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Jimi Wikman

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Blog Entries posted by Jimi Wikman

  1. February is a slightly shorter month and usually one that is a bit difficult to find time to write for me. This February, however, was not bad, and I got some writing done in the Roles chapter. I also started to write a little in the Documentation chapter, as I am doing a few projects at the moment that focus on documentation.

    Focus on documentation in March
    As we are now in March, I am going to focus on writing in the Documentation chapter this month. Not only is this close to the work I am doing, but it is also an important chapter for an Atlassian Administrator. Many Atlassian administrators do not know much about documentation, as that is almost a lost art in our Scrum-influenced world. As a result, many do not know the difference between information and instructions.
    Even fewer understand information architecture or have even heard terms like System of Record (SoR), System of Work (SoW), or even Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). Understanding management systems, or control and command systems, is almost seen as heresy in many organizations that use dysfunctional Agile. This is a bad thing, and I want to make sure that as an Atlassian Administrator, you at least understand the benefit of such documentation.
    I will also dive into Assets a bit and explain how Assets is also documentation, and show some examples of how you can use it for the Atlassian platform.

    Introducing Comala Document Management
    As I progress, I want to make sure I have the attention of my Muses so they can provide me with the feedback I need. As such, I have added Comala Document Management to my Confluence setup. This is a great way to keep track of changes in the writings, and I can see who has read things and who has not ;)
    I will create some videos on Comala Document Management and how this can help if you need to set up Confluence with ISO-9001 and ISO-27001 compliance.

    Adding content to Affinity Studio
    This month, I also plan to rebuild the content in Affinity Studio as I am moving from Affinity Publisher 2 to the new platform. It will take a few hours to finalize the layout, as there are some things that do not translate over very well. Once the templating and structure are in place, I will start moving over the content in Confluence to the final format. This gives me a better overview of the final product, and I can start mapping out graphics that I need to create.

    Other things...
    Besides this, I am also looking to rework some things in the Dark Secrets chapter, where I have added some content and now need to align it to something that makes sense from a reading perspective. There are some parts that I need to group, some that I need to elaborate on, and some I might cut from this book and add to my second book...

  2. Roles, Dark Secrets and a new domain

    A3 Updates · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 02/07/2026 05:26 PM

    It has been a while since I wrote here, and this is because I kind of crashed a bit after the hectic year of 2025, where I did not have any vacation,s and the loss of my father kind of threw me out of whack. I have also spent some extra time building a few things on the website, and I will continue to do so. I have also created some new videos again, so the creative side of me is slowly waking up again!
    I have in january added three new muses to help inspire and push me to finish this book. The three new muses are @Fabrice Huart, @Bryan Guffey and @Matt Doar. Please drop a comment and welcome them so they feel welcome!
    I have also created a new block here on the website that shows all the Muses. This is my way of saying thank you for helping me. You can see it on the A3 guidebook home section: https://jimiwikman.se/content/writings/the-advanced-atlassian-administration-guidebook/


    I started writing again, and I am focusing on the Roles and the Dark Secret chapters right now. I am not happy with the Roles chapter, and I am trying to get some flow into the text and rewrite things. I am expanding the chapter a bit to include more about what it means to be an Atlassian administrator and what skills and experiences are good to have. I wrote a section on what happens if you fail as an Atlassian Administrator earlier this week. Today I tossed in a ton of text about working in a toxic environment. I know this will trigger some people, but it is an important chapter, so I want to make sure it is in there.
    I also purchased a domain, or actually, I bought a bunch of them. I did this as I also changed my email setup, as Gmail was acting up, so I removed them and took back control of my mail. As part of that, I also added the domain https://a3guidebook.com, which is now pointing to the Confluence space where I am writing my book.
    I feel that if I can get the Roles chapter in shape, I have a fairly decent amount of content there right now. I will probably move over to the strategy chapter in March and go back a bit later to the Roles chapter to finalize it. At work, I will start a new project which will be a lot of documentation, so it is likely that Iwill add some content there in the next few months.
    Overall, I feel that I am getting back to writing again, and things feel like I am back on track again!

  3. Entering 2026 and building again

    General · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 01/07/2026 03:28 PM

    As you might have noticed, things were very quiet around here in 2025. The reasons for that are many, but between losing my dad in April and integrating into a new company while juggling book writing and my diabetes, I did not have a lot of energy to focus on building the website. As I am almost done with the aftermath of handling my father's passing, I feel I am in a good place at work, and my book is coming along fine, so I am focusing on building this website again. While I always have big plans, I will focus on small changes this year rather than massive new projects.

    Atlassian Section
    I have been slowly playing around with the Atlassian section, and I will focus on this so I get a starting point for other things. In Short I am building information pages for the collections and the corresponding apps. I will focus on the collections and then the big apps Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, and, of course, Assets. Rovo will also be there, as it has a lot of buzz at the moment, and I will probably add a section for Data Center due to the 2029 end date.
    The purpose of these pages is to both act as landing pages to collect information from multiple sources of the website, but also as landing pages for SEO purposes to promote myself (and later others as well). The pages are not that difficult to create, but they require some design focus, and I have not felt that I have the inner peace to focus on such things for a while. Once I have this, I will finish the sections and start working with content for them.

    Atlassian App Updates
    I have opened up the Atlassian App updates again, and I will add the updates again. I stopped doing this as I did not feel it was worth my time to add the hundreds of updates, but now I will do it again. I do this both to make sure I am updated myself, but also because I see that there is a need for it in the community.
    I am still testing out a few things, and I hope that I will be able to add a function so every member can add their Atlassian Home ID so they can find the release notes in their instance. I am using a custom profile field for this, which is proving to be less straightforward than I would like...
    Overall, this database is working just fine, and I just might do some adjustments and improvements in 2026.

    Videos
    My videos section is already coming along fine. I am going to adjust some things and move over the remaining videos from YouTube, so I have a full set of all my videos here. For the Atlassian videos and the community videos, I will just finalize My Videos first, and then I will finalize those databases as well. I am also planning on making more videos in 2026, as I kind of lost traction in 2025 with all things going on.
    All in all, the videos section is pretty much done, and I am just going to improve a few things in 2026.

    Articles
    The Articles section needs some changes because I want to separate this from blogs, which is a different category of content, as I see it. As a result, I will restructure this and move some content to blogs so the Articles section will be more professional and helpful. This will be a big task, and I need to consider how to do this so it makes sense content-wise.
    Overall, the design and the code are where I want them, but I will add some functionality for views and split the content area that I have into other areas. I also want to see if I can add functionality for authorship for community-driven content to ensure that submitted articles provide value for the authors.
    In 2025, I have also received several questions regarding purchasing Articles or to add links in existing articles from various SEO companies. If I add that as a possibility, I need to add some functions to mark articles as sponsored. I also need to figure out how this will work for community Articles since any income from their articles obviously should go to them. I will dig into the E-commerce aspect of this in 2026 and see what can be done.

    Stories
    For Stories, I might invest a bit to get help to build this as the Digg-like service I was initially planning on building. For now, I will just let it sit the way it is, with a few tweaks to add the new Views feature that I built for the Atlassian App Updates database. To build this, I might dig into the Invision Community plugin features to see what can be done, but we will see...

    About Me
    This section will be rebuilt in 2026, and I have several changes planned. The first change is that I will rebuild the My Work section, as it was built from a CV perspective, and I have a different approach in mind. At the moment, it is a bit cluttered, and having employment, projects, and other things in one database is not exactly optimal. So I will rebuild this section and also update the information. For this database, I will also rebuild and restructure the People database that is connected because it currently clashes with a larger people project.
    For My Roles, I am considering changing things to better fit not just roles, but expertise in general. I am going to present my competence and expertise in more detail as people sometimes get surprised that I know more than they thought. I will also add some videos for this, I think.

    If time permits...
    Depending on how much time I have in 2026, it would be fun to build a people section and a job section. Nothing super fancy, but a nice way to present great people and a place where people can post if they are looking for work, or want to employ someone. I do get a ton of people asking me for references, connections, and so on, so why not take that to the next level?
    I already have the Awesome People database, so I could just expand on that and see what I can build.
    I have also toyed with the idea of doing some things with APIs. For example, I would like to see if I can build a website front for tickets to Jira Service Management so people can submit tickets. It would also be fun to see if I can get tickets from Jira Service Management as well to present on the website.
    We'll see what time permits in 2026.


    That is pretty much it.
    Not as much as I usually plan, but my main focus this year will be to finish my book and a few other things outside of the website.

  4. Chapter one is done - First draft.

    A3 Updates · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 11/08/2025 06:39 PM

    The first draft of the first chapter for the Advanced Atlassian Administration book is now done. While the smallest chapter, it feels good to have a first draft completed anyway, and I take the win.
    Great feedback from @Staffan Redelius and a good reminder from @Bryan Guffey to include that what we do as Atlassian administrators matters.

    Here are the chapters in the Introduction:
    Why did I write this book?
    Who is Jimi Wikman?
    My journey to become an Atlassian Administrator
    Your Users Are Incompetent
    Your Work is More Complex Than You Think
    You Are More Competent Than You Think
  5. I like Bitbucket and I think that it is not a bad product at all. If you want to use Bitbucket as a single developer, or a small team of 2–3 individuals, however, it is horribly overpriced, and it is not that obvious to you as a customer! The reason is that Atlassian is using dark pattern design to trick you into thinking you will pay $3.65 for a user, but in reality you will pay $18.25 because you can't purchase fewer users than 5!
    Let us take a look at what the GUI tells us when you are in Bitbucket and you go to check the plans to see if you want to upgrade.

    Nowhere on this screen does it say that there is a minimum number of users that you have to pay for. This view suggests that there is no such limit at all, which is what would make sense, as there is no reason to set a limit to the number of users for a product like Bitbucket.
    This is where I think you should show the expected cost for a plan change. In fact, I believe this is even mandatory, legally, in many countries as you are now not being honest about the cost, and you are basically scamming the users into paying a lot more than expected. In fact, for me, this jumped up 5 times because I just wanted the standard for myself to use on this website.
    So what does the Bitbucket pricing page say?


    Again this says $3.65 per user per month and nowhere can you find the information that there is a minimum number of 5 users that you have to pay for. They have purposely added 5 users to the pricing table, which technically makes this value true, as it is $3.65 per user if you select 5 users. For a total of $18.25, even for just one user.
    The ONLY place I have found where the actual pricing and the requirement that you have to pay for a minimum of 5 users are found is on the pricing FAQ, which is a tiny side link in Bitbucket in the overview page:


    This tiny link is also available on the Bitbucket pricing page in the FAQ, but not under a section you would expect, but under the section on over usage:


    On that page that you can find if you are really, really, really looking for it and explore all links, then you will find the following information:


    This kind of practices to hide costs in the hopes that someone will miss that the monthly cost is many times higher is just a bad look for Atlassian. For me as an Atlassian fan who happen to love the functionality of Bitbucket and Bitbucket pipelines, this is a huge turn-off. Not just that I have to pay almost as much to use Bitbucket standard than I do for Jira premium, which is priced at $18.30 per user and month, but the fact that they are using omitting that on the pricing pages by using dark pattern design to trick us...
    I will use the free version, as there is zero reason for me to pay that much for the standard functionality. This will also 100% prevent me from getting the software collection unless they will have a pricing that will work for me as a single user, or a team smaller than 5.
    I am disappointed to say the least.
  6. It was a difficult Monday morning for Atlassian today as almost all their services got affected by a DNS problem for the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1 cluster at AWS. This incident did not just affect Atlassian of course, but had several other sites and services feel the effect of this incident as well. The AWS team quickly identified the root cause and has been working hard to resolve this during the day. As of right now, it seems that most of the services has recovered, but API errors are still causing problems.
    While this has been cause for some issues where I personally was unable to access certain customers admin sections and some automations were not running, overall the impact has not been very great for me today. I did however get a bit annoyed when I could not access the old API documentation for Confluence data center when the newer seemed to work fine, but an event that was not too bad and lasted an hour or so before it was resolved.
    It can't be a great day for Atlassian support today to deal with this incident that is not due to anything they can actually control. It does however raise the question of redundancies and how outages like this can actually happen. As reported by Peter Sayer over at Networkworld, who reported this early on, this is not the first big outage that has happened recently:
    AWS Incident Log:
    https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

  7. Did Atlassian just kill Assets?

    Don’t #@!% the customer · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 10/03/2024 01:00 AM

    In the recent price increase blog post from Atlassian they not only announce another massive price increase, they also threw in even more restrictions to an already battered Assets product that has been slowly dying for a while now. Not only is it getting more and more restricted in terms of functionality, they now place a Consumption-Based Pricing for Assets and Virtual Service Agent. This is in itself a pretty bad idea as most companies do not like consumption based pricing because it makes budgeting almost impossible, but to add it based on asset objects will effectively remove any incentive to actually work with the product.

    Why are Atlassian doing this?
    I do not claim to know the reasons, but you do not have to be a genious to see the pattern of all the changes Atlassian are doing to Assets and other products. To me it seem clear that the Atlassian Cloud platform is lacking scalability and because scalability is not a part of the products non-fucntional requirements it is not top of mind when developing. As the services start to suffer from performance issues you can either rebuild for scale, or add limitations on the use of the product.
    Atlassian seems to focus on limitations rather than fixing the underlying issues as we see a large number of restrictions like number of issues in a board, number of issues you can bulk change and now how many Asset objects you can have.

    Does it make sense to limit Assets this way?
    Limiting an Assets product with how many asset objects you can have makes no sense at all. The number of objects simply refers to how much space you occupy in a database. Nothing nore.
    Having 10.000 objects or 100.000.000 objects is irrelevant in that regards because it is only storage and storage is very, very cheap.
    What becomes taxing is when you need to query data and then the number of objects does not really matter, it is the relations that needs to be presented when you look at objects and work with objects that can cause issues. This is what requires processing power and what can cause databases to lock up if not designed properly.
    As I know some of the people that built Insight back in the day and I have talked to them about the architecture, the original product that was built for Server and DC do not have these issues, so this seems to be a cloud product problem.
     
    Atlassian claim this will allow funding to build a better product
    I call BS on this. Atlassian is trying to spin this as us paying more will allow Atlassian to invest more time and money to make assets a better product. The thing is that Assets is not sold separately and we already must pay for Jira Service Management premium to get access to Assets. So we are already paying extra to get Assets.
    We are also getting the short end of the stick because Atlassian is failing to build at scale, or because they are getting greedy and try to milk us for more money anyway they can.
    Either way they are #@!% the customer.
     
    Should you use Assets in 2024?
    Full disclosure here: I absolutely love Assets. I have loved it since I first saw it in Riadas office when it was just a newborn product and I use it every day with much delight. It is to me an amazing product that I love to use and that I would use privately as well if it was more affordable.
    That being said I would not recommend anyone to use Assets today.
    The number of restrictions imposed these last 12 months alone is enough to discourage anyone from investing in a tool that constantly deteriorate in functionality. I have never seen a product continously be reduced in value instead of having more value added to it. Assets is to me unique in that way.
    Adding a ridiculously low limit like 50.000 asset objects tells me that Atlassian either don't understand Asset management at all, or they are going to reduce this number further in the future to make it fully consumption based. Either way it is cause for serious concern for anyone looking for a solid asset management tool.
    The fact that there are upper limits of 2 million objects has already made some companies look elsewhere and this is going to make this situation even worse.
     
    Is Assets dead, or is there hope?
    Sadly I think this killed Assets.
    Unless Atlassian announces a significant upgrade to Assets very quickly, I don't see any serious company investing in Assets as it is simply in decline functionality-wise and now they have to pay double for it. There are other solutions out there that are better alternatives long term as apps don't tend to loose functionality, unless imposed by Atlassian.
    I think that for companies that see asset management as an important part of their business, which many do, they will look towards other tools like ServiceNow and then the question is where do Atlassian stand compared to ServiceNow in other areas such as incident management and product life cycle management...
    I think that Assets only real place these days are on Data Center, at least for now. For cloud I would start looking at other options. Personally I am looking at Starhive as it is built by the creators of Insight, which is now assets. I talked to them recently and I think they will be interesting to follow as they have all the experience and expertise to build a far better product.
    They also understand asset management so they build for scale and without BS limitations to hide a flawed product.
  8. After a long and interesting week with Atlassian Team '25 taking place there were a lot of big changes when it comes to Atlassian. There was a pretty big shift in the company view of their products, and they are clearly aligning into a single platform rather than multiple ones. As refreshing and interesting this is, it also impacts this site since much of it is dedicated to Atlassian. Based on these things I am shifting things around a bit and making changes to the website.
    The biggest change so far is that I realize that I need more content around Atlassian that goes beyond what is database driven. In short that means that almost all content I have is from one of the databases and I lack proper pages with focused content. While Articles are great, I also need information pages and because of that I am adding an Atlassian section. The idea is that this section will hold a combination of Atlassian information and how I am connected to that information.
    As an example I am adding a landing page for Atlassian where I want to present information about Atlassian, a list of their products, some links and useful information. I will also add myself as an expert and later also link to other experts or companies that I collaborate with. This is my top priority and from that page I will start creating different subpages for Atlassian products and some information on what I am offering in terms of services as a consultant. I aim to focus on Rovo as that is now the core of the Atlassian platform and two pages for the two new collections that I have a feeling more people will want to know more about.
    The goal here is to make great pages that can generate traffic.

    Tags and organization of content
    When it comes to content I am also continuously working on my tags to clean out unused ones and adding new ones that are needed. In this event alone I will be adding dozens of new tags and start adding them to new content. These new tags will partially be combined with a new category setup where each database will have a field for categorization. This categorization will then be connected to custom icons I will set up in Font Awesome that I just upgraded to the new V7 Pro+ package. This allows me to have up to 500 custom icons, which should be enough for now.
    With this new categorization you will also be able to filter content in each database, and for many categories you will have custom icons displayed to help identify what kind of content is in each object.
    By doing this I am also removing many of the categories used to classify content before. This should provide a more fluid experience and provide a better overview of content when it is not all compartmentalized into categories.
    Needless to say this is a very, very large project and with hundreds of tags to work through, it will take a while to get things sorted.


    The New Atlassian
    The new Atlassian also came with new graphics and new colors this year, and I am working on collecting all the Atlassian icons as SVG so I can use them in different ways, like adding them as fonts through Font Awesome. Atlassian announced two new products and added an icon for Assets this year, so I have added those as icons as well as tags. I am still chasing down the so-called Platform Apps, which are Goals and Teams for example.
    Color wise we got four "new" colors this year, or rather Atlassian added them as branding now for their product apps. Yellow, green, purple and orange are now added to the blue and white as highlight colors. I will add them as primary variables so I can use them across the site. I have also added them to my Figma file where I have decided to break out my Atlassian content to a new project.
    Based on these new colors I will also update my YouTube graphics.


    Speaking of YouTube and Videos
    When it comes to YouTube and Videos I feel that I am moving towards a good setup here on the website. I have set up the categorization standard on My Videos and I will just need to make some adjustments to the templates there, and then I think I am ready to start adding my YouTube videos and start working with them.
    Once the section for My Videos is done I will add the same templates to the Community Videos.

    This is going to be great!

  9. 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?


    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.

    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!
    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.
    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.
    Project Types vs Project Types
    There are now two Project Types in the form of Team Managed and Company Managed.
    In addition to this we also have two Template Types in the form of Software and Business template types.
    This is something I was not aware of and based on your selection of Templates when creating a Jira project you can now get completely different configurations for your Jira project! I will make a full review of the templates so you know what template this refers to and which have the Software configurations.

    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.
    I have to try this to see how this work because the description is a bit confusing to me.
    Wait, what?!
    Please note that when you paste a table into another table, it will not create a nested table in the selected cell.

    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...

    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.
    And saying “Goodbye” to Company Hub as an option for Confluence landing page.
    If you’d like to retain the feature of having a prominent entrypoint to this page on the nav and as the default landing page, the workaround is to create a separate Confluence space, add the Company Hub content on that space, and set this space as the Confluence default landing page.

    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:
    OpenAPI specification are now automatically discovered and synced to the API tab from repos on GitLab.com (cloud hosted). 
    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! 
    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.
    Custom room filters (now)
    In version 11.9 we introduced multi-select filters for portfolios, solutions, and programs inside of custom room pages. You can use these filters to select up to 10 of these teams and filter the room accordingly.
    Improved team hierarchy navigation (soon)
    We’re enhancing Jira Align’s navigation experience with a new hierarchical team selector, which provides you with a better way to visualize and navigate through your team structure. The new menu will simplify five options down to one in the top navigation bar. This new Teams menu lets you quickly access recent contexts and saved contexts, and see how your portfolios, solutions, programs, and teams relate to each other.
    Audit log archival policy (soon)
    To improve the performance of Jira Align, we’re updating our audit logs to automatically archive entries that are older than 13 months. This change will affect the administration audit log, work item audit logs, and queries to audit log API endpoints.
    Deep linking improvements (soon)
    We continue working to improve the experience when sharing links to a specific Jira Align page and set of filters.
    Support for Atlassian Smart Links (soon)
    Have you noticed how when composing a page in Confluence, links to other Confluence pages and Jira work items automatically resolve with a preview of the page/item name? These are known as Smart Links. Soon, links to Jira Align work items will also support this functionality.

    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.


    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.
  10. As the Invision Community version 5 is stabilizing I am moving my attention towards cleaning things up. I have mapped all old databases and I will begin removing those. I have also started to work on the new tags system, and yesterday I added quite a few new tags and deleted a few. I will continue this work, and I am also looking into how to best produce Swedish content for marketing purposes.
    A lot of fun things are happening behind the scenes right now, and I am working on cleaning things up and "killing my darlings" when it comes to databases. With the new way Invision Community is handling databases it is no longer possible to have a database that is not connected to a page, which makes having internal databases a bit tricky. I can get around this with some database magic, but I would prefer not to have to hack things, but it is what it is. Most of the databases though are not being used, or have very little content, so I plan to delete those databases, after I have saved the content if it is something I want to keep.
    When it comes to Articles I will do some cleaning there to make it more useful for the users. I have been using it for thoughts and articles with little consideration of the difference. It is time to change that and also to consider what value the articles are actually providing. Articles should have a value and if they don't, then they should be moved to my personal blog. I will also make sure that I publish at least one article every month, so I will start planning topics for 2025.
    I also realized that as I will focus a lot on the Swedish market as part of my new job. This means that since this site is in English, I need some strategy for making Swedish content. I have just purchased a few domain names for this purpose, and I'll see how I can best use this for promotional purposes. I will need to sit down and consider the best strategy for this, but I have a few ideas...
    When it comes to tags I have set up a strategic list of what tags I want to start with, and it is a fairly extensive list. I have started to create these tags and I will continue to do that for a few weeks. I will also go over all content, which is quite a lot of content, and re-tag content. I will also go over content in general to see just what kind of content I have. Some content I want to remove and some content I want to elevate with new graphics and some touch up. Some content I also want to re-publish or move to pair it with the content it should be. This means that some blog posts might become an article and some articles might become blog posts.
    There are a lot of things to be done, but much of this is behind the scenes, so things might seem a bit slow for you. So just be patient and you will see things in time :)
    Slow and steady wins the race.
  11. Now that Invision Community 5 is released it is time to restructure and build this site with a better focus. Up until now I have mostly played around with the new functionality and I have not moved a lot of content, but now it is time to re-focus the site. As I am continuing to work with Atlassian in my new job, that will also remain my focus here on the site, but I will refocus to be more about me than trying to build a community. There will still be community functionality of course, but it will be as a part of my content and not the main focus.
    The first thing that I need to do is to change the start page. Currently, it is just all content splashed and no real focus on direction. The new start page will have more focus on me, what I offer and how to get in touch with me. This means that much of the content that currently exist will be removed from the start page. I will also move some areas like My Personal Blog to be only for members and My Articles will be the focus for my writings. The Articles section will be renamed to just Articles and I will connect the two databases for articles differently than today.
    I will also create a new page for my book The Advanced Atlassian Administration Guidebook. This way I can prepare for when it is ready to be sold. My thoughts right now are to create a section for each of the chapters with information on what I intend to write there. I will also add a newsletter sign up so I can send out updates to those that want to learn more about the progress of the book. I will add a section on the main page for this as well to make it easy to find. On the book page I will also add information on how to participate in the Club by providing feedback on the content, or inspire new content.
    While this will not be a very large change for you as a member or visitor, it will be a lot of work behind the scenes to clean things out. The biggest changes for you will be a new navigation and the new pages for the start page and the book page.

  12. Governance, Authority and Strategy

    A3 Updates · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 02/09/2025 08:56 PM

    This week I have been a bit preoccupied with finding a new job. I have had 4 interviews this week and this weekend I have been wrestling with a decision as I have 3 very good work opportunities to choose from. Despite this I have been putting in some work on my book and I have added a fair bit of text in the Governance, Authority and Strategy chapters. I have also made some updates in other areas to clear some things up and revise things.
    In the Authority section I added information about leadership with the goal to define 8 leadership styles and how to use them in your role as Atlassian administrator. I know not a lot of Atlassian administrators think about leadership as they are often in a servant position, but I want to make it clear that you need to take lead when you have ownership over a work tool that very often is business critical.
    This then bled over to the Strategy section where I added information on organization maturity with some paragraphs about the user adoption process and the user adoption curve. I also started to add information on how to define product and platform criticality using the application criteria and criticality scale. While this is a fairly small part, it is important to be able to do this and show it to management in case you need to show how business critical the Atlassian platform is in an organization. It is also important so you can direct your strategies to the actual criticality so you don't act too lose or too strict in relation to it.
    In the Governance I have started to add sections for how to work if your organization have governance and if it does not have. This is mostly for when you don't have it, which is the norm I think, as that can be really tricky and easily burn you out.
    The last page is now page 98, but there are some half pages and whole pages still in that mix. Still there is progress, and I am not feeling any writer's block. It is just the process of getting a new job that is taking up most of my attention at the moment, but that should change soon.

  13. Invision Community 5.0.0 Released!

    General · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 02/06/2025 12:20 PM

    After more than a year of longing, Invision Community is finally released in its fifth incarnation. For me this means that in a few months the platform will be stable enough for me to get serious about this website again.
    It has been a long journey to get here, and I am super excited to finally, finally be able to put time and effort into this website again. I am still focusing my time of getting a new job and writing my book, but once life settles into a structured pace again, I will spend more time on this website for sure. For now, I just updated the site to the final version of Invision Community 5.0.0, and I will start planning the restructure and clean up a bit and then back into the My Work section to get that done.
    This is going to be Epic!

  14. Focusing on work at the moment

    A3 Updates · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 01/17/2025 10:16 AM

    In the coming weeks I will focus on work as I am moving back to consulting again, and I have several CV’s that needs to be rewritten for the new templates. I also need to write them in both English and Swedish, which takes a while since I am currently are focusing on 3 roles, but that can swell to 10-12 depending on the market. That means I have to write at least 6 new CV’s for the 3 roles I am currently looking at and so far I have done 2. I will eventually also update everything in the My Work section and the My Roles section.
    As far as writing goes I currently have around 65 pages written, and I am itching to write. I just need to get some work off my plate so I can focus on it. The goal is to have the first draft ready for review after the summer and then go through a few adjustment cycles before it is ready for release. This might be quicker or slower depending on where work takes me, but I have the basics already in my head, so I just need to get things out and written down.
    I am not sure how big this book will be, but probably around 600–1000 pages depending on how much in detail I want to go in certain areas. I also have not decided if I want to try to have this as a physical book, or just an E-book, but we’ll see. I’ll focus on writing it first, and then I’ll solve the rest later.

  15. As I keep working on the My Work database, I realize that I want to connect this with, sort of, a CV that show my professional proficiency related to the work I have done. I have been playing around with different thoughts and come to the conclusion that it may not be a bad idea to have a database for it. The reason for that is that I will go back to being a consultant again next year and having updated information with connections to My Work will be very nice indeed.
    I already have a database for Roles and I will repurpose and this will be very easy to do since much of it is pretty static. I will make these entries in two languages, so each entry will have a switch between English and Swedish. For the Assignments I will simply use a plugin block that I add to a text field. This will allow me to feed in entries from the My Work database automatically. I will play around with this a bit to see how I can best use this to make it look exactly like the CV I have in the downloads section.
    Speaking of the downloads section I will upload my CV’s again as I make the new ones. It should be pretty easy to do, especially if I put in the work to build the My Work properly. I will be able to get the listings of work automatically, but I will need to build multiple versions of the blocks to fetch the language specific fields depending on what language the user has selected. This should not be a problem, but it will be a bit time-consuming. As most CV’s have the same data, except for the description and in some cases the list of assignments, building this database and maintaining it should be a lot easier once I have this set up.
    For the areas where I have Employments, Education and Certificates I will simply just make blocks for that since they rarely need to be updated. For Area of expertise, Industry experience, Methodologies and Tools I will have to consider that a bit. The reason for that is that I want to link those to Tags and since you can only have one section for tags, I might want to set up a new database for that. This way I can use the database link field to select the “tags” I want to add to different sections. I have to test this and see if this works, otherwise the option is to make several blocks, and I am not that keen on doing that to be honest.
    To be able to work with Tags this way I need to make sure I can split the field values because they are saved as a comma-delimited list rather than individual items. This should not be that difficult, but I need to put in the time to actually solve that part.
    There is no shortage of fun things to build, but it takes time and I have to make sure it does not cause stress. This is because I am still recovering from a long period of extreme stress and working on the website should be fun and cause for joy and creativity and not stress. So, I will take it slow and put this on the to-do list while I continue to work on the My Work section.
    You can follow the progress in the Roadmap as always.


  16. Atlassian Cloud Changes and how to work with them in the future

    Atlassian Product Update Database · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 11/07/2024 08:58 AM

    Keeping up with the changes that are done in the Atlassian Cloud products is a full-time job it seems, but in the Atlassian Product Update database I do my best to get things a bit more organized and easier to follow. Today I made a few changes to the database and updated the fields a bit. These changes also impact the work to update the database, and I am now adding these new steps to my daily routine.
    The biggest change I have done is to split out the New This Week status as a Yes/No toggle and adding a link to the Atlassian Product change items. The New This Week is only viable for one week and every Wednesday they need to be removed to make room for new ones from the Atlassian Cloud Changes list. I have made this toggle visible when viewing the item itself, which makes it super easy to update.
    The link to the Atlassian Product Change take you directly into the Product Update object in your Jira Administration. This is for convenience for those who want to check the object itself. It also make it easier for me to follow up on things in case I want to double-check something, or refer to the actual update.
    My daily routine now will include to go over the daily updates and add them to the Atlassian Product Update database. Then every week I will go through all entries in the Atlassian Cloud Changes to make sure they are updated properly in the database. This will then provide me a nice list of the latest updates that I can use when making my weekly videos.

  17. Almost time to switch to V5 now

    General · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 10/30/2024 07:36 AM

    While there are plenty of bugs still in Invision Community V5, they are not bad and compared to the state of this site right now it is still a big improvement. I am still waiting for the next Beta to come out though as there is a bug with the Tags that I want to have fixed before I switch over. Once that is fixed I will most likely switch over and start working on the site again.
    When I switch over things will be very messy for a while, but that is expected. I will basically revert all customizations and then start over with the V5 engine to redesign certain templates. Right now I am saving all the templates as code for safekeeping, and so I can check what customizations I have done in the past. Once I have that I will make a fresh export to the beta site with the production data and production files.
    Next step is to change the templates for all databases to the default ones. I will then delete the old template files to make sure there are no customizations anywhere that can cause problems. After that I will do a V5 upgrade and if all goes well then I will just wait for the next Beta release to get the Tags bug fixed before I upgrade the production site.
    Once everything is upgraded I will start configuring everything. I will focus on the Articles, Stories and Atlassian Product Updates since those are the ones I will work with most after the upgrade. After that I will probably take a look at the My Projects database, Videos database and then the Atlassian CVE's. This can all change depending on what I see I need to focus on next.

  18. Invision Community now in Beta!

    General · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 10/11/2024 06:52 AM

    Yesterday, Matt announced that Invision Community V5 is available in Beta. This is amazing as that means that we are now moving into the final bug crushing before a stable release. This also means I can now set up a test site and test the upgrade and start playing around with it to see how it will behave with an existing site rather than just an empty one.
    While I still expect a few months before a stable release, I feel that things are moving in the right direction and I can finally start building things here again! I will see if I can set up a test install here this weekend and do a test upgrade. This should tell me roughly what to expect for the live site.
    Once I have that, I can start playing around with the templates and things of that sort. While it is now almost impossible to work with database link designs as we can no longer access those templates, I think I can work around that since the new tag system will replace many of those areas anyway.
    Overall, I am excited to sink my teeth into testing Invision Community V5 in more depth using a self-hosted test site rather than a cloud hosted alpha site 🙂
     
  19. As Invision Community v5 is around the corner, I am digging deeper into the content.
    At the moment I am deep into planning the structure as it is a bit tricky to get all the areas set up the way I want them. This is because of the content structure is so diverse and because I want to split things up a bit, which will lead to quite a lot of configurations. I always tend to get things a bit complicated, then I simplify too much, and then...well, you get the idea 🙂
    So this time I need to step back again and consider the pros and cons of the approaches, as the new tag system really will throw a wrench into this thought process. There must be a value in how I divide things, or it will just be a waste. Right now, I am considering the SEO effect as I have quite a lot of content, but I have not really put any effort into SEO in the past because this is a playground.
    Part of this is also a massive update of pretty much all content. Not only to freshen up the content, but also to change all graphics to WebP and remove the branding. This to be more in line with the new branding, making the site much faster, AND to make the site easier to rebrand in the future.
    So, I have a ton of work before me and I absolutely love it!

  20. Stories and how to make it useful

    News Database · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 10/05/2024 10:32 AM

    Back in the day, Digg.com was one of the hottest websites in the world, acting as an aggregated link farm for all blogs and news outlets in the world. It ultimately failed because it became too bloated and because large groups started to mass vote to get higher rankings. When planning Stories, these are things to consider and to design around so I don't repeat these mistakes. Instead, I need to focus on what made Digg something valuable to the users.

    The first advantage is that Stories is focused on a fairly limited number of topics, where the Atlassian ecosystem is the main focus. While the Interesting and Ways of Working categories are fairly broad areas, they are still limited to a reasonably niched community. I also do not expect to go viral anytime soon, so the volume should be manageable. If things escalated, then we can always split the database into several areas....which I might do anyway now that I think about it...
    Functionality wise, I will try to keep things as easy as possible and expand only if I see that it actually lead to more value. The main focus will of course be to make sure the users quickly can get to the website to read the full article. The secondary function is to rate the Stories to help them become more visible, and the third is to provide a discussion area for the story for those that want to comment or discuss the story.
    I think that once I have some traffic it might make sense to split up to have more than one sorting on the start page, but in the beginning I will just have the latest Stories. I will also have the latest Stories block for the sidebar, and then I can add blocks for top ranked over time and make that a tabbed block.
    For now my main focus is to update the categories for the Atlassian categories, since they are the main focus, and then I will consider if I want to split the Stories for the other main focus areas, or keep them in one database.
    Stories will be a fun thing to build, I think, and I will look at how I can combine this with the Release notes as well...
     
     

  21. What are Atlassian's Core Values?

    Be the change you seek · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 09/29/2024 05:05 PM

    Atlassian has been built on top of five values that have guided their company, the people that work for Atlassian and their products. These five values are:
    Open company, no bullshit Build with heart and balance Don’t #@!% the customer Play, as a team Be the change you seek  
    Open company, no bullshit
    Openness is root level for us. Information is open internally by default and sharing is a first principle. And we understand that speaking your mind requires equal parts brains (what to say), thoughtfulness (when to say it), and caring (how it’s said).
    Build with heart and balance
    “Measure twice, cut once.” Whether you're building a birdhouse or a business, this is good advice. Passion and urgency infuse everything we do, alongside the wisdom to consider options fully and with care. Then we make the cut, and we get to work.
    Don’t #@!% the customer
    Customers are our lifeblood. Without happy customers, we’re doomed. So considering the customer perspective - collectively, not just a handful - comes first.
    Play, as a team
    We spend a huge amount of our time at work. So the more that time doesn’t feel like “work,” the better. We can be serious, without taking ourselves too seriously. We strive to put what’s right for the team first – whether in a meeting room or on a football pitch.
    Be the change you seek
    All Atlassians should have the courage and resourcefulness to spark change – to make better our products, our people, our place. Continuous improvement is a shared responsibility. Action is an independent one.
     
     
    Are they still living according to these Values?
    Well, Atlassian slip up from time to time, and that is when we pick up the proverbial pen and add a post here to call them out on it. Unfortunately, Atlassian seems to be in a growing phase and with their work from anywhere policy things are slipping through more and more lately. We see more bugs being shipped to customers and more and more bad practices of greed and bad quality products happening.
    So let us call them out on it and make sure the Atlassian we all have grown to love and admire does not lose their way, but stick to their values.
     

  22. This weekend, I have been having some fun getting serious about images. I have also done some work to prepare for the release of Invision Community that I assume will drop around the end of the year. It might be sooner, but I am in no hurry, as I have plenty of other things to do at the moment. One of those things is to plan the new structure of the website here, as there are quite a lot of changes happening for both content and design.
    This weekend I have updated the forums a bit so they have descriptions and are toned back a bit when it comes to colors and things like that. I am also adding a new level since the new design require that, and I have moved a few things around to accommodate the new databases I have added. Those databases are the Atlassian Release Notes, Atlassian Product Versions and the Atlassian CVE databases.
    In the clubs, I have created two new clubs: The Swedish Jira Users and the Content Creator clubs. Swedish Jira Users will be for local Swedish users that prefer to discuss things in Swedish, and the Content Creator club are for those of us that create content on various social media and on our websites or blogs. This should be enough for now and show that there are more than just one club.
    For the blogs, I have added a second group blog named "If you don't - Mind" where I will post more about psychology and how that affects us. It is a pretty big area and I hope we will see that people will enjoy it, have opinions and of course contribute with their own perspectives.
    I am also getting back to add Stories that I will rebuild a bit to remove the colors to unify the color scheme. For now, I am adding news update as I find them in the Atlassian Community and some other resources.
    I am going to duplicate the databases for Articles and Videos because I want to divide them into My Articles (since it is my website) and community content. So rather than messing with the categories, I will keep the database separately. This way I can also develop those separately, which will be good since I might have different need than the community in general. Both Articles and Videos will be rebuilt to reset the design and go back to a more standardized template. I also want to make sure the videos especially get more room in the display template.
    I will also make some changes to the My Projects database, since I have not updated that in a while. As I am looking for new employment, I will also update my CV's in the Files section and I want to make sure I have my projects updated with proper information in case potential employers drop by and read it.
    For all content, I will do a massive overhaul of the graphics. This is one of the reason why I am also investing in graphics and set up new workflows. The idea is that all content will have new graphics that is optimized and in the WebP format. While doing this, I am also going to promote some content or repurpose it into new content. This will reduce the content size and improve load times by a lot, but it is also a massive undertaking that will take a while to get through.
    So there are things happening, even if you might not see much design wise 🤖
  23. 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.
  24. I am currently alpha testing the new V5 version of Invision Community, and it will be some time before it will be ready. It has a lot of potential and I very much look forward to it being released, but it has a lot of bugs at the moment, so I don't expect it to be released anytime soon. This means I have more time to play around with things, but it also means that I will probably not have any new site done this year, or very late this year.
    This is neither good nor bad, but the way things are.
    There are a lot of other things I can still do on this site to prepare it for the new design. One of those things is to go over all the content and adjust it a bit to make sure it fit the new structure and focus. I already wrote about the new focus in my personal blog here:
     
    What I am looking into deeper now is how the new tags system work and how I can best use that. The new tags system will allow for more of a node thinking, which is something I have wanted for a very long time! This new system will allow for easy organization of content, so you have tag sites that will give you the latest and greatest content for a specific tag from all products within Invision Community. This will be a very interesting way to summarize and group content that I very much look forward to.
    I am currently considering how I can best utilize this functionality, since all tags are curated and require manual setup. I want to combine this with the databases, but I am not 100% sure how I want to do that yet. I know that everything related to Atlassian as a company will be one tag and then one tag for every Atlassian product. I also want one tag for each of the Ways of Working and Interesting categories. This means that I can provide a pretty nice structure of information and allow people to subscribe to the content they are interested in.
    I have not yet decided how to do with other companies and other products, but I figure I will add some of the largest companies and products that I will write about most...
     
     
    This will require quite a lot of work to create the tags and then go over all content and tag them with the new tagging system. It does allow me to touch up and republish some articles, though, which is always a good thing.
    So, I guess the summary here is that I am kind of waiting for the release of V5, so I can start working on this site again and rebrand myself again. For now there is not much point in doing anything since the code is still moving in V5, and I am not sure what CSS classes I will be using once it gets released.
    I will keep posting thoughts here until we are getting closer to release.

  25. Atlassian Align honey trap

    Don’t #@!% the customer · 💫 Jimi Wikman · 07/10/2024 12:51 PM

    When it comes to Jira Align, there are a ton of things to write about, as it is a black hole and it seems to break every value Atlassian stands for. One area stands out however and that is the honey trap website that lock content behind a submit form. A submit form that ask you to provide contact information to access some Jira Align videos. These videos are available on YouTube and even the videos tab of Atlassian Community!
     

     
    This website is what you will find many people link to when people ask for how to get a demo of Jira Align.  The page have nothing of value, and the only way to access the so-called Demo Center is to fill out your contact information. This is what is known as a honey trap. A page designed for the sole purpose of gathering contact information for sales and marketing purposes.
    If you fill this form in, then all you will get is a list of videos of Jira Align. The worst part is that these videos are all available on YouTube as well as on the videos tab of the Atlassian Align section of the Atlassian Community. So providing information on this page will give you nothing of value.
     

     
    This is not consistent with the Atlassian values and I think this website should be taken down. Whoever decided that creating honey traps to #@!% the customer, should read up on the Atlassian values because this page is a stinker!
    Do you agree or disagree? Write a comment and let us know.

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