Atlassian runs a number of events throughout the year—High Velocity (for ITSM), Unleash (for product development), and other trade shows, but Team is Atlassian’s headline event, bringing together Marketplace App vendors, ACE leaders, Solution Partners, and of course, thousands of customers. We come together to swap stories, attend sessions, find out what exciting product announcements Atlassian will make, and attend a party or two.
The event took place in Las Vegas as it has done historically; in case you didn’t make it, or perhaps you did but had to have a lie-in for “reasons” we don’t need to go into, you can stream the presentations on-demand.
The Eficode team all lined up in yellow at Atlassian Team '24.
Atlassian Team '24 announcements
There were so many product announcements this year that I can’t mention them all, but do recommend you watch the keynote. What I’ll endeavor to do in this blog post is give you the briefest summary of the announcements that caught my attention that I think are worth mentioning.
The merging of Jira’s
First up, and possibly most important, is that Jira Work Management (JWM) and Jira Software (JSW) are being combined into a single product called Jira. This fixes a number of challenges that customers have, such as JSW users wanting the calendar or list views or JWM users wanting JSW features such as “Releases” to track project milestones. Put simply, this change simplifies everyone’s lives; there will only be one Jira license to manage, and when configuring a project, choose the features you want to use.
System of work
This next headline is a bit more nuanced; rather than a feature or product, Atlassian announced that they are repositioning their products as a platform for enterprises and businesses to conduct their work.
Atlassian sees its platform as the central nervous system for an organization to track work, collaborate, and perform strategic planning. Ecosystems such as Google, Microsoft, and other tools integrate tightly, forming a single organism that seamlessly works together in an efficient way. They’ve made a great start with this already, with smart links and other integrations, but their future plans (see Rovo below) are where it really gets exciting.
30 new Atlassian Intelligence capabilities
You won’t win any prizes for guessing that there would be a ton of announcements about artificial intelligence (AI) at Team this year; 30 new AI capabilities were announced across the platform. A couple of my favorites are the ability to automatically create sub-tasks from the description of an Issue or to expand the content in a product description Confluence page based on bullet points. AI continues to be big news in the industry, and these tools built into the platform provide massive productivity benefits for users.
Optic + Compass
Just before Team ’24, Atlassian announced the acquisition of Optic; this tool provides API documentation capabilities to Compass, ensuring your component or service APIs are properly documented, helping prevent drift between the code and the documentation.
Compass has already had a successful launch, with many thousands of customers benefiting from its capabilities; this new addition will fill a much-needed gap in its functionality.
Find anything with Unified Search
Locating information is getting harder. Be it on a Confluence page, ticket, comment, or somewhere else, many hours are wasted searching for something you need. Atlassian Unified Search is now cross-product, making it so much easier to find what you are looking for.
Atlassian University for everyone
Is now available for free—how cool is that?
Introducing a brand new product: Rovo
Rovo was the surprise product announcement that Atlassian kept till last; this powerful AI-powered engine will create a large language model for your organization, pulling in data from multiple sources, the Atlassian platform, Google or Microsoft documents, Slack or Teams, and other sources.
You can ask Rovo questions, which will then search through its model to return knowledge. If you’ve played with ChatGPT or other similar tools, this ability to return knowledge from data will be familiar to you.
On top of that, Rovo will have virtual agents (think of these as extensions to your team). You can ask them to perform actions, such as checking a document against brand guidelines, or removing feature flags from code. The potential for this product is massive, and will doubtless provide incredible efficiency gains for users. I can’t wait for it to become available.
The event sessions you cannot miss
As usual, there were many interesting and informative sessions for delegates to choose from, and now available to stream, my favorites were “Unleashing the potential of every team with AI,” “Navigating the new frontier of developer productivity,” and most of all the “Conversation with the co-creators of Ted Lasso,” which was hysterically funny. Be sure to give them a watch!
Time to say goodbye: A farewell to Scott Farquhar
Team ’24 was the last we’d see of Atlassian Co-Founder Scott Farquhar in his role as Co-CEO, but after all those announcements and the most exciting Team ever, what a way to end his tenure!
Published: May 8, 2024
