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News and updates on Atlassian's cloud and on-Premise tools as well as an invitation to App Day and Team 22

Transcript

Ryan Spilken:

Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 139 of the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast: Atlassian Stands With Ukraine and I say for myself, Ryan Spilken, and my co-hosts Brenda Burrell and Matthew Stublefield, that for whatever it's worth, so do we.

Matthew Stublefield:

As our viewers at home may have guessed, it probably doesn't mean a whole lot. I don't think Putin really cares a lot about our podcast, but you know what? He's got another thing coming.

Ryan Spilken:

It's the least we could... What else can we do? We are really just playing Yahtzee while they're over there playing Risk with human lives, and it's just a totally different ball game.

Matthew Stublefield:

It's heartbreaking. Even my initial response of what can I say, thoughts and prayers? I mean it as much as I can possibly mean it. If somehow you're out in the world and have been looking for something to do, there are lots of ways that you can support the Ukrainian people. There are lots of ways that you can donate. There may be local volunteer events going on. Adaptavist is part of the Pledge 1% Program, and we have had employees who have leveraged their 1% time to go work at donation sorting locations and events and things like that. So, we're all humans on this big blue marble, right? Let's do what we can to take care of each other. And I, for one, am really pleased that Atlassian has taken the stand that they have, and we'll be linking to their blog post about it.

Matthew Stublefield:

There's a lot of questions that are raised that we unfortunately can't answer for you around the impact on Russian organizations and their Atlassian licenses. So this is something that we are kind of preparing for internally. We know, as hopefully all of you do, it's not like every Russian citizen and company supports the invasion of Ukraine.

Ryan Spilken:

It's so important to remember.

Matthew Stublefield:

But their leaders have made this unfortunate decision and put a lot of innocent people on both sides experiencing impacts as a result. And so we're doing what we can, right? Atlassian's doing what they can. I think it's important to send this type of signal to tyrants. So yeah, we'll link to Atlassian's blog post about it, and then talk about what else Atlassian is doing as they continue to build out their cloud products.

Brenda Burrell:

It's hard to just jump into cloud news after that. Thank you, Matthew, for so eloquently putting into words what I was struggling to articulate myself. But the unfortunate truth is that some stuff continues. And so here we are with cloud updates, starting with the Jira platform, advanced roadmaps for JIRA now allows you to export aesthetic screenshot or PNG of your plan. So when you're presenting your roadmap to stakeholders and colleagues, you can now quote the beloved Nickelback. Is it Atlassian? I have questions. Oh. And say, "look at this photograph." That's right. You can now export a screenshot of your plan and advanced roadmaps using the export to an image function. To use it, set your timeline to show the issues you want to include in your screenshot, then use share as, and then image.png.

Ryan Spilken:

If you're a Mac user, may I recommend: Shift+Command+3 and/or Shift+Command+4?

Brenda Burrell:

Or the screenshot tool of your choice.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah.

Matthew Stublefield:

Yeah.

Brenda Burrell:

But it's now built in.

Matthew Stublefield:

I live that Shift+Command+4 life. That's a constant that's muscle memory at this point. But-

Ryan Spilken:

Right.

Matthew Stublefield:

I digress, let's talk a bit about Jira software, where you can now view deployment information on the release page. So provided you have integrated a CI/CD tool, which, in cloud terms, you know, might be Bitbucket, but it might just as well be GitHub, or something else. If you've got that integrated with your Jira site and your team is including issue keys in the branch names, commit messages and poll requests, you'll now see information about the deployments on the release page. So we talked about this a podcast or two ago, there was like one little bit of information. Now it sounds like it's just expanding out to the range of information that you can see. And there is now a new column labeled, 'Deployments' that will show an icon to indicate whether an issue has been deployed successfully, and a label to tell you what environment's been deployed to, which I particularly like, I don't recall seeing the environment in other, Atlassian tools before, but I think that's really a cool thing to add here.

Ryan Spilken:

JiraService Management changes the way you add stakeholders directly from the issue view. Now you are able to view the number of stakeholders inside an incidents issue view. Selecting the stakeholders option will allow you to view and add more people. The question is why doesn't, why isn't a stakeholders field, like a standard field on things. It seems like any kind of work always involves some kind of...

Matthew Stublefield:

Oh,

Ryan Spilken:

Maybe I'm...

Matthew Stublefield:

Oh, so like why is this in Jira Service Management and not in JIRA Work Management, is that the question?

Ryan Spilken:

Or just on the Jira platform in general. A stakeholders field seems like a smart addition across the board.

Brenda Burrell:

Atlassian take note.

Matthew Stublefield:

I mean, I kind of disagree. If you have a story for a feature where there's a bug or something, generally, this is for software development and it's tied in with our CI/CD tool. So we can see what environment we're deploying to. That's not a place where you typically need stakeholders. And if you do, then that's probably a different issue type. It's a different place in the project. You're your product owner or product manager ought to really be protecting you from stakeholders coming in and commenting on your tickets. But for Service Management, that absolutely makes sense. Because usually there is more than one person involved in an incident or, needing some type of service.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah, I guess in my communication/marketing world, it makes a lot of sense to have stakeholders on everything. But...

Matthew Stublefield:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ryan Spilken:

And for customers, using Jira Service Management portals, they are now able to download attachments directly from email notifications. So project admins can choose how customers access attachments from email notifications for security purposes. Whether they need portal authentications to download the attachment from an email, is now in your hands.

Brenda Burrell:

Over in Confluence Cloud, you get a personal space, and you get a personal space, and you get a personal space. A personal space in Confluence is a place of your own to jot down new ideas, introduce yourself to your team, keep track of tasks, store important items, or files, polish content before sharing with others, and more. You can choose to leave the space open for others to visit and collaborate, or you can restrict the pages so that no one else can see them. If you don't already have a personal space, one will be created for you after you've logged in and viewed a page.

Matthew Stublefield:

Canny listeners of this podcast may recall that we spoke about this a few months ago, and the massive community backlash of admins who said giving to every user under the set personal space was a horrible wretched idea. If you are an admin who is likewise horrified by the concept of thousands, or tens of thousands, of people suddenly have personal spaces that now show up in your search results, we've got a bargain for you. In a new version of Scriptrunner for Jira Cloud, which if you're on Cloud, of course you have the new version. It's cloudy that way. We've got a method for cleaning up personal spaces, and, for a limited time only, maybe we can add a link to the show notes about it, and help you out there. I know it's not really limited time. Ryan's giving this look over Zoom of like, 'What are you talking about?'...

Ryan Spilken:

Is the link limited time? Or is the, do we...

Matthew Stublefield:

Yeah.

Ryan Spilken:

No...

Matthew Stublefield:

Go on.

Ryan Spilken:

It will be there until the end of time.

Brenda Burrell:

To be fair...

Matthew Stublefield:

For the rest of all time.

Ryan Spilken:

Until the end of the internet

Brenda Burrell:

Ryan looking befuddled is sort of Ryan's standard state of being.

Ryan Spilken:

It is my resting face.

Matthew Stublefield:

It is.

Brenda Burrell:

Resting befuddled face.

Matthew Stublefield:

So, if you have Scriptrunner for Jira Cloud, or if you don't and you want to check it out, we, likewise didn't want the massive personal space sprawl and built a way to deal with that. So, we'll give you a link.

Matthew Stublefield:

For On-Prem, this is overall, a pretty lightweight podcast - two week period, not a lot of notes and releases. 7.16.2 for Confluence is out. It is a bug-fixed release with 11 bugs fixed. Some of this has to do with, if you've connected Jira Cloud with Confluence On-Prem, fixing some stuff there, being able to write from one to the other, or kick off something in the other, some things related to attachments and styling, little team counter one. So take a look at the release notes. If it's part of your regular update cycle, it make sense to do it. If you're not experiencing any of these problems, there may not be anything here that compels you to work extra this weekend and get this update out. But we'll link to this in the show notes as well.

Brenda Burrell:

Over in the world of Bitbucket, Atlassian announces Bitbucket Data Center 7.21 Long Term Support Release as of March 2nd, 2022. It's been about five months since the last long term support release, which was 7.17. You can now view deployment information in Bitbucket, create HTTP access tokens for teams working on specific projects and repos that aren't fixed to user accounts, exclude projects from the data pipeline, make your integrations more secure with OAuth2.0. I think we talked about all of these over the course of previous podcasts. So there's roughly 50 issues resolved since 7.17. There is a link to a long term support release change log. So if you are going from long term support release to long term support release, there's quite a few issues that have been resolved. So 7.21 includes support for open search as a search server for Bitbucket, it provides better preparation for upgrading to Bitbucket 8.0. As previously announced, 7.21 is the last release that supports Bitbucket hosting on Windows.

Brenda Burrell:

So if you are hosting on Windows, you will need to migrate. There is a guide available for that migration if you need it. If you are upgrading to 8.0 and using the H2 database, you'll have to migrate the on-disk database file from a page store format to MV store format, there will be instructions on how to do this available with the Bitbucket 8.0 release. Bitbucket 8.0, will no longer support elastic search 5.X, 6.X, or versions lower than 7.10.2.. If you are running an external search server, you will need to use a supported version of Elastic Search, which is 7.10.2 or higher, or Open Search 1.2.4 or higher with Bitbucket 8.0. If you need to upgrade your search server, this can be done before your upgrade.

Brenda Burrell:

In addition, Atlassian are deprecating legacy hook scripts stored in the hooks/pre-receive.d or hooks/post-receive.d directories inside the Git repos. Existing Java, API, and SPI for hooks and hooks scripts used by add-ons are not changing. Atlassian will provide a guide to help you migrate your legacy hooks scripts to a replacement mechanism that is currently under development. 8.0 will require Git2.31 or higher. You don't need to wait for 8.0 to upgrade Git as 7.21 supports up to Git2.35. So there is an upgrade guide. There is a change log of some issues resolved specifically for 7.21. As always with the long term support release, that's generally a go ahead and update. So if you are running Bitbucket Data Center or Server, take a look at 7.21 Long Term Support Release and get ready to upgrade.

Matthew Stublefield:

So, Ryan, last year we were seeing a ton of updates from the Bitbucket Cloud team. Just like rapid fire, one after the other. We've had some stuff for On-Prem this year, but it really seems like Bitbucket Cloud has gone, after their massive re-architecture project, that they wrapped up at the end of last year. You're the one who pulls together all of our updates for us to look at. What's your read on that? What's going on with Bitbucket Cloud these days?

Ryan Spilken:

Well, that's an interesting question. Thank you for thinking I know what I'm talking about. What I have noticed is several updates to the cloud roadmap. And so I think it's the calm before the storm. There are plans to add some big functionality to Bitbucket in the roadmap. This is actually really nice. The work that they've done on the roadmap page...

Matthew Stublefield:

It is.

Ryan Spilken:

Like superb.

Matthew Stublefield:

It is really good.

Ryan Spilken:

The one that really tickled my fancy was that they're working on dropping MacOS build support into Bitbucket pipelines, multi-step deployments, which I've heard the Dev-Ops teams talking about, pipeline runners, which is also coming to Bitbucket, Windows builds as well. They're going to drop some stuff this year that's going to make people very happy. That's my take.

Matthew Stublefield:

Yeah. And there's a good number of these that are saying, 'Coming Soon Q1 22', going to have to be real soon. It seems only been quiet for a while, but you're good to draw our attention back to the roadmap and see what's coming up next.

Brenda Burrell:

And if you want to provide feedback to the Bitbucket team, the method for providing suggestions for new Bitbucket features will be changing as of May 1st, 2022. Instead of creating a suggestion on the Bitbucket Cloud Project, B Cloud on jira.atlassian.com, you will be using a 'Give Feedback' feature, and from that, Atlassian will determine if it needs to be created, and they will create that suggestion on your behalf. So ideas collected via this feedback channel will be reviewed and may appear as new suggestions in the B Cloud Project where you can watch, vote, and comment. We will link to this update post. It links to the roadmap, which shows what's already planned out over the next few quarters. So just be aware if you are wanting to provide feedback on Bitbucket, the methodology for doing that changes as of May 1st, 2022.

Matthew Stublefield:

And what would a March podcast be without referencing Team 22, which is coming up fast in our front wind screen. Atlassian Team 22 kicks off starting April 5th, digitally, April 6th. So you can join in person or online. We will link to the Atlassian event page so you can sign up for that. I also want to highlight, as we did last episode, on April 5th, Adaptavist in partnership with Appfire, SmartBear, and Tempo is hosting App Day 22. Our partners and different companies in the ecosystem will be coming together to share how we're preparing to address changing user demands, meaning the future business transformation needs, and likely some opportunities for you to connect directly with people from our companies to ask whatever burning questions you might have. Of course, you'll be able to find people in the booths later in the week, but April 5th, sign up for App Day if you're going to be in Vegas. And we hope to see you there at the Venetian Expo.

Ryan Spilken:

And that's it for this episode of the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. Thank you all listeners for joining us today. As Matthew mentioned earlier, it's a tough time out there. Look after your people. Look after yourselves. And look in on us on social media, @adaptavist any time you feel like. For Brenda Burrell and Matthew Stublefield, I'm Ryan Spilken. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast, part of the Adaptavist live network of shows.