Summit 2014 has officially kicked off! Mike and Scott delivered an exciting opening keynote address this morning, and over 2100 Summit attendees are digging into the breakout sessions as we speak. If you weren’t able to catch the live-stream, here are five juicy announcements made during the keynote.
1: Portfolio management, JIRA-style
Managing a portfolio of products, each with their own schedules, release cadences, and pools of resources–human and otherwise–is hard. Really hard. But fear not: Jira Portfolio is here! With this killer new add-on for Jira, business owners can keep their high-level plans connected to what’s happening on the ground with their development teams. Plus there are powerful bells and whistles for capacity planning, modeling various schedule scenarios, and getting that all-important bird’s eye view. And the best part is that it’s available to install on premises right now, with a hosted offering coming soon.
2: Stash Data Center
Stash is already the most powerful and flexible Git repository management tool on the market. Now, it’s also the most scalable. Starting right now, teams can test-drive a beta version of Stash Data Center that is horizontally scalable and built for high-demand environments. Designed for enterprise teams, Stash Data Center offers the entire Stash feature-set, plus the ability to be deployed in a clustered environment. If high-availability is high on your list, you’ll want to check this out right away.
3: Agent-based pricing (and more) in Jira Service Desk 2.0
…and the people rejoiced! Since we announced it’s arrival at last year’s Summit, thousands of IT teams around the world have been using Jira Service Desk to manage their queues and rock their SLAs. Today JSD 2.0 hits the streets with a new agent-based pricing model. Teams can get started for as little as $25 per month–no matter how many customers you’re providing support to. But that’s just part of the story: JSD 2.0 brings you advanced SLA management, easier onboarding, and the option to create and track service desk requests via email. With accessibility improvements like these, teams across the entire company like HR, Legal, and Finance can easily use Jira Service Desk to create self-serve portals and automate their workflows (ours do!).
4: Collaborative editing and first-class files
If you’re like us, you use Confluence constantly. And it’s not uncommon for two or more people to need to make updates to the same page at the same time. That’s why we’re bringing real-time collaborative editing to Confluence. (yes!) Timeframe for delivery is a bit nebulous at this point, but the dev team is already plugging away on it. As exciting as that is, let’s face it: not every document can live as a Confluence page. So we’re giving files and attachments the first-class treatment in the upcoming 5.7 release. You’ll be able to share files through Confluence and collaborate on them in much the same way you already do with pages, using @mentions and in-line comments. Oh, and in-line commenting? Yeah, that’s coming to Confluence pages in 5.7, too.
5: Hipchat for iOS8
The Hipchat team has been hard at work bringing you a re-designed and re-imagined app for iOS8. You can share files from any app on your iPhone or iPad with any teammate or room via Hipchat. There’s also an option to add Hipchat to your lock screen, complete with direct access to your recently active chat rooms so you can jump into the most important conversations straight away. But my favorite part is the new interactive notifications. Now you can pull them down to read the whole message, and even reply right from that view. Super-slick!
6: Bonus highlight: growth, growth, and more growth!
Some pretty amazing numbers were dropped. For starters, we’ve grown our customer base by 9,000, pushing our total customer count to 40,000. We opened new offices in Manila and Austin to accommodate all our t-shirts the 300+ new Atlassians that have joined our ranks this year. In the feel-good department, Atlassian employees spent 1,600 hours volunteering this year, and to date we’ve helped provide school facilities, books, and scholarships for 170,000 children through the non-profit organization Room To Read. Not bad for a couple of college pals who started a company because they didn’t want to get a “real job”.
I could go on for another 15 highlights or so, but you’d probably rather hear it straight from the source.