather than all the floors. This means that the receptionist can no longer pop into Mrs Foo’s office while she is away, as that floor is not offered to him when he taps his card.<br><br>Employees in the same roles need access to the same floors. For example, all engineers need access to the R&amp;D lab, the restaurant and the meeting suite. To save time, the security team has set up access groups for each of the various roles. They can use access groups to quickly grant employees access to groups of floors, rather than having to specify each available floor individually.<br><br>The key card system addresses all of the drawbacks of the key code system. If a key card is lost or stolen, it can be disabled remotely by the security team. Security is improved as employees can only access the floors they need, rather than the whole office. Access to floors is enforced by the system, rather than based on trust. And finally, the system enables a finer granularity of audit, as it records when individual floors were visited rather than just when someone came in and out of the office. If key card serial numbers are assigned to employees, Foo Corp can even determine who entered each floor - unless tailgating is involved, of course!</p>
<h4>Relating the analogy to OAuth 2.0</h4>
<p>Now that we understand how the different concepts and actors work together in the Foo Corp analogy, let’s take a look at how they map across to OAuth 2.0 and relate to a real world example.</p>
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<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="margin: 0px auto; font-family: sans-serif; display: block;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzEyOSw0Ml0/Foo-Corp.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Foo-Corp.png" alt="Foo Corp"></p>
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<h5>Foo Corp</h5>
<p>Foo Corp owns its intellectual property and the assets in the offices. It’s Foo Corp and no one else that decides to whom it delegates access to the offices it’s renting in Bar Tower. In OAuth 2.0, Foo Corp is the <strong>Resource Owner</strong>.</p>
<p>ℹ️ You are the Resource Owner of your Facebook profile.</p>
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<p> </p>
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<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" height="213" cellpadding="20"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 131px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Employees.png"  alt="Employees"></td>
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<h5>Foo Employees</h5>
<p>Foo Corp decides how it delegates employee access to its offices, that want to access the different floors in order to carry out their jobs. In OAuth 2.0, the employees are <strong>Clients</strong>.</p>
<p>ℹ️ A Birthday Reminders app that wants to access your Facebook friends’ dates of birth is a Client.</p>
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<p> </p>
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<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Floors2.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Floors2.png" alt="Floors2"></p>
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<h5>Office Floors</h5>
<p>The floors which Foo Corp leases don’t just hold offices. There’s also the reception, the meeting suite, the restaurant, the R&amp;D lab, the boardroom and the CEO’s office. Different employees have access to different floors, according to their job roles as defined by Foo Corp. In OAuth 2.0, the different floors are the <strong>APIs</strong> to which a Resource Owner can delegate access to. <strong>Scopes</strong> define which APIs a Client has access to.</p>
<p>ℹ️ The Birthday Reminders app only requires the Scopes for the APIs to get your friends’ profile info. Other Scopes like Photos or Timeline are not required.</p>
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<p> </p>
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<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Security2.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Security2.png" alt="Security2"></p>
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<h5>Security Desk</h5>
<p>In the lobby of Bar Tower, before you get to the elevators, you have to go past the security desk. Here, an agent checks the ID of new employees to make sure they are who they say they are. New employees get given a key card that lets them access the floors they need, according to the rules defined by Foo Corp. The security desk is the <strong>Authorisation Server</strong>. It’s run by Bar Tower, but implements the access delegation rules defined by Foo Corp.</p>
<p>ℹ️ When you grant permission to Birthday Reminders to access your friends’ dates of birth, you are interacting with Facebook’s Authorisation Server.</p>
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<p> </p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" height="213" cellpadding="20"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 131px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Card.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Card.png" alt="Card"></td>
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<h6>Key Card</h6>
<p>Employees are issued with Key Cards by the Security Desk. These grant access to different floors of the Foo Corp office, depending on roles. The cards themselves are meaningless and hold no information other than what floors they unlock. In OAuth 2.0, key cards are known as <strong>Access Tokens</strong>. Like key cards, Tokens do not hold any usernames or passwords. Tokens are issued by the Authorisation Server to the Client, once the Client has been authenticated.</p>
<p>ℹ️ If you decide to give Birthday Reminders access to your Facebook friends’ profile info, the Facebook Authorisation Server will give the app an Access Token which it can use to get your friends’ profile info, but nothing else.</p>
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<p style="text-align: left;"> </p>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">Let’s recap.</h4>
<p style="text-align: left;">You’ve just installed an app called Birthday Reminders, which uses your Facebook friends’ dates of birth to send you birthday reminders. You are the <strong>Resource Owner</strong> of your contacts stored in the <strong>Resource Server</strong>, which is Facebook. The app, which is the <strong>Client</strong>, asks you to grant it access to your Facebook contacts through the Facebook <strong>Authorisation Server</strong>, and you decide to give it access only to your contacts’ names and dates of birth (the <strong>Scope</strong> of the access).</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">This is how it all maps out:</p>
<style> .datagrid table { border-collapse: collapse; text-align: left; width: 100%; } .datagrid {background: #fff; overflow: hidden; border: 1px solid #003366; -webkit-border-radius: 3px; -moz-border-radius: 3px; border-radius: 3px; }.datagrid table td, .datagrid table th { padding: 3px 10px; }.datagrid table thead th {background:-webkit-gradient( linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0.05, #003366), color-stop(1, #003366) );background:-moz-linear-gradient( center top, #003366 5%, #003366 100% );filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#003366', endColorstr='#003366');background-color:#003366; color:#FFFFFF; border-left: 1px solid #003366; } .datagrid table thead th:first-child { border: none; }.datagrid table tbody td { color: #00496B; border-left: 1px solid #E1EEF4;border-bottom: 1px solid #E1EEF4 }.datagrid table tbody td:first-child { border-left: none; }.datagrid table tbody tr:last-child td { border-bottom: none; } </style>
<div class="datagrid">
<table><thead><tr><th style="width: 178px;"><strong>OAuth 2.0</strong></th>
<th style=""><strong>Foo Corp Analogy</strong></th>
<th style=""><strong>Birthday Reminders</strong></th>
</tr></thead><tbody><tr><td style="width: 178px;">Resource Owner</td>
<td style="">Foo Corp</td>
<td style="">You</td>
</tr><tr class="alt"><td style="width: 178px;">Resource Server</td>
<td style="">Bar Tower</td>
<td style="">Facebook</td>
</tr><tr><td style="width: 178px;">Client</td>
<td style="">Employees</td>
<td style="">Birthday Reminders App</td>
</tr><tr class="alt"><td style="width: 178px;">Authorisation Server</td>
<td style="">Security Desk</td>
<td style="">Facebook Auth Server</td>
</tr><tr><td style="width: 178px;">Access Token</td>
<td style="">Key Card</td>
<td style="">Access Token</td>
</tr><tr><td style="width: 178px;">Scopes &amp; APIs</td>
<td style="">Office Floors</td>
<td style="">Profile, Photos, Timeline</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p style="text-align: left;"> </p>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">Final Thoughts</h4>
<p style="text-align: left;">The Foo Corp analogy was carefully crafted to accurately reflect the high-level fundamentals of the OAuth 2.0 concept. In reality, the finer details are more complex, but unless you are a developer looking to implement OAuth 2.0, this level of detail illustrates the main principles. In the next blog, we’ll revisit the concept from a technical perspective, and relate the actors from the analogy to their real-world articles.</p>

Apps automate actions on our behalf, but how do we control your shared data? See how right here.

OAuth 2.0 and its vital role in application data security, explained simply (Part 1)

<p>We hope that part one of this blog series gave you a clear overview of OAuth 2.0 and its importance in enforcing security and granular permissions when personal information is shared between apps. Now that you have a handle on the basics, in this blog, we are going to take things up a notch.</p>
<p>As you will no doubt remember, in our previous blog, we used an office access control system analogy to explain the high-level concepts behind the most common OAuth 2.0 flow, Authorisation Code Grant. This time we’ll go through it again using a more realistic example, which we’ll relate back to our analogy.</p>
<h5>OAuth 2.0 Authorisation Code Grant: Actors and Concepts</h5>
<p>We previously introduced the Birthday Reminders app, which uses your Facebook friends’ dates of birth to remind you to wish them a happy birthday. In this scenario, OAuth 2.0 Authorisation Code Grant allows you to delegate access to a very specific subset of the data in your Facebook account (your friends’ birthdays) to the Birthday Reminders app, without sharing any of your credentials. Before we start, let’s remind ourselves of the different OAuth 2.0 concepts and actors.</p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" cellpadding="20" height="213"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 184px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;">
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzE2NSwxNjBd/Owner.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Owner.png" alt="Owner"></p>
</td>
<td style="width: 501px;">
<h5>Resource Owner</h5>
<p>ℹ️ In our office analogy, Foo Corp was the Resource Owner.</p>
<p>Although Resource Owners can be corporations, they usually tend to be individuals like you or me. It would not be wrong to say that by extension, the Resource Owner was in fact Mrs Foo, the CEO of Foo Corp. In this example, the Resource Owner is you: while you do not own Facebook, you do “own” your profile data, your posts, your photos and so on.</p>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p> </p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" cellpadding="20" height="213"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 184px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;">
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Resource.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Resource.png" alt="Resource"></p>
</td>
<td style="width: 501px;">
<h5>Resource Server</h5>
<p>ℹ️ In our office analogy, Bar Tower was the Resource Server.</p>
<p>This time, it’s Facebook. That’s where the data (or resource) that you control is held. This maps to Bar Tower, which is where Foo Corp (the Resource Owner) has its office. Just like there are other offices in Bar Tower that are not leased by Foo Corp, there are obviously other profiles on Facebook, as well as yours. More specifically, the Resource Server is the actual Facebook API that returns your friends’ birthdays, which is your data that the app wants to access.</p>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p> </p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" cellpadding="20" height="213"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 184px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;">
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Client.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Client.png" alt="Client"></p>
</td>
<td style="width: 501px;">
<h5>Client</h5>
<p>ℹ️ In our office analogy, employees were Clients, to whom Foo Corp delegated access to specific floors of the office.</p>
<p>In this scenario, the Birthday Reminders app is our Client. It’s the actor requesting your consent (as the Resource Owner) to access the Facebook API that returns your data (the Resource Server). Only you hold the right to decide whether or not to delegate your access to Birthday Reminders.</p>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p> </p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" cellpadding="20" height="213"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 184px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;">
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Auth.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Auth.png" alt="Auth"></p>
</td>
<td style="width: 501px;">
<h5>Authorisation Server</h5>
<p>ℹ️ In our office analogy, the security desk was the Authorisation Server.</p>
<p>The Authorisation Server orchestrates the OAuth 2.0 flow. It creates the Access Tokens which grant Clients access to the Resource Server. In this case, it’s the Facebook Auth Server. As a Resource Owner, you already have a relationship with the Authorisation Server, for example here you have a Facebook account. The Auth Server asks for your consent to delegate your access to Clients such as Birthday Reminders, and if granted, generates their Tokens. You will only be asked to consent to the specific Scopes that the client has requested.</p>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p> </p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" cellpadding="20" height="213"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 184px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;">
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Token.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Token.png" alt="Token"></p>
</td>
<td style="width: 501px;">
<h5>Access Tokens</h5>
<p>ℹ️ In our office analogy, keycards represented Access Tokens.</p>
<p>Generated by the Authorisation Server with consent from the Resource Owner, Access Tokens are a Client’s key to retrieving data from the Resource Server. They’re often implemented as JSON Web Tokens (JWT), but can be other types of token. The Token doesn’t store any of the Resource Owner’s credentials. To the Client, it’s nothing more than a meaningless entity that unlocks access to the Resource Server. Facebook will only share your friends’ birthdays with Birthday Reminders when its Resource Server is presented with a valid Token by the app.</p>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p> </p>
<div style="border-radius: 10px; border: 0px solid #000000; background-color: #f1f2f1;">
<table style="width: 693px; height: 213px;" cellpadding="20" height="213"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 184px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzE1NywyMDhd/Scopes2.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Scopes2.png" alt="Scopes2"></td>
<td style="width: 501px;">
<h5>Scopes</h5>
<p>ℹ️ In our office analogy, the security desk would code new keycards with a permissions group that would allow employees to go to the specific office floors required to carry out their roles. These permission groups represented OAuth 2.0 Scopes.</p>
<p>While a Token can unlock access to all of the Resource Owner’s data, often only a subset of the data needs is required. Birthday Reminders only need your friends’ birthdays, your photos are not required. This is where Scopes come in. They make it possible to delegate access to discrete portions of the Resource Owner’s data. Clients usually only request access to the Scopes they require to fulfil their purpose, and the Resource Owner has full control over which Scopes are granted. Scopes can encompass one or several APIs.</p>
</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p> </p>
<p>For reference with our office analogy, here’s the summary table we used last time.</p>
<div class="datagrid">
<table><thead><tr><th><strong>OAuth 2.0</strong></th>
<th><strong>Foo Corp Analogy</strong></th>
<th><strong>Birthday Reminders</strong></th>
</tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Resource Owner</td>
<td>Foo Corp</td>
<td>You</td>
</tr><tr class="alt"><td>Resource Server</td>
<td>Bar Tower</td>
<td>Facebook</td>
</tr><tr><td>Client</td>
<td>Employees</td>
<td>Birthday Reminders App</td>
</tr><tr class="alt"><td>Authorisation Server</td>
<td>Security Desk</td>
<td>Facebook Auth Server</td>
</tr><tr><td>Access Token</td>
<td>Key Card</td>
<td>Access Token</td>
</tr><tr><td>Scopes &amp; APIs</td>
<td>Office Floors</td>
<td>Profile, Photos, Timeline</td>
</tr></tbody></table></div>
<p> </p>
<h5>Before OAuth, all we had was Basic Auth </h5>
<p>In Part I of this blog series, we saw how before introducing keycards (OAuth2.0), Foo Corp used a simple keypad and secret code to grant employees access to the office. This represented Basic Auth.</p>
<p>Before OAuth 2.0, when Birthday Reminders needed to access your Facebook account to get your friends’ dates of birth, you had to give Birthday Reminders your Facebook username and password. When working with APIs, credentials had to be encoded directly into the API calls. This was Basic Auth, and it’s still used by some apps today.</p>
<p>While Basic Auth is appropriate in some simple scenarios, for example when users are logging into their account on a platform, there are a number of drawbacks when it’s used for access delegation.</p>
<p>Firstly, it’s not very secure, because you are essentially disclosing your username and password with a third-party app. You have to fully trust that Birthday Reminders will keep your credentials safe and won’t share them any further, as you have no way to enforce it. Birthday Reminders might keep passwords unencrypted or could be hacked, resulting in your credentials being compromised. Furthermore, if you ever changed your Facebook password, Birthday Reminders would no longer be able to access your Facebook account and you would miss your friends’ birthdays, which would be very sad.</p>
<p>Secondly, once you’ve shared your credentials with Birthday Reminders, the app has exactly the same level of access to your Facebook account as you have. You have no way of monitoring or enforcing that it will only retrieve your friends’ birthdays, rather than say, your photos.</p>
<p>Lastly, there’s no way for you to track which of your Facebook data Birthday Reminders has been accessed. At best, you could check the login history of your Facebook account and try to work out which events were not yours. But from Facebook’s perspective, it cannot differentiate you from the app, as you’re both using the same credentials.</p>
<p>These are the main drawbacks which are eliminated by OAuth 2.0. In the next section, we’ll take a look at how it lets you delegate access to only the specific parts of your Facebook account that Birthday Reminders actually needs.</p>
<h5>The modern way – OAuth 2.0</h5>
<p>There are four different “flows” in OAuth 2.0, which are appropriate for different scenarios. Where we need to delegate our access to an app to a less trusted app, like in our Birthday Reminders example, we tend to use the Authorisation Code Grant flow. As it involves three parties (a Resource Owner delegating their Resource Server access to a Client), it’s sometimes referred to as “3-Legged OAuth”, or “3LO”. Let’s take a look at how the flow works with the help of our example.</p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzQwOCwzMzld/3LO-Diagram.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/3LO-Diagram.png" alt="3LO Diagram" width="408" height="339"></p>
<p>Everything starts off when you first set up the Birthday Reminders app. It needs to acquire an Access Token in order to use Facebook’s ‘user’ API, so it contacts Facebook’s Authorisation Server. The Auth Server asks for your consent, but first it needs to make sure it’s you, so it will ask you to log in if you don’t already have an active session. With your consent granted, the Auth Server will generate an Access Token that Birthday Reminders can now use to access your data.</p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzgyMyw0Mzld/Flow-.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Flow-.png" alt="Flow "></p>
<p>However, there is an intermediate step which for simplicity, was not represented in the Foo Corp analogy and the diagram above. This OAuth 2.0 flow’s name actually comes from this step. Once it has your consent, the Auth Server actually sends Birthday Reminders an <strong>Authorisation Code</strong>, which Birthday Reminders sends straight back to the Auth Server along with its unique <strong>Client ID</strong> and <strong>Client Secret</strong>. Only then does the Auth Server generate and send the Access Token.</p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzc0MCw0NTld/Auth-Code.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Auth-Code.png" alt="Auth Code"></p>
<p>The Client ID is unique to Birthday Reminders, and the Client Secret is kept strictly confidential between the Client and the Auth Server. Used together, the ID and Secret allow the Auth Server to identify the Client as the Birthday Reminders app, which is important so that it doesn’t just hand out Access Tokens to anyone. It was the Facebook Auth Server which generated Birthday Reminders’ Client ID and Client Secret at the time when Birthday Reminders’ developers set up the app to work with Facebook.</p>
<p>Now when Birthday Reminders wants to retrieve your friends’ dates of birth, it shares its Access Token with the Resource Server, which grants it access to the ‘users’ API. It’s important to note that the Access Token only grants access to this specific API, so Birthday Reminders can’t start accessing your Facebook photos and timeline.</p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzYwMCw0MDFd/Data-Exchange.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Data-Exchange.png" alt="Data Exchange"></p>
<p>In OAuth 2.0, subsets of your data on the Resource Server that Clients can access are called <strong>Scopes</strong> (although Facebook calls them <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/permissions/reference/">Permissions</a>). Scopes could be individual APIs or collections of APIs, usually grouped together when they are related and serve a common purpose. The Scope of the access delegated to Birthday Reminders is Facebook’s ‘users’ API, and that API allows other data to be accessed by the app, such as the friends’ names.</p>
<p>OAuth 2.0’s Authorisation Code Grant flow addresses all of the drawbacks of Basic Auth in scenarios where you want to delegate your access to one app to another. Your credentials are safe as they are never shared with the app you’re delegating access to. Tokens expire and can be revoked, so even if a Token is stolen, the damage can be mitigated. Access to your data is enforced by the system rather than based on trust. And finally, the system enables a finer granularity of audit, as it records when specific data was accessed rather than just an account login event.</p>
<h4>Final Thoughts</h4>
<p>In this two-part blog series on OAuth 2.0, we’ve been discussing Authorisation, the mechanism that enables access delegation. This is not to be confused with Authentication, which is what the Authorisation Server does to verify your credentials and log you in. OAuth 2.0 is often used in conjunction with <a rel="noopener" href="https://openid.net/connect/" target="_blank">OpenID Connect</a> (OIDC), which extends the authority of OAuth 2.0 to introduce the element of Identity. Services such as “Sign in with Google” are using OAuth 2.0 and OIDC to allow you to log into Client applications with a pre-existing account created on another platform (e.g. Google). Clients use OIDC to retrieve information about you, the Resource Owner, from the Authorisation Server.</p>
<p>While OAuth 2.0 is widely adopted in the app world, e.g. apps like Birthday Reminders, it’s less prevalent in app integration platforms and solutions. Typically, these allow you to create integrations that rely on Basic Auth to act on your behalf.</p>
<p>Here at Adaptavist, we recognise the importance of securely implementing access delegation and we’ve been thinking of ways to address this problem in the Atlassian space and beyond. Many of our tools already harness the benefits of OAuth 2.0. For example, you can safely delegate your Jira access to our <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.searchmy.app" target="_blank">SearchMy</a> app to let it pull issues from your multiple Jira instances into Slack.</p>
<p>However, these tools serve a single purpose. We’re now working on a next generation of open-ended tools to let developers create custom Atlassian apps and integrations that support seamless identity mapping between different platforms and services, significantly facilitating multi-instance operations such as migrations. Keep an eye out across our channels for more news in the near future.</p>
<style> .datagrid table { border-collapse: collapse; text-align: left; width: 100%; } .datagrid {background: #fff; overflow: hidden; border: 1px solid #003366; -webkit-border-radius: 3px; -moz-border-radius: 3px; border-radius: 3px; }.datagrid table td, .datagrid table th { padding: 3px 10px; }.datagrid table thead th {background:-webkit-gradient( linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0.05, #003366), color-stop(1, #003366) );background:-moz-linear-gradient( center top, #003366 5%, #003366 100% );filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#003366', endColorstr='#003366');background-color:#003366; color:#FFFFFF; border-left: 1px solid #003366; } .datagrid table thead th:first-child { border: none; }.datagrid table tbody td { color: #00496B; border-left: 1px solid #E1EEF4;border-bottom: 1px solid #E1EEF4 }.datagrid table tbody td:first-child { border-left: none; }.datagrid table tbody tr:last-child td { border-bottom: none; } </style>

OAuth 2.0 and its vital role in application data security, explained simply (Part 2)

Part 2 of this series on enforcing security and granular permissions unpacks the analogy in more detail.

Measuring the success of a training is something that has long been discussed within the Learning and Development community and still remains a challenge. If you’re still having these discussions with key stakeholders, you might want to read on.

In this blog, I hope to clarify what training success really means.

“We need a training course”. Classic! This is the usual statement from a key stakeholder - someone like a Head of Department - that a person working in L&D receives. Likely people are not doing what we need them to do, perhaps with a tool or a process, or we need to help them consider things from a different perspective. Part of the problem with the statement above, is that they have jumped right to the solution (the delivery method) rather than actually defining the issue at hand. For some reason, it’s much easier for people to focus on the delivery method (i.e. a training course), rather than actually consider what the purpose of the learning is.


Are you tired of hearing “We need a training course”? L&D people, listen up!

This is a well-known challenge in the L&D industry and, luckily, we have some methodologies to help us. One I really like is the Kirkpatrick model of training evaluation. This model helps L&D professionals guide key stakeholders to clarify what they really want to achieve from a learning intervention.

What is your learning intervention achieving?

Level 1 is at the lowest level. It clarifies as to whether the trainees found the training engaging and relevant to the job they perform (e.g. ‘I enjoyed the training’). 

Level 2 is about understanding the level of learning achieved from the training. What skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours were learned (e.g. Agile methodologies).

Level 3 is about the ability to apply the new knowledge to their work to drive a change in behaviour (e.g. Apply methodology in the dev team’s work).

Level 4 is all about results. This is about achieving the previously defined outcomes that the learning intervention supported (e.g. Reducing support ticket closing time by 50%).

Here’s an example of the model in action. Let’s imagine my key stakeholder, the Head of Customer Service, wants to do some training on getting their team to use a new piece of software. We find a training course and deliver it to the appropriate participants. Going through the levels we are likely to have the following statements from the trainees:

Level 1 - “Very Good. Never boring and very relevant to my job”

Level 2 - “I learned some new tricks and tools in that software that I didn’t know before” 

Level 3 - “I can see immediately how some of those new approaches to using the software will massively speed up my efficiency”

Hopefully, you see the difference here. Level 1 is just basically asking, ‘did you enjoy the course?’ If it is a positive response that’s great, but it’s not necessarily helpful. It could be difficult for someone in L&D to justify the expense and time taken away from billable work by staff. Level 3 is much more like it; we can clearly see how the trainee not only learned something but also, they are going to take that into their daily work and make improvements for the better.  

So, what about Level 4? Ideally, the results set right at the start of the discussion with the Head of Customer service were along the lines of ‘we need to increase efficiency in my team by X% with the use of this software.’ Now with Level 3 successfully fulfilled, we can hopefully see this improvement not only in their skillset, but also in their work output and efficiency. 

Trophy (1).png

So many companies fall into the trap of only focusing on the training delivery method, rather than the results it can provide. Other traps are; how many people attended the training? How long does it take? How much will it cost? Don't get me wrong, those are all important factors. However, they are not what is going to make a huge difference to behaviours and growth of staff, and ultimately the business. 

Another key gap that needs to be addressed is the transfer of learning. This is how we help trainees take the learning from the course and actually apply it back in their workplace. Too many times (particularly with soft skills courses), you will speak to a trainee and ask them about the training they attended a few weeks back:

Trainee: “It was a great training session. Really good” (Note: Level 1 response) 

Colleague: “And what did you specifically learn from the course?” 

Trainee: “Ummm, lots of things” (Note: poor Level 2 response)

Colleague: “Have you put them into practice yet in your job? 

Trainee: “Well no, not yet.” (Note: very poor Level 3 response)

After a few weeks, the chances of this trainee applying the learning in their day-to-day work are very unlikely. So, our impact is merely Level 1 on the Kirkpatrick scale.

This is why the role of the employee’s manager here is critical. Bridging the gap between training and the trainee’s job is the main challenge here. The training plan must take into account how the learnings from the training will fit and be applied in their daily work. This doesn’t need to be overly complicated. The manager should support the request for ‘some training’ and determine what the overall development area is for the employee and consider many other possible delivery methods. 

Moreover, the delivery method here can make a massive difference. When dealing with training for software programs, an online course can be very beneficial. This is because an employee can learn the content and then immediately apply it in the software they have on their computer. The gap from completing a training course to applying the learning can be massively reduced. This can be made even more successful where an interactive online course is provided. This can provide a lab style environment where concepts, examples and activities can be completed by the trainee in the software whilst working through the course. But what if you could put the learning directly inside the software?  

 The quality of the training is the real difference

I’m proud to say that at Adaptavist the way we think about education in B2B is exactly that. For example, our Learn for Jira product is built as an application add-on that a Jira user can simply click to activate and then have access to the learning materials available for them to pick up a key concept and then apply it back in their work. When this is combined with a sandbox instance of Jira, learners know that they can ‘play’ and learn to understand the tools and concepts, increasing transfer to their daily jobs and learning further.  

 Learn for Jira - the innovative way to train

Defining results from learning interventions will always be a challenge, but if you are a Head of Department reading this, before you go to your L&D department and say ‘we need a training course’, try and clarify the change or result that you want to achieve. And also, have in mind, that when it comes to software training, there are lots of innovative ways for training tools coming into the market, making it easier to get actual results and behaviour change.

Find out how to add an innovative twist to your training, with a little help from our Learn for Jira app.

Calling all Confluence content creators! Content Formatting macros is now available for Confluence Cloud. It’s perfect for all users looking to create great looking, well structured and more engaging content. 

Confluence is a great tool that many teams use to plan, document and share important information, however, we can sometimes get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information we have to deal with and provide to others. This can lead to creating or documenting information in a way that doesn't engage as we envisaged.

This gif gives you all the proof you need. No one wants text-heavy, unstructured and hard to follow Confluence pages! Rather create noticeable content that is easy to read and consume by making the design more eye-catching, structuring the page so that it's easily navigable, or drawing attention to key information by adding an element to it.

Sound good? It gets better. What you see above is just a taste of what can be achieved with Content Formatting Macros. To discover more, let’s take a closer look at how you can use Content Formatting Macros to optimise your content on Confluence Cloud.

The Progress Bar Macro lets users create a user journey and provide visualisation for documented processes in Confluence. This could be an onboarding process for new employees created by the HR team or documenting an events plan that can be shared with the wider Marketing team.

The Tabs macro lets users break down those long, congested content pieces into easily digestible tabs. This makes your Confluence page cleaner and easier for the reader to follow and navigate. 

For example, when creating a marketing plan, many Confluence users tend to have all the information sequentially on a single page or they elect to create multiple child pages in an effort to break it down into relevant sections. With the Tabs macro, users get the best of both worlds. They can now have all the information on the page, but neatly segmented into relevant sections.

Give the reader more context by adding the Tooltip macro to any element on your page. The tooltip text is displayed as the user hovers over the tooltip indicator or clicks on it. It’s a great way of providing extra information to a specific part of your content, without over congestion.

4. Buttons macro and Buttons Group macros

The Buttons macro allows you to create a single stylised button, hyperlinked to other pages or websites. The Buttons Group macro is used in conjunction with the Buttons macro, allowing users to create a group of stylised hyperlink buttons in a toolbar-like display. This is a great way to draw attention to specific parts of your content that require the reader to navigate to an external site.

The Footnotes macro is a pair of macros that lets users reference and display extra or supplementary information within texts written in Confluence. This is particularly useful for users writing academic texts, journals or reports in Confluence.

The LaTex macro allows users to insert complex mathematical formulas directly in Confluence. Whether it’s inline or block formulas, they are easy to insert and are  presented neatly on the page.

And there you have it, a few macros to get you started. However, do keep an eye out as we’re always developing and adding additional powerful macros that will continue to provide further value to users. In the meantime, visit the Marketplace listing to start your free trial as a first step to creating awesome content in Confluence Cloud.

Make your content stand out with Content Formatting macros for Confluence Cloud

Use Content Formatting Macros for Confluence Cloud to make your pages stand out from the rest. Read the blog to find out how.

Create content that's superior to the rest on Confluence Cloud

Now available! Create great looking and engaging content in Confluence Cloud.

If there’s one thing the past year has highlighted, it's the power of partnerships. Everything is moving too fast and the challenges we face too great to go it alone. With this in mind, we wanted our first Partnership Sales Readiness Summit to be an opportunity to take a step back and recognise what we have collectively achieved by joining forces together.

Last week, we were thrilled to hold our first-ever virtual Partner Sales Readiness Summit, bringing together 60+ valued partners across 6 continents, and 31 countries. 

You could think of our Partner Sales Readiness Summit as a springboard into all the great things we are doing and planning together - all with the aim of helping our partners feel valued and empowered to succeed. 

Our first Summit kicked off with a high-energy and very warm welcome from our MC, Ryan Spilken, closely followed by a chat with our executive team on Adaptavist’s future strategy and Atlassian ecosystem trends. A few of the big hitting themes included:

Atlassian Cloud is the future for everyone 

Our CEO, Simon Haighton-Williams spoke on the growing trend of customers looking to move away from Server to Data Center and Cloud. He highlighted the need for our partner community to support customers on their migration journey to ensure they experience a ‘soft’ landing to their chosen platforms.

According to Adam Wignall, our Head of Product Management, the emergence of other complementary ecosystems to Atlassian opens up new possibilities for customers. Adaptavist is already exploring these ecosystems and our strategy in this space will continue to mature over the coming months. 

So what exactly happens at an Adaptavist Partner Readiness Summit?

Hot on the trail of our executive update, the wider Adaptavist team provided a more granular look into our product roadmap and plans for leading Apps including ScriptRunner, and Project Configurator. In addition, the team also delved into key insights around the launch of our new training platform, Learn for Jira, and integrations with the likes of Tempo software, Slack, and Trello, to name a few.

Success is all the sweeter when shared with our partners

Before information overload set in, proceedings moved swiftly on to the eagerly-awaited Partner Awards ceremony 2020!

As an organisation renowned for its fun social events, Adaptavist has a reputation to uphold. So, we didn’t let the fact that it was a virtual event get in the way of hosting our customary swag and cocktail/mocktail after-party festivities. 

With a sparkling spritz in hand, and from the comfort of our homes, we raised a toast to all our amazing partners. To recognise the impact they make not just to our business but to our culture and crucially, to our customers. 

Every partner is a winner in our eyes, but this year there are a few who deserve special recognition.

Congratulations to all our worthy 2020 winners!

Regional Partner of the year (Asia Pacific): DragonSoft Digital - DragonAgile

Regional Partner of the year (South America): e-Core

Regional Partner of the year (EMEA): Methoda

Regional Partner of the year (North America) Coyote Creek Consulting 

Top New Business Award: Seibert Media GmbH

In an increasingly complex and ever-changing world, no one person or organisation has all the answers. When we’re willing to embrace new partnerships, share our diverse expertise, and work together toward a common goal, the sky's the limit to what we can achieve.

We’re always keen to forge new partnerships with organisations as passionate about customers and technology as we are. Could you be what we’re looking for? 

Let’s chat today. https://www.adaptavist.com/partner-programme/channel-partners

Strong partnerships start with synergy, not similarity

Last week, we were thrilled to hold our first-ever virtual Partner Sales Readiness Summit, bringing together 60+ valued partners across 6 continents, and 31 countries. Read all about how it went here!

Celebrating the launch of our first-ever virtual Partner Summit

Success revolves around the power of our products & partners. See who won at our virtual partner summit. 

<h4><strong>We are proud to share with you that we have recently achieved Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) Gold partner level with Scaled Agile, Inc (SAI).</strong></h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">SAFe</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">®, the world’s leading framework for enterprise agility, supports organisations in their adoption of lean-agile values and principles at enterprise scale. Our Gold partner status in this partnership manifests our significant experience and commitment in helping enterprises as they embark on an agile transformation journey.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In today’s fiercely competitive business environment coupled with the new norm of social distancing and remote work, it’s more important than ever for enterprises to embrace digital transformation to become more agile, collaborative, and customer-centric. We are seeing increased adoption of agile and lean techniques across different industries as companies recognize the need to re-invent and drive innovation.  </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We understand and support these enterprises as they embark on their transformation journey by providing </span><a href="https://www.adaptavist.com/atlassian-consulting-services/scaled-agile-framework-for-enterprise/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">strategic advisory services</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">—often leveraging SAFe®. Our transformation services enable organizations to tailor their transformation journeys to meet their goals. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We help organizations focus on driving agile adoption incrementally and iteratively and support all aspects of DevOps implementation. We believe that becoming truly Agile requires much more than just tooling—it takes guidance, pragmatism and </span><a href="https://www.adaptavist.com/webinars/developing-an-agile-mindset/#:~:text=An%20agile%20mindset%20is%20the,disruptors%20that%20reshape%20entire%20industries."><span style="font-weight: 400;">a change in company culture</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Our SPC-certified practitioners deliver </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">SAFe® training and coaching, as well as agile at scale process transformations powered by a tried-and-tested best practice framework of flexible, integrated Atlassian tools.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are proud to become a Scaled Agile Gold Partner and look forward to helping companies </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">apply </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">SAFe® to help achieve agility and increased business value at scale.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you’re interested in learning more about our agile transformation services and capabilities, visit: </span><a href="https://www.adaptavist.com/atlassian-consulting-services/scaled-agile-framework-for-enterprise/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">https://www.adaptavist.com/atlassian-consulting-services/scaled-agile-framework-for-enterprise</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, or please</span><a href="https://www.adaptavist.com/contact/"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> feel free to get in touch</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>

Adaptavist becomes a Scaled Agile Gold Transformation Partner

We're proud to share that we have recently achieved Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) Gold partner level with Scaled Agile, Inc (SAI). Check out this blog for more details.

Our scaled agile gold transformation partner status cements our commitment to help enterprise digitally t...

<p style="text-align: center;"><a class="link--button link" href="/remotework">Get your copy now</a></p>
<h6 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Worried about what’s appropriate attire for a Zoom call or whether your chat message is considered rude? You are not alone! We're delighted to announce the release of our <a href="/remotework">Digital Etiquette report</a> surveying over 2800 workers across a wide range of industries to uncover the positives, and the pitfalls, of the sudden shift to remote work. </strong><br><br></span></h6>
<div class="p-rich_text_section">The transition to remote working brought about by COVID-19 has meant learning how to collaborate, iterate and offer feedback in new and not always natural ways. <br><br>For many organisations, that transition has involved a degree of scrambling to set up the tools and technologies to make remote communication possible. Board meetings have become zoom calls, feedback sessions have transitioned to Slack messages, and direction from your boss can now come in the form of a Jira ticket. <br><br>This new way of working raises many questions around how we should behave online. As Victoria Turk, author of a book on digital etiquette explains: </div>
<div class="indent border-left purple">
<p><em><span style="font-size: 1em; font-family: sans-serif;">All too often, good manners seem to dissolve in the glare of </span><span style="font-size: 1em; font-family: sans-serif;">a smartphone screen or the clicking of a keyboard. This isn’t (usually) out of any malice; the problem is that there’s very little consensus on what constitutes good conduct in the digital world. You might know your way around a dinner party, but how confident are you on the etiquette of WhatsApp groups?</span></em></p>
</div>
<h5 class="p-rich_text_section">So how are we coping with this new normal? </h5>
<div class="p-rich_text_section"><br>Our findings show most organisations have done a good job providing us with tools to maintain productivity and to keep communication flowing, but it’s still the wild west for how we use them.</div>
<div class="p-rich_text_section">In fact, 82% of respondents plan to work remotely in the future, but 2 out of 5 (38%) worry daily about how to communicate virtually – particularly the younger generation.<br><br></div>
<div class="p-rich_text_section"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzQ2MiwzOTVd/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-13.57.41.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-13.57.41.png" alt="Screenshot 2020 08 25 at 13.57.41" width="462" height="395"></div>
<div class="p-rich_text_section"><br>To make matters worse, a staggering 42% of people struggle with the expectation of being 'always on' when working remotely. <br><br><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzQ1OSwzNzJd/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-14.56.44.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-14.56.44.png" alt="Screenshot 2020 08 25 at 14.56.44" width="459" height="372"><br><br></div>
<h5 class="p-rich_text_section" style="text-align: center;"><a class="link--button link" href="/remotework">Get the report</a></h5>
<h5 class="p-rich_text_section"><br>Here are a few more of our key findings:<br> </h5>
<ul class="p-rich_text_list p-rich_text_list__bullet" data-stringify-type="unordered-list" data-indent="0"><li><strong>More communication tools, less training and less productivity. </strong> <br>The research highlighted that although 41% of us are actively engaged on over 4 platforms a day, 44% of us have never had any training on how to use them. <br><br>To compound this issue, workers admitted to spending 45 minutes a day searching for information they need to do their jobs. So for every team of 10 employees, organisations effectively lose the productivity of one entire employee a week due to the fact that they have to search for information<strong><span>. </span> <br></strong><br><strong><span><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzIxMiwyMzJd/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-12.03.01.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-12.03.01.png" alt="Screenshot 2020 08 25 at 12.03.01" width="212" height="232"><br></span></strong></li>
<li><strong>Digital communication angst highest amongst the young.</strong> While millennials are often seen as a digital friendly generation, 46% of millennial workers worry daily about how they communicate virtually (vs. just 22% of over 45s)<br><br><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzUxMCwyNzBd/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-13.57.54.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/Screenshot-2020-08-25-at-13.57.54.png" alt="Screenshot 2020 08 25 at 13.57.54" width="510" height="270"></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 1em;"><strong>Workers expect a high level of professionalism, even when at home.</strong> 58% of respondents believe taking a conference call from your bed is never acceptable. Additionally, one in ten under 35 year olds considers it utterly unacceptable for pets or children to appear on a video conference.</span><br><br></li>
</ul><div class="p-rich_text_section" style="text-align: left;"><span>Clearly the transition to remote work hasn't been plain sailing. Our report highlights that organisations that embrace digital transformation and work in an Agile way will be best placed to cope with what the future has in store. Interested in finding out more?<br><br>                                                      <a class="link--button link" href="/remotework">Download the report </a></span></div>

New report: Digital communication etiquette in the era of remote work

We surveyed over 2800 workers to discover the positives, and the pitfalls, of the sudden shift to remote work. Get the latest insights and download a copy of our Digital Etiquette report here.

As remote working increases, it’s affecting companies & their people. Find out how in this detailed repor...

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One area of agile project management that is proving difficult,  How do you appropriately set issue priorities and keep them up to date in Jira when everything is always changing?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this post we’ll look at a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) method for prioritising issues, called WSJF, and then we’ll dive into how to implement this dynamically in Jira using ScriptRunner’s Scripted Fields feature. A code snippet is included to help you get started.</span></p>
<h4><span style="font-weight: 400;">A holistic and agile approach to prioritising issues in Jira: the Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) method</span></h4>
<p>In agile teams that manage backlogs and releases continuously, it’s important to decide on a job sequence that maximises output value. Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is designed to prioritise the backlog jobs that provide the most value in the shortest time. This is done by determining:</p>
<ol><li>Cost of delay</li>
<li>Job duration (or size in some cases)</li>
</ol><p>These can then be divided together so that:</p>
<ul><li><strong>WSJF ranking = Cost of delay ÷ Job duration</strong></li>
</ul><p>Let’s think about this intuitively. If you have a job which really needs to be done, then the cost of delay is high, so WSJF ranks this highly in prioritisation. If that job is also a short one and can be done quickly, WSJF pushes it up further still in the priority ranking.</p>
<h5>How to calculate the cost of delay</h5>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If we list every factor that’s important in deciding an issue priority, we will probably come up with the following:</span></p>
<ol><li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Value to the customer</strong> <span style="font-weight: 400;">- how much will customers benefit from an issue being progressed? For example, a missing product feature may be consistently requested by customers.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Enablement value</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> - is an issue blocking progress towards other value-add features or technology? An example could be a bug preventing users achieving a task. </span></li>
<li><strong>Time criticality</strong> <span style="font-weight: 400;">-</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">does an issue need a quick resolution? An example might be an outage that requires urgent resolution</span></li>
</ol><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If an issue is delayed, these factors are put at risk. In other words, there is a cost to each of the above. For each issue, you can assign the factors a weighting that then makes calculating the cost of delay relatively straightforward:</span></p>
<ul><li><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Cost of delay</strong> = Value to the customer + Enablement value + Time criticality</span></li>
</ul><h5>How to determine the Job duration</h5>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you feel comfortable predicting the duration of issues, you can use this as the denominator in your WSJF calculation. Perhaps you have a conversion rate between story points and hours which you can use. But it is fair to say that a lot of organisations find it hard to predict exactly how long jobs will take as there are many factors at play. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this case, we can use a proxy that is much easier to estimate: the size of the issue. In most cases, as long as the team makeup is consistent, issue size is a good enough proxy for duration. The larger the issue size, the longer it will take to complete. What you use here is up to you and what you are most confident about. The key is to get a relative weighting between issues.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Following the WSJF method, your backlog becomes a continuous, dynamic and prioritised list of jobs adding incremental value, in the shortest time. Of course, the world is not a perfect equation and there’ll be times when an intervention is necessary. For example, a security vulnerability might crop up meaning that the typical backlog prioritisation is put to one side until a fix is deployed (even in this case you could argue that WSJF would rank these jobs highly because of their high cost of delay). But for normal day-to-day backlog prioritisation, WSJF provides a clear, logical and justifiable method for prioritising jobs.</span></p>
<h4><span style="font-weight: 400;">Using ScriptRunner to prioritise issues</span></h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As we alluded to earlier, Jira projects, epics and issues are constantly being updated by team members. This is the very reason why Jira is such a great tool, but it also means the backlog is constantly in a state of flux. Discrete prioritisation sessions only keep you up to date for so long. There needs to be a way to continuously update the priority ranking as and when things change elsewhere in your instance. Scripted Fields lets you do exactly this.</span></p>
<h5>What is the Scripted Fields feature?</h5>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://scriptrunner-docs.connect.adaptavist.com/jiracloud/scripted-fields.html">Scripted Fields</a> lets you show dynamically calculated information on the issue view. For example, let’s say you want to dynamically show the latest USD to GBP exchange rate on an issue. Using Scripted Fields, you can create a field on the issue view that is calculated with a script that pulls the rate from a public API. Every time you open the issue, the latest rate is pulled and shown right there. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Given what Scripted Fields is capable of, you can see how it is the ideal solution for WSJF prioritisation. There are three main steps to getting this setup on your instance:</span></p>
<ol><li><strong>Define your WSJF output format</strong> - what do you want to see when you click on an issue? You can go about this in a couple of ways:
<ul style="list-style-type: disc;"><li><strong>Rank</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> - you may want to rank every single issue: 1, 2, 3 etc. The advantage of this method is that it is decisive in setting the priority. On the other hand, this decisiveness might be too crude if some issues are extremely close in their WSJF ranking</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Categorisation</strong> - the alternative option is to create categories, for example from “Extremely Low” to “Urgent”, each of which corresponds to a WSJF range defined by you. This helps you to keep that human element, as all issues within a category need to ultimately be prioritised over one another by you. The difficulty with this method is knowing where to draw the boundaries for the categories; it might not be immediately obvious</span></li>
</ul></li>
<li><strong>Setup your Field in Scripted Fields</strong> - <span style="font-weight: 400;">now that you know your output format, you’ll know what option you’ll need to pick in Scripted Fields. If you’ve gone for the rank option, you’ll need the numeric field, if you’ve gone with the categories, you’ll need single line text<br><br></span></li>
<li><strong>Write your script - </strong>You know what you’re aiming for, so it’s time to implement the logic. Below is an example code snippet for ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud</li>
</ol><div class="alert-box alert-box--code-box">
<div class="alert-type">
<p>// ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud example<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.9em;"> </span></p>
</div>
<div id="" class="alert-text">
<div>
<div><span>// To retrieve a custom fields ID we have to hit the field REST API endpoint</span></div>
<div><span>// This will return a Map of field names to field ID's</span></div>
<div><span>def</span> <span>customFields</span><span> = get(</span><span>"/rest/api/2/field"</span><span>)</span></div>
<div><span>    .asObject(</span><span>List</span><span>)</span></div>
<div><span>    .body</span></div>
<br><div><span>// We've defined a closure here so we can pass in a custom field name and have it return its ID</span></div>
<div><span>// We use the ID to assign the fields value to a variable that we can then pass into our calculatePrioritizationCategory method</span></div>
<div><span>def</span> <span>getCustomFieldId</span><span> = { </span><span>name</span><span> -&gt; customFields.find { it.name == name }.id }</span></div>
<br><div><span>// Define a method to calculate the cost of delay (cod) using the wsjf formula and determine its category</span></div>
<div><span>// If a parameter hasn't got a value default it to 1</span></div>
<div><span>def</span> <span>calculatePrioritizationCategory</span><span>(</span><span>busValue</span><span> = </span><span>1</span><span>, </span><span>timeCritical</span><span> = </span><span>1</span><span>, </span><span>opportunityEnablement</span><span> = </span><span>1</span><span>, </span><span>jobDuration</span><span> = </span><span>1</span><span>) {</span></div>
<div><span>    // Calculate the cod based off the parameters passed in</span></div>
<div><span>    def</span><span> cod = (busValue + timeCritical + opportunityEnablement) / jobDuration</span></div>
<div><span>    // If the cod is weighted at less than or equal to 2.5 class it as low</span></div>
<div><span>    if</span><span>(cod &lt;= </span><span>2.5</span><span>) {</span></div>
<div><span>        return</span> <span>'Low'</span></div>
<div><span>    }</span></div>
<div><span>    // If the cod is weighted at greater than 2.5 and less than or equal to 5 class it as normal</span></div>
<div><span>    else</span> <span>if</span><span>(cod &lt;= </span><span>5</span><span>) {</span></div>
<div><span>        return</span> <span>'Normal'</span></div>
<div><span>    }</span></div>
<div><span>    // If the cod is weighted at greater than 5 and less than or equal to 7.5 class it as high</span></div>
<div><span>    else</span> <span>if</span><span>(cod &lt;= </span><span>7.5</span><span>) {</span></div>
<div><span>        return</span> <span>'High'</span></div>
<div><span>    }</span></div>
<div><span>    // If the cod is weighted at greater than 7.5 and less than or equal to 10 class it as urgent</span></div>
<div><span>    else</span> <span>if</span><span>(cod &lt;= </span><span>10</span><span>) {</span></div>
<div><span>        return</span> <span>'Urgent'</span></div>
<div><span>    }</span></div>
<div><span>}</span></div>
<br><div><span>// Pull the value from the issues business value custom field.</span></div>
<div><span>def</span> <span>busValue</span><span> = issue.fields[getCustomFieldId(</span><span>'Business Value'</span><span>)].value</span></div>
<br><div><span>// Pull the value from the issues time criticality custom field</span></div>
<div><span>def</span> <span>timeCritical</span><span> = issue.fields[getCustomFieldId(</span><span>'Time Criticality'</span><span>)].value</span></div>
<br><div><span>// Pull the value from the issues opportunity enablement custom field</span></div>
<div><span>def</span> <span>opportunityEnablement</span><span> = issue.fields[getCustomFieldId(</span><span>'Opportunity Enablement'</span><span>)].value</span></div>
<br><div><span>// Pull the value from the issues job duration custom field</span></div>
<div><span>def</span> <span>jobDuration</span><span> = issue.fields[getCustomFieldId(</span><span>'Job Duration'</span><span>)].value</span></div>
<br><div><span>// Call our calculation method passing in the values we've retrieved from our custom fields</span></div>
<div><span>return</span><span> calculatePrioritizationCategory(busValue, timeCritical, opportunityEnablement, jobDuration)</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>In this example, we've followed the categorisation method for the WSJF result. We've defined the category boundaries in our code. We've then extracted the value from the custom fields, calculated the WSJF rating and then categorised them according to this definition. The result will then show in the issue view in Jira.</p>
<h4><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keep your backlog under control with ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud</span></h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In our <a href="https://www.adaptavist.com/blog/sprint-planning-and-forecasting-in-jira-cloud-using-scriptrunner/">previous blog post we discussed how to forecast and plan sprints</a>. Prioritising issues is a key way of helping that agile process. It is critical to staying efficient and delivering the most effective results. But it’s a difficult task, especially with long, dynamic backlogs. Luckily the WSJF method, implemented using ScriptRunner for Jira’s Scripted Fields, lets any Product Manager or Jira Admin make sense of their backlog and make sure they’re focusing on the right actions at the right time.</span></p>
<p><a class="link--button link ss-broken" href="https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6820/scriptrunner-for-jira?hosting=cloud&amp;tab=overview"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Try ScriptRunner for Jira for FREE </span></a></p>
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How to prioritise issues in Jira using WSJF as Scripted Fields

In this post we’ll look at a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) method for prioritising issues, called WSJF, and then we’ll dive into how to implement this dynamically in Jira using ScriptRunner’s Scripted Fields feature. A code snippet is included to help you get started.

Even in Jira, issue prioritisation can be tricky. Employing WSJF & Scripted Fields can help overcome that...

<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a class="link--button link" href="/state-of-atlassian-report"> Get your copy now</a></span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We’re thrilled to share our first State of the Atlassian Ecosystem report. Our findings are based on the responses to a global survey we carried out recently of more than 700 users of Atlassian tools.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our report highlights how teams are leveraging the power of apps, customisation, and 3rd party integrations to boost their Atlassian capabilities. It also explores the adoption of key digital transformation trends across the ecosystem</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">— </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">from automation to Agile, and DevOps.</span></p>
<h4>So what did we discover?</h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Atlassian tools are supporting every aspect of modern business, with organisations keen to take advantage of all that the ecosystem can offer to boost agility and get work done.</span></p>
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<p><em>“It is evident that the Atlassian ecosystem is in good health - with a wealth of rich functionality, integrations, and deployment models available for organisations of any shape or size. As </em><em>businesses continue to transform, embrace agility and adopt more sophisticated ways of collaborating - it will be fascinating to see how these findings evolve in the future.”</em></p>
<p><em>Simon Haighton-Williams, CEO, Adaptavist</em></p>
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<p>Here are a few of our key takeaways:</p>
<p><span style="color: #7a7a7a; font-family: &#039;Museo Sans W01_700&#039;, sans-serif; font-size: 25px;">Atlassian tools are supporting every team and need</span></p>
<ul><li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The use of Atlassian tools is expanding beyond the technical community  - with 80 percent of workers saying at least one business team in their organisation uses Atlassian tools, and 92 percent of workers using at least two Atlassian tools.</span></li>
</ul><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzM1MSwxNzNd/p6-What-Teams-pie-charts-NEW.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/p6-What-Teams-pie-charts-NEW.png" alt="p6 What Teams pie charts NEW" width="351" height="173"></span></p>
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<p><em>"Atlassian applications are designed to work together and this brings great advantages to Vistaprint over and above the benefits of working with single applications.“<br>Patrik Fontana, Employee Technology Leader, vistaprint</em></p>
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<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Atlassian deployment: there’s no one-size-fits-all solution</span></h3>
<ul><li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Organisations are adopting a variety of deployment solutions to meet different business needs - the majority still use a Server deployment model (52 percent), 19 percent use Atlassian Cloud (SaaS), 11 percent use Data Center, and 9 percent use a hybrid hosting model.</span></li>
</ul><p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzYwMCwyNjld/p9-What-Atlassian-hosting-deployment-.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/p9-What-Atlassian-hosting-deployment-.png" alt="p9 What Atlassian hosting deployment " width="600" height="269"></p>
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<div class=""><em><span class="">"We are seeing a shift to Cloud at a strategic level by forward-looking CIOs. The inherent agility of Atlassian Cloud enables businesses to fast-track transformation and take advantage of on-demand scalability to drive growth”</span></em></div>
<div class=""><em><span class="">Daniel Stefanic, Head of Partnerships, Easy Agile</span></em><span> </span></div>
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<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Atlassian users crave more automation</span></h3>
<ul><li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">D</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">espite having access to an abundance of automation tools and capabilities, 78 percent of workers still want more automation capabilities across their Atlassian stack, and 96 percent believe automation will increase productivity.</span></li>
</ul><p> <img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzE0OCwyMDdd/p13-Automation-pie-1.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/p13-Automation-pie-1.png" alt="p13 Automation pie 1" width="148" height="207"><br> </p>
<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Atlassian ecosystem is enabling organisations to transform</span></h3>
<ul><li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agile and DevOps are now firmly established in the vast majority of businesses with 77 percent of respondents reporting to have implemented Agile within their organisation. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">And, 58 percent having a DevOps strategy in place.</span></li>
</ul><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzE4MSwxOTZd/p16-Agile-pie2.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/p16-Agile-pie2.png" alt="p16 Agile pie2" width="181" height="196"></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a class="link--button link" href="/state-of-atlassian-report">Download the full report here</a> <br><br></p>
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<p><em>"Truly successful and sustainable agile transformations only emerge when organisations take ownership of the methods and practices they use and make them their own. Agile then becomes part of your DNA.”</em></p>
<p><em>Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO &amp; Founder, Easy Agile</em></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 1em;">Want to get more out of the Atlassian ecosystem? </span><a style="font-size: 1em;" href="/contact">Let's chat</a><span style="font-size: 1em;">. </span></p>
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Introducing our first-ever State of the Atlassian Ecosystem report

For our State of the Atlassian Ecosystem report we surveyed more than 700 users of Atlassian tools to find out how they are leveraging the power of apps, customisation, and 3rd party integrations to boost their Atlassian capabilities. We also explore the adoption of key digital transformation trends across the ecosystem—from automation to Agile, and DevOps.

The Atlassian ecosystem is forever evolving. This report details how 700 customers are using its tools.

<p>Digital transformation expert, Adaptavist, was recently named an Atlassian Verified Government Partner. This distinction highlights Adaptavist’s leadership and expertise in helping public sector and government organisations maximise their investment in Atlassian technology with industry-leading apps and solutions. This includes a wide range of public sector entities in the US and UK across defence, aerospace, healthcare, transport, and federal agencies, and organisations such as BAE Systems, NASA, the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Department of State.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Adaptavist is delighted to receive this recognition from Atlassian,” says Simon Haighton-Williams, CEO of Adaptavist. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“In light of COVID-19, it’s more important than ever for government agencies and suppliers to embrace digital transformation projects to become more collaborative, customer-centric and agile. We understand the unique needs of public sector organisations, from </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">procurement to technical to security requirements.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We look forward to being part of the Atlassian Public Sector Partner Program and increasing our support for important government agency initiatives and our public sector footprint within North America.” <br></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The U.S. government is slated to spend <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.govtech.com/budget-finance/What-Will-State-and-Local-Government-Spend-on-IT-in-2020.html" target="_blank">an estimated $111 billion on IT this year</a> as public sector organisations invest in modernising legacy infrastructure, improving the citizen experience, increasing cybersecurity and enabling remote collaboration for essential government agencies.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As one of the largest Atlassian partners in the world, Adaptavist is uniquely positioned to help public sector organisations facilitate cross-department collaboration, improve productivity, and scale service offerings. Adaptavist has worked with government organisations to streamline Atlassian licensing, upgrade and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">migrate mission-critical tools and historical data, and provide expert consultancy with a focus on DevOps, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">continuous integration and delivery to ship software to citizen end-users, faster</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Adaptavist also helps governments deliver agile at scale using methodologies such as SAFe and tools like </span><a href="https://www.adaptavist.com/atlassian-consulting-services/jira-align/">Jira Align</a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><strong>About Atlassian Verified Government Partner Program</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Atlassian Verified Government Partner program is an initiative Atlassian created to support public sector clients as they have specific security, technical, and regulatory requirements. These solutions partners have gone through specialist training and  have the internal resources to meet the unique demands of government entities, including knowledge of the government contracting and funding process. </span></p>
<p><strong>About Adaptavist</strong></p>
<p>An Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner and Platinum Marketplace Vendor, Adaptavist offers expert agile consultancy, apps, training, managed services, and licensing solutions to more than half of the Fortune 500. We are uniquely placed to provide our experience, expertise, and insight to help your business.<span style="font-weight: 400;"><br><br></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a class="link--button link" href="/atlassian-consulting-services/authorised-us-government-solutions-partner">Find out more</a></p>

Press Release: Adaptavist Named Atlassian Verified Government Partner

Digital transformation expert, Adaptavist, was recently named an Atlassian Verified Government Partner. This distinction highlights Adaptavist’s leadership and expertise in helping public sector and government organisations maximise their investment in Atlassian technology with industry-leading apps and solutions.

This award means Adaptavist is better placed to help the public sector become more collaborative & agile....

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Can only a few of your team members</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> raise a ticket on Jira? Is it painful onboarding your new employees and getting them up to speed on how to use your Jira instance? Do you feel like despairing when you see a colleague randomly clicking buttons as they try to change the status of an issue?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Well, here's the thing, it doesn't have to be that way. Meet <a href="https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221348/learn-for-jira?hosting=server&amp;tab=overview">Learn for Jira</a>, the best way to get your people using Jira the way they should be. </span></p>
<h4><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learn Jira </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">in</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Jira! </span></h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learn for Jira is a native Jira Server and Data Center app that will meet any Jira training needs within your organisation. With a course catalogue that caters to any training level, you can find the most up-to-date training videos,</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> right where they should have been all along – inside Jira.  </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/wXOcIWe9UOg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Do you have new Jira users to onboard? The "Jira for Beginners" course will help your users not only understand what happens when they click a button, but also </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">when</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">why</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> they should click it, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">who</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> they should talk with, and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">what </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">needs to be considered as part of a configuration decision.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Do you need to upskill your existing teams? With Learn for Jira you can create a specific learning path for them that might include the "Jira for Power Users ", "Jira Software for Scrum" or "Jira Software for Kanban" courses.</span></p>
<h4><span style="font-weight: 400;">A bit of history</span></h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We believe that Atlassian tools help make people’s work easier, but you have to know how to use the tools properly. Figuring out how to use the tools can soon become your job instead of helping you do your job. Jira without training is an incomplete solution. However getting everyone trained can often be a scheduling and financial nightmare.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learn for Jira provides on-demand training at a price that works equally well for small teams and multinational organisations. Our priority is to help people work better together, so we have taken an agile and cost-effective approach both to developing this training and building this app to meet the needs of any organisation.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzYwMCwzMzhd/navigate-to-courses.gif" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/navigate-to-courses.gif" alt="navigate to courses" width="600" height="338"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sounds too good to be true? </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Well, we’re not done yet. Here are seven reasons why you should evaluate – and eventually buy – Learn for Jira now:</span></p>
<h4><span style="font-weight: 400;">1. Training from the best in the business</span></h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Being here and reading this blog post means you already know and trust Adaptavist.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> If not, you should know that</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Adaptavist is not only an Atlassian Platinum and Enterprise Solution Partner but also an Atlassian Authorised Training Partner. Our course creators and trainers have decades of experience within the Atlassian Ecosystem and have helped some of the most complex organisations to train their employees. </span></p>
<h4>2. The courses are engaging and always up to date </h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unlike other course options on the market, Learn for Jira courses are always up-to-date and continually refreshed. Our training videos are easy to digest and crafted to hold your user’s attention. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">You'll find animations, demonstrations, and best practices learned and developed from our work with over half of the Fortune 500.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And while we know that </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">eLearning has an average completion rate of 13% globally, Learn for Jira courses average a 64% completion rate! What can we say? People enjoy our content and find it to be both engaging and valuable.</span></p>
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<h5>"The [Adaptavist] team really understands Jira and Atlassian. They managed to deliver an incredibly engaging course which our team benefited greatly from..."</h5>
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<h5>Daisy Joan, Head of Training<span style="font-size: 1em; font-family: sans-serif;"> </span></h5>
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<h4>3. It’s easy to use at any level - literally any level</h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Users only need to type what they are looking for into the search bar and Learn for Jira's powerful search instantly</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">shows</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> you</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the information you need. Users have access to all courses across Atlassian and Adaptavist products, while the learning content works on any format and device in both video and text. </span></p>
<p><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/_resampled/ResizedImageWzYwMCwzMzhd/search-jql.gif" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/search-jql.gif" alt="search jql" width="600" height="338"></p>
<p>                                          <a class="link--button link" rel="noopener" href="https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221348/learn-for-jira?hosting=server&amp;tab=overview" target="_blank">Try for FREE now! </a></p>
<h4>4. In reports we trust </h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We know that reporting and monitoring your team’s training progress is essential. With our </span><a href="https://docs.adaptavist.com/learn/jira/server/latest/admin/team-reports.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Teams Reports</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> feature you can create teams using Jira groups, designate team leads, and view people’s progress or export progress data to CSV.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/team-reporting.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/team-reporting.png" alt="team reporting" width="512" height="228"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Users can also view their </span><a href="https://docs.adaptavist.com/learn/jira/server/latest/navigation-basics.html?utm_campaign=l4j_s-dc_announcement_l4j-1.1-update---customers_all_2020-05-21&amp;utm_source=hs_email&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_A1Njog1okaysoU_wFfffzEU_u5CkaQCvtUCPMN1uKCo9jq1AsBu5OQqjmGPe2jCC_Fkdp"><span style="font-weight: 400;">training progress</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and download certificates of completion! </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><img class="leftAlone js-zoom-image" title="" src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/certificate.png" data-zoom-src="https://static.adaptavistassets.com/assets/Uploads/certificate.png" alt="certificate" width="512" height="364"></span></p>
<h4>5. We're ambitious, just like our roadmap!  </h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The future looks bright. We have an ambitious roadmap including granular permissions management, the ability to edit courses and create custom learning paths, and you’ll also be able to add your own custom content to Learn for Jira.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And if you’re looking for something we don’t have, whether that’s a feature or comment, you can send that directly to Adaptavist through </span><a href="https://productsupport.adaptavist.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/38/create/262"><span style="font-weight: 400;">our customer support portal</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<h4>6. Real-world value for your money</h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learn for Jira provides training for enterprises at a fraction of the cost you would normally have to invest, especially if you compare to instructor-led training (ILT) or live training. Plus, it </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">lets people get the right training for their experience level while also providing an ongoing reference tool. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">You will reduce your onboarding costs and the time invested in training new employees. </span></p>
<h4>6 + 1. Jira is just the beginning </h4>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With Learn for Jira, your team can master not only Jira but other Atlassian platforms &amp; products. The collection now includes Confluence, Portfolio for Jira, ALM Works Structure, and Trello, with more training coming soon for all your beloved products! </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">J</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ira is here to help your teams work better together, but only if people know how to use it properly. Learn for Jira puts Adaptavist's expertise at your fingertips to get the help you need when you need it, and</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> upskill your way to Jira success!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a class="link--button link" rel="noopener" href="https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221348/learn-for-jira?hosting=server&amp;tab=overview" target="_blank"> Try for FREE now! </a></p>
<p><br><br></p>

6 + 1 reasons you should choose Learn for Jira now

Are you wasting precious time getting your team up and running on Jira? Take the pain out of onboarding and upskilling your team with Learn for Jira. The best way to get your people using Jira they way they should.

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