Transcript: The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast Ep. 113 - All's Quiet On The Atlassian Front

Ryan Spilken: Hello and welcome everyone to Adaptavist Live, the Atlassian Ecosystem podcast. This is episode 113, All's quiet on the Atlassian front. I'm your host, Ryan Spilken and joining me today are Brenda Burrell and our favorite guest host, Danny Coleman. Brenda, Danny, hi.

Brenda Burrell: Hello.

Danny Coleman: Heidy-ho, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Spilken: So glad to have you back, Danny. Matthew has decided to take a vacation. Who approved that?

Brenda Burrell: He's not actually on vacation, he's doing a great deal of home improvement stuff and that is not what I consider a vacation, but I hope that he finds it restful and relaxing.

Ryan Spilken: Oh, you know he's enjoying himself.

Brenda Burrell: Oh, he is having a ball.

Ryan Spilken: All right. Well let's get started with a relatively light load of Atlassian news in the past couple of weeks. And we'll begin as we always do in the Atlassian Cloud. Beginning with the Jira platform, most of the changes are to the roadmapping function. First, we start with selective scheduling where along with helping create an entire plan, you can now tell the auto-scheduler to only schedule specific issues. Instructions for this will be found in our show notes. Atlassian has also enabled deployments for all projects with SCM data. So when you have a source code management tool integrated with your Jira project, the deployments feature will be enabled to give you visibility into your deployment pipelines against issues over a timescale. In the project management space, you are now able to create and schedule future sprints. You can now create the sprint and pencil in the start and end dates. The key quote from Atlassian, "Your future self will thank you later."

Brenda Burrell: Tenses there made my head hurt a little bit.

Ryan Spilken: And in the Jira roadmap, you're now able to drag and drop story level issues. So you can just rearrange story-level issues directly in the roadmap, grab the issue, drag it and drop it. You can adjust the issue's rank in its current epic or move it to a new one. List this one under tricks to make Jira roadmap maintenance. A total breeze. In Jira service management cloud, they're rolling out a feature to manage and edit portal groups and request types faster, where you can now add request types to portal groups directly from the request types page and see which portal groups and issue types your request types are in at a glance with new, additional columns. They've also added new filters to the request types page so that you can filter your request types by keyword, issue type, or portal group. And lastly for the cloud updates this week, we've got confluence, confluence, confluence. We are able to view pages in your space differently. You now have more options for how you view the pages in a space. You can see those options by clicking on the three-dot menu. Does that have a name, the three-dot menu?

Brenda Burrell: I'm pretty sure it's the three-dot menu.

Ryan Spilken: Danny?

Danny Coleman: I've heard it called an ellipses menu.

Ryan Spilken: Well, using the ellipses or three-dot menu next to pages in the space sidebar will give you access to change how you view pages in a space, including options to change space views by last updated or alphabetically by title, and that change will persist in a space until you change it. Wow, do I wish I had access to that feature for my personal space.

All right, the table of contents macro will now include elements in the heading. So now when you put an emoji in your chapter one, it's going to show up in the table of contents. That also includes mentioned statuses or dates. And finally, you can easily sort templates before selecting the right one. It's template sorting when you go to create a page and it's brilliant. To select the right template to create your content in, they've added a sort by selector, so this will allow you to browse templates confluence recommends based on your usage or sort the templates alphabetically, another nice improvement.

Brenda Burrell: Can I just say real quick that the thought of emojis in heading texts, I mean, I'm all for flexibility and having a little fun, but please don't put emojis in heading text. I'm just thinking of the table of contents.

Ryan Spilken: But now the table of contents will allow you to put an emoji in the ...

Ryan Spilken: They were so busy being preoccupied with whether they could do it, that they failed to stop and think if they should.

Brenda Burrell: I've said my peace.

Danny Coleman: Please don't give Brenda a sad. And on top of all of that, and you're going to start seeing a lot more visualization within confluence in general. And it's a nice improvement just to make confluence a lot more readable, a lot more pleasurable to use. You'll see more emojis. You can add page cover images. Hey emojis, some people like the emojis. I don't know. Sorry, Brenda.

Ryan Spilken: They communicate a lot.

Brenda Burrell: Okay.

Danny Coleman: You can customize space avatars, really just kind of make it a more visually appealing experience. On top of that they've also added smart links, which make it even easier to display external content in confluence. So when you link to something like YouTube or Trello, what's going to happen is you'll see that content in its native format within confluence. So that's a nice feature.

A couple more little features that they've recently added is you can schedule publishing. Yeah, so now that you can schedule publishing, you can just kind of write up your content and schedule out when you want that to go live. That's a pretty big feature that is very popular in the social media world, especially with social media managers. Because who's actually writing and publishing in real-time? Nobody. You're creating your content and then you're scheduling when you want it to go out so that it gets to the right people at the right time with maximum peak, what am I trying to say?

Ryan Spilken: Influence ability.

Danny Coleman: Yeah. So you can influence the most people at peak engagement times. So confluence now helping you reach your audience. And finally, they've added the ability to allow you to convert pages in confluence to blogs, just a slightly different type of content in confluence, but they function a little bit differently. So if you're writing your content up as a page, then you can easily convert it to a blog for pushing out there. So again, we're starting to see confluence focus a little bit more on the interactive nature of content for external consumption, which is interesting.

Ryan Spilken: I think this is good. One of the things that's on the Atlassian Cloud roadmap is external collaboration in confluence. All signs point to yes.

Danny Coleman: Indeed, and then getting away from confluence and talking about Jira, Atlassian has launched an early access program for cloud to cloud migrations. This is only for customers and users who want to migrate projects in a Jira software classic or Jira core project from one instance to another. And ideally, for those looking to do it in April, May of 2021, it's pretty short-term. Once you sign up, you'll have access to technical support from Atlassian documentation about the migration and the feature itself. So when you migrate projects that will include issues, attachments, related configurations, and users from the target site to the source site. So this is a really interesting opportunity, one to get help with any migrations you might be trying to perform, but also to help provide Atlassian feedback, because that's sort of what early access programs are about is getting in there, helping Atlassian get real data about how these tools use and giving them the feedback.

So as part of this, if you sign up, they'll want to know whether the experience worked for you, bugs or issues you ran into, documentation or information you wish you may have had what was helpful, what worked, what didn't, any performance issues, that kind of thing. So just know if you're signing up. It's kind of a, almost a conversation. It's not just like, "Here's the thing, give it to me," but they'll want something back in return, and that's fair, I think. And as an early access program, I think we can reasonably assume that this is something that's going to continue to be built out and improved upon with time and we'll make sure that we give you those updates as we hear more about them.

Brenda Burrell: Bringing everything out of the clouds and back down to earth, not just a ton of information for DC server, nothing in fact for Jira and confluence, but we do have some updates for Bitbucket. Bitbucket data center and server 7.11.1 release available March 10th. Some small ease of use features, the big one that they're highlighting is being able to see all of your Jira issues on the dashboard. They call it your Jira issues in the text, the gif says your work. But it's a section where you can see issues that are assigned to you most recently updated ones at the top. You can open up details of the issue from the issue key, and you can create a branch directly from the actions menu. So just get right to work from this dashboard. I like stuff like this, dashboards that bring all of your, well, this is what I need to be worried about. This is near and dear to my heart. So it's a lovely little update.

A few bug fixes, things like if you submit a pull request with the title empty, which why would you do that? But if you did that, the reviewers would disappear. That's been resolved to allow the SSH port to listen only on local hosts. Some small, again, ease of use updates.

Moving on, some updates to Bitbucket pipelines, you are now able to talk to third-party applications without an access token or secret. In fact, you no longer need to store your secrets in Bitbucket pipelines, which is where I keep all of my secrets. Don't tell anybody. So what they're doing is they're using what's called open ID connect, and you create that token and Bitbucket pipelines and you can use that to talk to any third-party application that also uses it or supports it. So traditionally you would add a secret in as a variable using your pipeline step to talk to whatever the external resource is. They're easy to get started with, but managing them over time can be a huge challenge. If you've got multiple applications, if something goes wrong in a script, it could potentially be compromised. And so with open ID connect, it just makes it easier to manage. You have granular access based on your deployment environment, branch, et cetera. So there's some information on how to set this up and quite a bit in the blog post that we will link to in the show notes. So if you are a Bitbucket pipelines developer and you're using secrets, take a look at this open ID connect stuff. It's pretty slick.

And then one more update in the Bitbucket space, particularly for Android developers, there's an Android template in Bitbucket pipelines, helping you to automate building and testing your Android projects. And a Docker container using Gradle as the build tool. So it's a pretty specific environment that they've built this template for. But there is a template code that you can access from this blog post, and it walks you through how it's structured, what the prereqs are, how to build the project, lots of pictures and code samples, and things like that. So if you are an Android developer using Bitbucket pipelines, building and testing in Doc, or using Gradle, there is a new template for you. Again, we'll have the link to this in the show notes. So feel free to pop over there and take a look at this. It could be highly useful.

Ryan Spilken: Atlassian has announced the end of support for live plans, the legacy interface and advanced roadmaps. For the cloud on July 31st, 2021, Atlassian will end support for the live, the legacy live plans interface, and advanced roadmaps. And if you are on advanced roadmaps for server or data center, live plans will be removed from the next major update, though the exact date is not yet known. As soon as we hear, of course, dear listeners, viewers, we will pass it along.

Now, you might be wondering, "Well, how am I going to see my plans?" Well, your plan will not go away, only your legacy view. You will be forced into using the new view, which Atlassian really thinks is going to be a better experience for you in the long run. They do implore you to keep in mind that advanced roadmaps is still a sandbox environment, so none of the changes you're making in your timeline will be committed to your plan until you select the blue button. So you have the grace to play with the new interface and get familiar before committing any of your changes back to the plan. But the old interface is going away.

Brenda Burrell: So a mix of new, a mix of old, a mix of going away. As we said at the beginning, kind of a quiet episode. We sort of expect the news to be a bit of a trickle, essentially until Team 2021 happens. We suspect a lot of stuff is being sort of held back to be announced at Team, and we see this every year. So we will as always dear readers, listeners, viewers, be posting information as we see it. Our episodes may be a little bit shorter for a while and then be prepared for lots of news and lots of views from us following Team.

That's really it for today. So I'll go ahead and just say thank you again to Danny for being the best guest host we could ask for.

Ryan Spilken: The best guest in the west.

Brenda Burrell: Best guest in the west.

Danny Coleman: Aww, shucks. Southwest, technically, but I'll take it.

Brenda Burrell: Southwest. So Danny, thank you for being here. Ryan, you're obligated, so you don't get any thanks, but it is a pleasure as always to spend time with the two of you. Matthew, hope your home improvement projects are going fantastically well. As always, we will be posting links to everything we've talked about in the show notes. You can reach us on social at Adaptavist Live on your social media platform of choice. And thanks for hanging out with us today. We look forward to chatting more in a couple of weeks. On behalf of Danny Coleman and Ryan Spilken, I'm Brenda Burrell signing us off for episode 113.