Another week has passed, and I have been home sick this week, which has delayed things a bit. There has been a ton of news published this week, most of them fairly small, but some are quite important as we see removal of functions for both Confluence and Assets. In this blog post I will refer to the Stories, just to point you towards that section as well in case you have missed it.

Newsletter Content

• Atlassian General News

  • A new Atlassian Community is here

  • Query BYOK product data from Atlassian Data Lake

  • Connect your teams to Confluence spaces and Jira Projects

  • Curated Recommendations in Atlassian Home

• Jira News

  • Subtasks in Epics changes - you can no longer create subtasks

  • Schedule Work in Jira

  • AI JQL Fixer (BETA)

  • Create multiple boards in Jira Business Projects

  • How Atlassian work to future-proof expressions when working with the new Jira Workflow

• Confluence News

  • Atlassian is removing infrequently used Macros for Confluence

  • Nested Tables in Confluence

  • Real Time avatars of who is viewing a page in Confluence

  • New Sharing Experience for Confluence

  • Company Navigation Hub Changes in Confluence

  • Cards enhancement for Confluence

  • Sections in Confluence

• Jira Service Management News

  • Playbooks for agents in Jira Service Management

  • Okta user Lifecycle management in Automation

  • EAP: Assets Cloud to Cloud migration

• Compass News

  • Compass API changes and the Swagger App deprecation

• Rovo News

  • Rovo Connectors now display object counts

• Jira Align News

  • Jira Align Roadmap Q1

  • Unified OKR hub coming to Jira Align

• Trello News

  • Moving from Trello to Jira

• Bitbucket News

  • Bitbucket Pipelines Digest

• Loom News

  • Record your meetings with Loom

  • Speaker Notes in Loom

• Atlassian Marketplace News

  • Atlassian Marketplace Quarterly Digest

Atlassian General News

A new Atlassian Community is here

This was a surprise to me, but Atlassian rolled out a new community this week. The changes are not that big, except that when you go to the community link now you end up on a landing page where you have to choose one of the three community parts: Forum, Learning and Events.

It makes sense to combine the different parts into one community experience, and there are several reasons for why Atlassian did this. One is more control over your profile and especially privacy settings, which sounds good, but my profile is a broken, so I can't check it!

Query BYOK product data from Atlassian Data Lake

I am not sure how many users actually know about Atlassian Data lake, but for those of you that do and are using it this should be good news for you. According to the article Atlassian Data Lake now have support for BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) encryption. This means that you can query encrypted data and use it in Atlassian Analytics or via Data Shares. This is rolling out and if I understand things correctly you can add BYOK support to a new connection as well as update existing ones, but the data will not be affected until April 30, 2025.

Connect your teams to Confluence spaces and Jira Projects

According to the article we can now connect Teams to Jira Projects and Confluence spaces. You do this on the Teams page and from the look of the screenshot this is a Teams update I don't have yet so I can't check it. The new layout seems to have multiple columns, where you can connect Jira Projects, Confluence Spaces and Goals. I have not seen any information on this new design, so I can't tell much about it. The article say it will come soon, so I guess we have to wait for it.

Once you have connected the team to a Confluence Space or Jira project you can then see a new icon (a pink team icon) at the top of the page at the end of the title of the project or space. It only shows one team in the screenshot, so the question is what it will look like with multiple teams...

Curated Recommendations in Atlassian Home

Atlassian Home is getting another feature I can't say I have ever heard anyone wanting. This new feature will allow some form of help to recommend what you should do next, which seems a bit bizarre, but perhaps there are use cases for this? Is anyone even using Atlassian home today?

Currently these recommendations come from Atlassian Goals, Projects & Teams, Jira, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery & Confluence. We are already working on adding new recommendations and functionality to make your workflow even smoother.

Jira News

Subtasks in Epics changes - you can no longer create subtasks

I am surprised that this has not been fixed before, but Atlassian is finally fixing that you can not attach subtasks to Epics. In the article we get some examples on why this change is rolling out. These include Bad hierarchy data, confusing user experience and experience limitations and I can't agree more.

This has been a pain for a while and I am glad they are finally fixing what I consider to be a bug. You should never be able to break the work item hierarchy and this is now finally fixed.

In work item view, you can no longer create subtasks within epics via the subtask panel. Instead, all existing subtasks will be merged into the work item panel, alongside other child work items. New work items can still be created, but only one level down in the hierarchy.

Schedule Work in Jira

This is a great new addition where you will get a GUI for creating automations for the specific purpose of creating scheduled work items. This is basically a much nicer and less frustrating ways to create a cron job for your automations where you don't have to know how to create the regex!

When the work item recurs, it inherits the automation rule which will be turned on automatically. All fields and child work items will be copied to the newly created work item; except for Attachments, Start date, Due date, and Links

The due date of the recurring work item will be automatically set based on the scheduled frequency. For example, in a weekly schedule, the due date will be set to seven days after the creation date of the work item.

A “recur” icon will appear next to the Due date field in the work item view and next to the work item summary in the Calendar view.

I like this a lot and I know several clients that has this setup manually and now they can transition into this new solution for much better experience.

This new feature also come with Admin controls so you can manage it if you don't want to use it or if you want to manage it in other ways.

AI JQL Fixer (BETA)

I am not sure who needed this feature as we already have the AI function where you can write a query ising normal language and get the JQL syntax, but here it is. This function is only available to Premium and Enterprise customers.

Is JQL too complicated to learn and use to get the results you want? We're thrilled to announce the beta release of the new AI JQL Fixer, designed to simplify your Jira experience by using AI to correct your JQL mistakes.

This is going to show up when you get an error in the JQL and AI will then try to fix the issue for you by suggesting changes that are valid. Just click accept and you will have an updated JQL query and can move on whith your day.

Not a bad change and it would be interesting to see this included in Confluence as well in the future.

Create multiple boards in Jira Business Projects

If you have a business project in Jira, then you can add multiple boards (up to 5) to it. If you like me had no idea that there was still something called a Business Project it seems that it is related to to the template selection, but I am not really sure which templates creates a business project rather than a Software one.

How Atlassian work to future-proof expressions when working with the new Jira Workflow

While not really a new feature it is a nice insight into the thought process and design decisions from an architecual point of view. This particular article walk us through how Atlassian approached future proofing Jira Expression when building the new workflow transition experience.

Confluence News

Atlassian is removing infrequently used Macros for Confluence

Confluence is having several macros removed, and you may already have noticed this. The article about the infrequent macros in Confluence being removed came out on March 28th and the first step has already rolled out. There are no product updates for this as I can see, which makes this very, very, very bad. The first change will have the macros show a (deprecated) suffix to their name and no fixes will be done for them. This rolled out on March 25th, 3 days before this announcement.

The second step will happen on September 25th, 2025. This is where these macros will be removed, and you will get a message that the macro is no longer available. This will not be fun if you are not taking actions today and inform your users that the following Confluence Macros will be removed in 6 months. In the article you have suggestions on how to replace these macros, and you also have a FAQ page with a much longer list of Confluence macros being removed than these that comes from the article.

• Chart

• Contributors Summary

• Gallery

• Google Drive (Legacy Editor only)

• Page Index

• PowerPoint, Excel, and Word macros

• Recently Updated Dashboard

• Related Labels

• Spaces List

• Span

• User List

Nested Tables in Confluence

We now have the ability to nest tables, which means that you can add a table inside a cell in another table. This can be very useful when you have complex presentations that require structures like that. You can create Nested Tables by inserting a table through the toolbar or the slash command while inside another table cell. You can also simply drag a table into another table cell.

Nested Tables do not support connected data or charts, and they are only functional within the primary table; they do not extend into the nested tables. Additionally, Nested Tables occupy the full width of the cell, but otherwise, they provide a similar experience to the full cloud editor tables.

I have to try this to see how this work because the description is a bit confusing to me.

Real Time avatars of who is viewing a page in Confluence

I am not sure about this because I feel like this is just adding more queries just to get an extra kick, but since we can turn it off I guess it is fine. So, what this does is that it adds profile images at the top of the page, indicating who is currently viewing the page you are looking at. To make this more complicated than it has to be, they are also dividing what users you can see based on your contribution to the page...

On Pages – viewers will see other page viewers, while editors of the page will be able to see other editors. On Live Docs (currently in open beta) – both viewers & editors will see other viewers & editors due to the openness of this content type.

If guests and anonymous access are allowed in your organization, you will be able to see those users with clear “guest” and “anonymous person” identification for deeper visibility!

New Sharing Experience for Confluence

The new sharing experience will not just allow you to share content, but Atlassian is putting everything into the sharing experience. By everything I mean you will have content restrictions, access management, and sharing options all in one flow. This means that the old setup with the padlock for permissions and the share button are now merged into just the share function that also show the padlock icon to indicate permission status. You will also find the Copy Link function in this section after it roll out for you.

I like this change as it reduces the clutter and put several functions into one easy to manage area.

Company Navigation Hub Changes in Confluence

More changes to teh Company Hub and this time we get a change in teh navigation. It seems that the Company Hub entrypoint, as in the link that takes you to it, is moving. This is related to the new navigation for Confluence and the Company Hub entrypoint will be shown in a new section in the left side navigation when that roll out for you.

It seems that the Company Hub will also be available in the App Switcher, which is what you use when you jump between Atlassian products. This is a bit weird to me as it indicates that the Company Hub is a new product and not just a feature in Confluence? In Atlassian Home you will also see the Company hub in a separat section in the left side navigation.

Cards enhancement for Confluence

Cards on Confluence, which is available to Premium users, are getting some enhancements. For example you can align your cards and you can turn your cards element into a scrollable section so you can have a nice row, even with more cards than can fit in the row you placed it. For some reason we also get AI help to suggest descriptions for the cards if we are feeling lazy. Finally we have dynamic cards that are based on filters and you can now sort those of "true cronological order", so it will also take updates into consideration and not just created date.

Sections in Confluence

This is a weird one as I don't understand if this feature is just for the Company Hub, or if it will also be generally available? In short this allow us to add a new element that is called sections. The section can then have a title, a description and one of three elements: Cards, Carousel and Spotlight by default. Each of the elements then have multiple styling options and you can remove or add elemnts as you see fit.

Sections just seem to be a container with some standard elements, so I am not sure what this is for or why we need it, but perhaps it is a part of larger vision to move Confluence towards a more CMS like experience?

Jira Service Management News

Playbooks for agents in Jira Service Management

We already covered this last week, but Atlassian have now published an article about it. You can also check my article about Playbooks that I wrote a while back.

Okta user Lifecycle management in Automation

If you are using Okta to authenticate your users, then this is going to make you very happy! Atlassian has announced that you now can manage users directly in Okta using automations in Jira Service Managment. This is going to make things a lot easier to add users to Okta, but also to fetch user details from Okta.

This is managed using two new automation actions called Create user in Okta and Retrieve user details from Okta.

This is apparently just the beginning and the team is working on more functionality for Okta and they want to hear from you what functionality you want to see. So drop by the article and make your wishlist right away!

EAP: Assets Cloud to Cloud migration

This is an announcement for an Early Access Program for migrating Assets between cloud instances. Not all of Assets will be available in the EAP:

• Migrating the Services schema or the Service Registry. We’re focusing on the core object schema and data first, with more to come in future updates.

• Migrating Data Manager. Support for Data Manager migrations will be added in a future iteration after Data Manager becomes generally available (GA)

This makes perfect sense to me since Services is a hard coded part of Assets (which I question why it is there now that we have to pay extra for objects) and the data manager is pretty barebone at the moment.

So, if you want to migrate Assets between cloud instances and you are not afraid of bugs, then join this EAP.

Compass News

Compass API changes and the Swagger App deprecation

For Compass we have received some updates for the Compass API:

1. OpenAPI specification are now automatically discovered and synced to the API tab from repos on GitLab.com (cloud hosted). 

2. Every endpoint in now searchable, making it easy for engineers to find relevant APIs to whatever they are working on. Rolling out to all sites this week! 

3. New API for uploading an OpenAPI/Swagger spec to a Component has launched.

This last point is related to the removal of the Swagger App from the Atlassian Marketplace. Users of the app should have received a message that the app will be fully deprecated on March 31, 2025. Note that the Curl command is NOT being deprecated so it will continue to forward uploads to the API tab. This is because the Curl command has been uploading to the API tab since february in parallel so the latest version should already be there.

More information on the Compass API can be found using this link.

Rovo News

Rovo Connectors now display object counts

This new feature will, according to the article, show how many objects have been indexed and are available to use in Rovo for third party Rove connectors. This is a good change since you will affect your Quotas where indexed objects will be billed at 1500 per billed users. So keeping track of the number of indexed objects will be important for that reason.

If you want to learn more about how indexed objects affect quotas you have an article about that here: https://support.atlassian.com/rovo/docs/rovo-usage-limits/

Jira Align News

Jira Align Roadmap Q1

This is a fairly extensive list of things on the roadmap for Jira Align. It also announces the new Jira Align product leader, which is Jamie St. Onge. I will not list all of the things coming to Jira Align, especially since this is a roadmap and roadmaps can change, but here is a list of the things you can read more about in the article.

Unified OKR hub coming to Jira Align

According to this article Atlassian is consolidating objective tracking into a single new area that they call the OKR Hub. It is scheduled to roll out to deploy to sandboxes on March 28, 2025, and for production environments on April 11, 2025. It will roll out to On-prem on April 30, 2025.

The OKR hub will replace the legacy Objectives tree page in the sidebar navigation, and selecting it will land you in the new experience by default. On your first visit, there will be a quick spotlight tour to review the Tier filter and the option to return to the legacy objectives tree page.

The Tier, Team, and Program Increment filters will respect the options selected in the sidebar, and are open to allow the selection of additional teams and program increments.

Trello News

Moving from Trello to Jira

In this article Melody from Atlassian is going over the steps to move data from Trello to Jira. If you are considering this move, then this article is an excellent guide to how to make this move from Trello to Jira in a nice step-by-step guide.

Bitbucket News

Bitbucket Pipelines Digest

This is a nice summary by Oleksandr Kyrdan from Atlassian where he describes the new Bitbucket pipelines and the updated Bitbucket pipelines in one easy to digest list. You find the Bitbucket Pipelines digest for March here.

Loom News

Record your meetings with Loom

I believe I have seen these a while back when working with Atlassian and they are pretty good. In short you connect you Loom account with you Google or Outlook calendars to record your meetings and when the meeting is concluded you get AI powered meeting notes and automatic recap emails. It is pretty neat!

Speaker Notes in Loom

If you are using Loom, then you can now add some simple speaker notes in Loom as you record your video. While hardly a replacement for a prompter, this is a nice and lightweight way to keep some simple notes available for when you record a video using Loom. The speaker note is only visible to you and it appears like a little sticky not that you can trigger from the Loom interface.

Atlassian Marketplace News

Atlassian Marketplace Quarterly Digest

This one was new for me, but it is a summary of the updates that has been made, or will be made, to the Atlassian Marketplace. Some interesting things include the ability for marketplace partners to display verified third party trust center links directly in their listings. You will be able to see app audit logs in Atlassian Admin (atlassian.admin.com) and Atlassian have partnered with Bonterms to help marketplace partners standardize and adapt customizable legal agreements.

Atlassian Platinum marketplace Partners will get new requirements that go live on July 1, 2025, which means that they must be SOC2, Type II or ISO27001:2022 compliance. They also must have a third party validated Trust Center. Gold partners will also need to be in the process to have one of those two certifications by that date.

There are quite a lot of things happening in the Marketplace space it seems, so I would like to hear more from Marketplace partners on how you experience these changes?

Sign off in the comments or send me a message.

Another week has passed, and I have been home sick this week, which has delayed things a bit. There has been a ton of news published this week, most of them fairly small, but some are quite important as we see removal of functions for both Confluence and Assets. In this blog post I will refer to the Stories, just to point you towards that section as well in case you have missed it.

Newsletter Content

• Atlassian General News

  • A new Atlassian Community is here

  • Query BYOK product data from Atlassian Data Lake

  • Connect your teams to Confluence spaces and Jira Projects

  • Curated Recommendations in Atlassian Home

• Jira News

  • Subtasks in Epics changes - you can no longer create subtasks

  • Schedule Work in Jira

  • AI JQL Fixer (BETA)

  • Create multiple boards in Jira Business Projects

  • How Atlassian work to future-proof expressions when working with the new Jira Workflow

• Confluence News

  • Atlassian is removing infrequently used Macros for Confluence

  • Nested Tables in Confluence

  • Real Time avatars of who is viewing a page in Confluence

  • New Sharing Experience for Confluence

  • Company Navigation Hub Changes in Confluence

  • Cards enhancement for Confluence

  • Sections in Confluence

• Jira Service Management News

  • Playbooks for agents in Jira Service Management

  • Okta user Lifecycle management in Automation

  • EAP: Assets Cloud to Cloud migration

• Compass News

  • Compass API changes and the Swagger App deprecation

• Rovo News

  • Rovo Connectors now display object counts

• Jira Align News

  • Jira Align Roadmap Q1

  • Unified OKR hub coming to Jira Align

• Trello News

  • Moving from Trello to Jira

• Bitbucket News

  • Bitbucket Pipelines Digest

• Loom News

  • Record your meetings with Loom

  • Speaker Notes in Loom

• Atlassian Marketplace News

  • Atlassian Marketplace Quarterly Digest

Atlassian General News

A new Atlassian Community is here

This was a surprise to me, but Atlassian rolled out a new community this week. The changes are not that big, except that when you go to the community link now you end up on a landing page where you have to choose one of the three community parts: Forum, Learning and Events.

It makes sense to combine the different parts into one community experience, and there are several reasons for why Atlassian did this. One is more control over your profile and especially privacy settings, which sounds good, but my profile is a broken, so I can't check it!

Query BYOK product data from Atlassian Data Lake

I am not sure how many users actually know about Atlassian Data lake, but for those of you that do and are using it this should be good news for you. According to the article Atlassian Data Lake now have support for BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) encryption. This means that you can query encrypted data and use it in Atlassian Analytics or via Data Shares. This is rolling out and if I understand things correctly you can add BYOK support to a new connection as well as update existing ones, but the data will not be affected until April 30, 2025.

Connect your teams to Confluence spaces and Jira Projects

According to the article we can now connect Teams to Jira Projects and Confluence spaces. You do this on the Teams page and from the look of the screenshot this is a Teams update I don't have yet so I can't check it. The new layout seems to have multiple columns, where you can connect Jira Projects, Confluence Spaces and Goals. I have not seen any information on this new design, so I can't tell much about it. The article say it will come soon, so I guess we have to wait for it.

Once you have connected the team to a Confluence Space or Jira project you can then see a new icon (a pink team icon) at the top of the page at the end of the title of the project or space. It only shows one team in the screenshot, so the question is what it will look like with multiple teams...

Curated Recommendations in Atlassian Home

Atlassian Home is getting another feature I can't say I have ever heard anyone wanting. This new feature will allow some form of help to recommend what you should do next, which seems a bit bizarre, but perhaps there are use cases for this? Is anyone even using Atlassian home today?

Currently these recommendations come from Atlassian Goals, Projects & Teams, Jira, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery & Confluence. We are already working on adding new recommendations and functionality to make your workflow even smoother.

Jira News

Subtasks in Epics changes - you can no longer create subtasks

I am surprised that this has not been fixed before, but Atlassian is finally fixing that you can not attach subtasks to Epics. In the article we get some examples on why this change is rolling out. These include Bad hierarchy data, confusing user experience and experience limitations and I can't agree more.

This has been a pain for a while and I am glad they are finally fixing what I consider to be a bug. You should never be able to break the work item hierarchy and this is now finally fixed.

In work item view, you can no longer create subtasks within epics via the subtask panel. Instead, all existing subtasks will be merged into the work item panel, alongside other child work items. New work items can still be created, but only one level down in the hierarchy.

Schedule Work in Jira

This is a great new addition where you will get a GUI for creating automations for the specific purpose of creating scheduled work items. This is basically a much nicer and less frustrating ways to create a cron job for your automations where you don't have to know how to create the regex!

When the work item recurs, it inherits the automation rule which will be turned on automatically. All fields and child work items will be copied to the newly created work item; except for Attachments, Start date, Due date, and Links

The due date of the recurring work item will be automatically set based on the scheduled frequency. For example, in a weekly schedule, the due date will be set to seven days after the creation date of the work item.

A “recur” icon will appear next to the Due date field in the work item view and next to the work item summary in the Calendar view.

I like this a lot and I know several clients that has this setup manually and now they can transition into this new solution for much better experience.

This new feature also come with Admin controls so you can manage it if you don't want to use it or if you want to manage it in other ways.

AI JQL Fixer (BETA)

I am not sure who needed this feature as we already have the AI function where you can write a query ising normal language and get the JQL syntax, but here it is. This function is only available to Premium and Enterprise customers.

Is JQL too complicated to learn and use to get the results you want? We're thrilled to announce the beta release of the new AI JQL Fixer, designed to simplify your Jira experience by using AI to correct your JQL mistakes.

This is going to show up when you get an error in the JQL and AI will then try to fix the issue for you by suggesting changes that are valid. Just click accept and you will have an updated JQL query and can move on whith your day.

Not a bad change and it would be interesting to see this included in Confluence as well in the future.

Create multiple boards in Jira Business Projects

If you have a business project in Jira, then you can add multiple boards (up to 5) to it. If you like me had no idea that there was still something called a Business Project it seems that it is related to to the template selection, but I am not really sure which templates creates a business project rather than a Software one.

How Atlassian work to future-proof expressions when working with the new Jira Workflow

While not really a new feature it is a nice insight into the thought process and design decisions from an architecual point of view. This particular article walk us through how Atlassian approached future proofing Jira Expression when building the new workflow transition experience.

Confluence News

Atlassian is removing infrequently used Macros for Confluence

Confluence is having several macros removed, and you may already have noticed this. The article about the infrequent macros in Confluence being removed came out on March 28th and the first step has already rolled out. There are no product updates for this as I can see, which makes this very, very, very bad. The first change will have the macros show a (deprecated) suffix to their name and no fixes will be done for them. This rolled out on March 25th, 3 days before this announcement.

The second step will happen on September 25th, 2025. This is where these macros will be removed, and you will get a message that the macro is no longer available. This will not be fun if you are not taking actions today and inform your users that the following Confluence Macros will be removed in 6 months. In the article you have suggestions on how to replace these macros, and you also have a FAQ page with a much longer list of Confluence macros being removed than these that comes from the article.

• Chart

• Contributors Summary

• Gallery

• Google Drive (Legacy Editor only)

• Page Index

• PowerPoint, Excel, and Word macros

• Recently Updated Dashboard

• Related Labels

• Spaces List

• Span

• User List

Nested Tables in Confluence

We now have the ability to nest tables, which means that you can add a table inside a cell in another table. This can be very useful when you have complex presentations that require structures like that. You can create Nested Tables by inserting a table through the toolbar or the slash command while inside another table cell. You can also simply drag a table into another table cell.

Nested Tables do not support connected data or charts, and they are only functional within the primary table; they do not extend into the nested tables. Additionally, Nested Tables occupy the full width of the cell, but otherwise, they provide a similar experience to the full cloud editor tables.

I have to try this to see how this work because the description is a bit confusing to me.

Real Time avatars of who is viewing a page in Confluence

I am not sure about this because I feel like this is just adding more queries just to get an extra kick, but since we can turn it off I guess it is fine. So, what this does is that it adds profile images at the top of the page, indicating who is currently viewing the page you are looking at. To make this more complicated than it has to be, they are also dividing what users you can see based on your contribution to the page...

On Pages – viewers will see other page viewers, while editors of the page will be able to see other editors. On Live Docs (currently in open beta) – both viewers & editors will see other viewers & editors due to the openness of this content type.

If guests and anonymous access are allowed in your organization, you will be able to see those users with clear “guest” and “anonymous person” identification for deeper visibility!

New Sharing Experience for Confluence

The new sharing experience will not just allow you to share content, but Atlassian is putting everything into the sharing experience. By everything I mean you will have content restrictions, access management, and sharing options all in one flow. This means that the old setup with the padlock for permissions and the share button are now merged into just the share function that also show the padlock icon to indicate permission status. You will also find the Copy Link function in this section after it roll out for you.

I like this change as it reduces the clutter and put several functions into one easy to manage area.

Company Navigation Hub Changes in Confluence

More changes to teh Company Hub and this time we get a change in teh navigation. It seems that the Company Hub entrypoint, as in the link that takes you to it, is moving. This is related to the new navigation for Confluence and the Company Hub entrypoint will be shown in a new section in the left side navigation when that roll out for you.

It seems that the Company Hub will also be available in the App Switcher, which is what you use when you jump between Atlassian products. This is a bit weird to me as it indicates that the Company Hub is a new product and not just a feature in Confluence? In Atlassian Home you will also see the Company hub in a separat section in the left side navigation.

Cards enhancement for Confluence

Cards on Confluence, which is available to Premium users, are getting some enhancements. For example you can align your cards and you can turn your cards element into a scrollable section so you can have a nice row, even with more cards than can fit in the row you placed it. For some reason we also get AI help to suggest descriptions for the cards if we are feeling lazy. Finally we have dynamic cards that are based on filters and you can now sort those of "true cronological order", so it will also take updates into consideration and not just created date.

Sections in Confluence

This is a weird one as I don't understand if this feature is just for the Company Hub, or if it will also be generally available? In short this allow us to add a new element that is called sections. The section can then have a title, a description and one of three elements: Cards, Carousel and Spotlight by default. Each of the elements then have multiple styling options and you can remove or add elemnts as you see fit.

Sections just seem to be a container with some standard elements, so I am not sure what this is for or why we need it, but perhaps it is a part of larger vision to move Confluence towards a more CMS like experience?

Jira Service Management News

Playbooks for agents in Jira Service Management

We already covered this last week, but Atlassian have now published an article about it. You can also check my article about Playbooks that I wrote a while back.

Okta user Lifecycle management in Automation

If you are using Okta to authenticate your users, then this is going to make you very happy! Atlassian has announced that you now can manage users directly in Okta using automations in Jira Service Managment. This is going to make things a lot easier to add users to Okta, but also to fetch user details from Okta.

This is managed using two new automation actions called Create user in Okta and Retrieve user details from Okta.

This is apparently just the beginning and the team is working on more functionality for Okta and they want to hear from you what functionality you want to see. So drop by the article and make your wishlist right away!

EAP: Assets Cloud to Cloud migration

This is an announcement for an Early Access Program for migrating Assets between cloud instances. Not all of Assets will be available in the EAP:

• Migrating the Services schema or the Service Registry. We’re focusing on the core object schema and data first, with more to come in future updates.

• Migrating Data Manager. Support for Data Manager migrations will be added in a future iteration after Data Manager becomes generally available (GA)

This makes perfect sense to me since Services is a hard coded part of Assets (which I question why it is there now that we have to pay extra for objects) and the data manager is pretty barebone at the moment.

So, if you want to migrate Assets between cloud instances and you are not afraid of bugs, then join this EAP.

Compass News

Compass API changes and the Swagger App deprecation

For Compass we have received some updates for the Compass API:

1. OpenAPI specification are now automatically discovered and synced to the API tab from repos on GitLab.com (cloud hosted). 

2. Every endpoint in now searchable, making it easy for engineers to find relevant APIs to whatever they are working on. Rolling out to all sites this week! 

3. New API for uploading an OpenAPI/Swagger spec to a Component has launched.

This last point is related to the removal of the Swagger App from the Atlassian Marketplace. Users of the app should have received a message that the app will be fully deprecated on March 31, 2025. Note that the Curl command is NOT being deprecated so it will continue to forward uploads to the API tab. This is because the Curl command has been uploading to the API tab since february in parallel so the latest version should already be there.

More information on the Compass API can be found using this link.

Rovo News

Rovo Connectors now display object counts

This new feature will, according to the article, show how many objects have been indexed and are available to use in Rovo for third party Rove connectors. This is a good change since you will affect your Quotas where indexed objects will be billed at 1500 per billed users. So keeping track of the number of indexed objects will be important for that reason.

If you want to learn more about how indexed objects affect quotas you have an article about that here: https://support.atlassian.com/rovo/docs/rovo-usage-limits/

Jira Align News

Jira Align Roadmap Q1

This is a fairly extensive list of things on the roadmap for Jira Align. It also announces the new Jira Align product leader, which is Jamie St. Onge. I will not list all of the things coming to Jira Align, especially since this is a roadmap and roadmaps can change, but here is a list of the things you can read more about in the article.

Unified OKR hub coming to Jira Align

According to this article Atlassian is consolidating objective tracking into a single new area that they call the OKR Hub. It is scheduled to roll out to deploy to sandboxes on March 28, 2025, and for production environments on April 11, 2025. It will roll out to On-prem on April 30, 2025.

The OKR hub will replace the legacy Objectives tree page in the sidebar navigation, and selecting it will land you in the new experience by default. On your first visit, there will be a quick spotlight tour to review the Tier filter and the option to return to the legacy objectives tree page.

The Tier, Team, and Program Increment filters will respect the options selected in the sidebar, and are open to allow the selection of additional teams and program increments.

Trello News

Moving from Trello to Jira

In this article Melody from Atlassian is going over the steps to move data from Trello to Jira. If you are considering this move, then this article is an excellent guide to how to make this move from Trello to Jira in a nice step-by-step guide.

Bitbucket News

Bitbucket Pipelines Digest

This is a nice summary by Oleksandr Kyrdan from Atlassian where he describes the new Bitbucket pipelines and the updated Bitbucket pipelines in one easy to digest list. You find the Bitbucket Pipelines digest for March here.

Loom News

Record your meetings with Loom

I believe I have seen these a while back when working with Atlassian and they are pretty good. In short you connect you Loom account with you Google or Outlook calendars to record your meetings and when the meeting is concluded you get AI powered meeting notes and automatic recap emails. It is pretty neat!

Speaker Notes in Loom

If you are using Loom, then you can now add some simple speaker notes in Loom as you record your video. While hardly a replacement for a prompter, this is a nice and lightweight way to keep some simple notes available for when you record a video using Loom. The speaker note is only visible to you and it appears like a little sticky not that you can trigger from the Loom interface.

Atlassian Marketplace News

Atlassian Marketplace Quarterly Digest

This one was new for me, but it is a summary of the updates that has been made, or will be made, to the Atlassian Marketplace. Some interesting things include the ability for marketplace partners to display verified third party trust center links directly in their listings. You will be able to see app audit logs in Atlassian Admin (atlassian.admin.com) and Atlassian have partnered with Bonterms to help marketplace partners standardize and adapt customizable legal agreements.

Atlassian Platinum marketplace Partners will get new requirements that go live on July 1, 2025, which means that they must be SOC2, Type II or ISO27001:2022 compliance. They also must have a third party validated Trust Center. Gold partners will also need to be in the process to have one of those two certifications by that date.

There are quite a lot of things happening in the Marketplace space it seems, so I would like to hear more from Marketplace partners on how you experience these changes?

Sign off in the comments or send me a message.

In March 2007 the Atlassian community created two suggestion tickets to Atlassian that there is a need for change logs when users edit the comments field. This was a change that was introduced at that time and people quickly noticed that for compliance reasons during audits, there has to be a trace of changes made to a comment and what changes were made.

The problem as described back in 2007

Problem Definition

JIRA-1100 introduced editable comments. This is great. When our security officer reviewed the feature he wanted access to the change history, which would be important in the event of a security audit. It appears that there is no way to view comment history.

Suggested Solution

The ability to view comment change history. Ideally, this would be implemented such that a new permission was added 'View comment change history' so that its implementation could be configured at the site level.

How Atlassian handled these tickets

On October 13th the first ticket, which is for Cloud, was closed for this request, after 17 years (!) with no action taken. You can see the ticket here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-12400

This was followed up with a corresponding closure of the ticket for Server and Data Center a few days later on October 17th. That ticket can be found here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-12400

This is bad for all forms of audit or control of content

Not only is this a devastating blow towards companies that need this to maintain audit trails for what happens inside a ticket or task, but it is also one of the many reasons why you should never use Jira as a requirement tool. Without the ability to actually trace what happens in a ticket or task, you can never use it in any form of legal context as the content is not tracked with change logs.

It is a bit strange that Atlassian do not want to implement this as this is already in place for Description and pretty much any other field that exist in Jira. It seems it is ONLY the comments field where this is not added (please correct me if there are other fields). So why is it so hard to implement for comments?

One thing that is being referenced is that there are permissions related to comments and because you have comments internally and externally there could be situations where you do not want the original content to show in a change log. This makes no sense to me because the change log already should have this built in because there are other areas that also have permissions connected to them, and they don't seem to have any issues.

It is not hard to add permission data to content such as a change log to ensure the changes are seen only by people that should be able to see it. It is also not difficult to add another permission for who can see the change log for comment changes.

Atlassian is just not interested in changing unsexy things like comments as they want to build new cool features instead. This is quite obvious from the many tickets never being touched that relates to basic functionality that should be standard in an enterprise platform.

No traceability for comments, so what?

I see this comment a lot in those tickets as well. Why do we need to keep track of what is written in the comments anyway, who cares? Well, there are actually many use cases for this.

For Jira Service Management it is not uncommon that support agents, or customers send sensitive data in comments, even though they should not. This could for example be a password or a token used in a product. If there is a breach, and it leads to a legal situation, then obviously you need to be able to see if a support agent is at fault or not. If all you see if that a comment has been edited, but not in what way, this can cause an issue.

Yes, you can dig this up in the mail logs and customer notification logs, but only if they are still available and if it is possible to retrieve them. In some cases a ticket might even be moved to another project if there is no proper escalation process and then the content of the ticket changes, and it is even harder to find the emails and customer notifications will not even exist for that ticket in the new project.

It can also be that you have claims of insult or inappropriate behavior in the comments and if you are in a Jira project and this was some time back, then it will be hard to find in the logs and to know what was actually written.

In some cases people are using comments as a requirement field (yes, I know that this is borderline insanity, but it happens). In that case you might have serious issues with contracts if the requirements change with no traceability of what or when. This is also true if you use comments for approvals (again, very bad practice) and a hundred other things that take place in the comments.

What can you do to mitigate this?

If you really need this then you are basically forced to either buy an app or be very creative with automations and custom fields.

There is an app called Issue History for Jira that is listed in the comments in one of these tickets and with this you can see all kind of activities that happens in a ticket. This app is not exactly free, and it is a bit puzzling to me as to why this is not bought up by Atlassian and placed into the core Jira product.

If you want to take the "free" route then you can try to create an automation that save comments on create and also make new saves based on comments edited. It would probably be best to add this to Assets since you will basically see a doubling of content and then any changes on top of that, so you will have quite a lot of entries added. Just consider the new consumption based pricing for Assets which will make that solution as expensive or not more compared to an app...

Conclusion: Atlassian does not care about legal requirements, unless they have to?

Ignoring a real legal requirement that many users have is bad, and it does not look good on a company that claim to be an Enterprise solution. Leaving this open for 17 years and in that time they must have reworked the comments functions dozens of times and still they did not put any perceivable efforts into adding a basic functionality such as traceability for customer communication?

I am sorry, but that is just sloppy and a blatant disregard for legal requirements that their users face globally today.

This feels like a clear breach of Don’t #@!% the customer.

Working on multiple projects at the same time is sadly a common experience for many of us working in IT. Many split their attention on at least 2 projects or responsibility areas. This comes at a cost however, not just for the person splitting their time, but also for the people they work with.

Few lift an eyebrow at the mention that someone is in a project for as low as 20% these days. Sadly no one really bat an eyelash when a coworker break down mentally and get sick from the mental stress either. In my line of work as an IT consultant I often see people splitting their time and I see what it cost those persons as well as the projects they are doing their best to contribute to.

Not to long ago I witnessed a co-worker taking a seat after lunch looking pale. A faded smile and assurance that he would join soon and just needed a moment to himself was followed by an ambulance taking him to the hospital. It took him a year to come back to work. More than once have I seen people pass out in a meeting and outbursts of anger and frustration for small things happen on a regular basis by even the most gentle and kind persons.

What could possibly cause such extreme amounts of stress? The answer is that all of these people have suffered from extreme forms of content switching. As a human we need time to focus in order to make rational decisions. As the time to focus is interrupted we experience content switching. That is that moment when you are forced to go from one focused thought to another. This change of focus comes at a cost of mental energy and eveyone need a different amount of time to make the switch mentally.

As a manager you do this a lot as part of your work. That mental flexibility and speed that you have as a manager serve you well to manage most situations. That is because the content switching is still within one context. When you need to split your attention on multiple context however the cost will increase exponentially and with time, you will build up negative stress. If you do not reduce that stress it will eventually cause physical harm and you will hit that famous wall head first.

Other fields in IT have the same situation, but there is one group that suffer from this more than any other group: the developers. Developers unlike most other groups are focused oriented, mening that they spend more time in their own minds setting up structures and logical flows that create the code they write. Once interrupted it takes far longer to get back to their focused state of mind. Fortunately developers are less likely to work on multiple projects at the same time, but when they do the damage is more severe than for other groups. Designers have a similar situation, but have an easier time to make the mental switch.

How to mitigate and avoid getting burned out

Speed is everything, or so they make you think. Meeting after meeting where you jump from onte topic to the next in frantic speed. As you solve issue after issue with your quick and skilled mind you will experience a sense of accomplishment. This is because your brain reward you for it and it becomes an addiction. Soon you will crave it and like a junkie you will crave your fix even when you are off work. Eventually the rewards will not measure up with the cost and you will get frustrated and eventually have problem being happy. A sense of feeling empty and caught in a endless loop is your last warning before you bend the knee to the mental exhaustion and collapse.

The price you pay fror strecthing yourself thin benefit no one as you break down. There are things you can do however to prevent this. Both as regular practices, but also as strategies and rules you set for yourself.

Managers, Requirements & Business people

• Make time for focused work - As a manager or if you work in the Business area the biggest danger is having long periods without proper focus. Meetings and workshops take up much of your time, so make sure you dedicate at least 1 hour every day for focused work (no, not during lunch...). This is a time where you take time to be fully alone without distractions to focus on emails, power points and whatever else you have promised to do. This will naturally lower your stress levels and allow you a form of soft reboot. If this does not work, then dedicate a longer period 1-2 days a week. This can be that you work from home one day once a week or two half days for example.
   
• Turn off at the end of the day - The most common mistake managers do is that they never stop working. My suggestion is that you leave the computer at work if you can, or leave it in the bag when you get home. The same goes for the phone. make sure it is turned off as soon as you leave work, or at least as soon as you get home. If you are required to be reached every hour of they day, then you are constantly on stand by and never relaxed. Not only is this bad for your health, it is actually a legal issue as well in many countries as you are working over time. Stop doing that today!
   
• Say no or delegate - If you get asked to split your attention between multiple areas or you feel that thet area you are in charge of is becoming difficult to manage within your normal working hours, then you should say no or delegate.  Saying no is always difficult since most managers are driven by status or to help others. It s however a very useful skill to master and it will save you a lot of stress. Just make sure you say no for the right reason and not to avoid stepping out of your comfort zone, because that is actually a good thing.
  
  This is very hard in some cultures and if you feel that this is impossible, then find a way within the situation you find yourself. A trick that you can try is to promote people that work for you or offer to teach someone what you do. Just make sure you make sure the person you delegate to also have their regular workload reduced or you will burn them out instead.
   
• Never try to lead someone that is not fully commited - Having people in your team that split their time is a cause for much frustration. No matter how much time they dedicate to your project you will never get that time because of the cost of content switching. You will also find the moments when they are not working on your project, no matter how rare they are, to be annoying and inconvenient. My advice is to never try to lead anyone who is not fully commited to your project because of this.

Developers & Designers

• Never split your work - There are times when you might be asked to split your work and my advice to you is to say no. No matter what split you have you will never be able to dedicate 100% time between the two. Each split will cost you a lot of time just for switching between them and the mental toll will be far worse then you think. If you split yourself 50/50 you will do 40% in each project and you will work 120%. You will constantly feel stressed and that you do not do the work you are supposed to. It will eventually break you down mentally so never accept a split work situation.
   
• Avoid meetings if you can - Some meetings you need to attend, but try to avoid meetings that are not necessary. The reason is that a meeting, even if it is just 30 minutes long, will completely content switch you from your work. Unlike a short interruption that cost around 10-15 minutes of lost time a meeting will cost at least double that. Some meetings may be even more disruptive causing fragmentaion of thought for hours afterwards as you try to focus on work, but have the new information or task in mind as well.
   
• Take time to clarify things - The biggest issue for most developers and designers is unclear requirements and unclear expectations. If you take time to clarify things, then you will save a lot of time. That is because not only will you wate time trying to find answers, you also suffer from content switching. This can make a simple question cost hours of focused work. Everyone have different need when it comes to clarity so do not rush sprint startups, requirement sessions or technical architect forums. Make sure everyone in the team understand what to do and why. This way you can focus on working without having to find answers or explain things to other members of your team.
   
• Agree on work environments - All teams have different compositions. Some need a lot fo focus, others less. Make sure you define wht your team needs and agree on how you will work. I have had teams that work with the hand so they just put up the hand to let you know they are busy. This way you can signal that the person have to come back later as you are deep into something right now. If that is still to disruptive then use a hat or something that indicate this before you even approach teh developer. In some cases it can be a good idea to assign a team lead or project manager to handle all outside requests to further reduce disruptions. Whatever your team need, make sure it is defined and agreed upon by everyone.

Test

• Insert yourself into the information flow - As testers it is sometimes difficult to know what is going on. This is because testers can be seen as an external part of the development flow. This usually means test comes in long after requirements and development planning, which is not only stupid from a quality perspective, it is also cause for frustration and stress. As testers you should sign off on all requirements and you need to be on top of development and deploys. So if you are not included in the information flows you need to be in, then make sure that you are. This way you do not need to run around looking for information or work within an isolated workflow. If you do not, then you will constantly feel stressed and frustrated.
   
• Agree on bug flow with developers - As testers you should not sit and verify browser compability or standard flows. These should already be well tested by the developers. If this is not the case then you will feel that you are just writing bugs all days and no development ever get past test. This is a bad situation and you should make sure there is a proper definition of done that prevent this.
  
  When you find a bug you often want to discuss this with a developer. Doing so is disruptive however and I suggest that you set aside two slots every day where you can go over the defects with the team when it does the least damage. This can be done directly after the daily standup and directly after lunch as that is also when many teams collaborate on code reviews and so on. Just agree with the developers when and how you will go over the defects to ensure the impact is as small as possible.

These are just a few small tips on how to reduce stress and what the cost is for stretching yourself thin by splitting your attention between multiple projects. Most of these may be most relevant to a certain group, but most of them are valid for all groups. Content switching and bad work processes cost billions every day and they cause health issues that should not be underestimated.

Stress related illness is increasing and in many fields you can name at least one or two persons that you work with that have suffered from being burned out. In Japan there is even a specific word for working yourself to death: Karoshi. So be wary of the many ways that you can harm yourself unintentionally. One good start to protect yourself is to never accept working on multiple projects at the same time.

If you have more tips, please share to help others avoid getting burned out.