What did we talk about?
- Atlassian named a Leader in Enterprise Service Management
- DevOps experts: Special showcase opportunity
- Atlassian Marketplace reached $2 billion in lifetime sales
- Rename ‘epics’ in your company-managed projects
- Cloud-to-cloud migration for Jira is here
- Removing the Companion app from Confluence Cloud
- Survey: Partners help Atlassian improve the Partner Directory!
- Compass is in open alpha now!
- Security issue in Log4J
- 📚 Article of the week: 4 tech stories that gave us hope this year
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Atlassian named a Leader in Enterprise Service Management
The Forrester Wave Enterprise Service Management report for Q4 2021 was released, and it places Atlassian's Jira Service Management solution as a leader.
Forrester mentions Atlassian as having the strongest strategy and has scored on 18 out of 22 of the ESM valuation scores among the other leaders in the space.
JSM is a great tool, used intensively by many teams across the organization in conjunction with other tools like Confluence, OpsGenie, Halp, etc.
DevOps experts: Special showcase opportunity
Quick shoutout to all DevOps experts out there. If you would like to take part in the Atlassian DevOps customer showcase have a look at this post where you can find the registration link. Atlassian is creating DevOps showcases with tips and tricks, or learnings that they can share with the community.
Atlassian Marketplace reached $2 billion in lifetime sales
The Atlassian Marketplace has just surpassed 2 billion dollars in lifetime sales. What a great piece of news, and let's take a moment to celebrate the real heroes of this achievement, the Marketplace Partners, developers, and teams that have been working hard throughout the years to bring the flexibility and extendability you can imagine to Atlassian users.
It is motivating to see the need for apps grow so fast, especially knowing it took 7 years for the marketplace to reach the first billion then only two years for the second, and we're getting mighty close to 1 billion annual sales.
There are some impressive numbers in the article, like for example, the fact that there are 28.000 app installations every week and that more than 70% of Jira and Confluence instances have at least one app installed.
Rename ‘epics’ in your company-managed projects
Soon you'll be able to find a "hierarchy" tab in your Jira admin settings on Free and Standard plans as well where you can manage issue hierarchy up to the epic level. Here you'll be able to rename Epic to anything you wish like for example Feature, Campaign, Program, and so on. This change will be then reflected in all company-managed projects.
And another change to be aware of, only issue standard issue types can be linked to Epics. You won't be able to link Epics to sub-tasks anymore. If you’re an Advanced Roadmaps user that has epic links for issues above the epic level, you’ll need to update these epic links by Feb 1st, 2022 to ensure this relationship data is not lost.
And last 2 smaller changes to epics:
- Epics will use "Issue color" instead of "Epic color" on kanban and backlog.
- "Issue summary" will be used as the name of the epic.
- The last change is related to JQL and search where a new JQL function called "parent()" is introduced to incorporate the functionality of "epic link" and "parent link".
But don't panic, the epic link and parent link JQL searches will continue to work but it's encouraged to use the new one for future searches.
These changes are being rolled during mid-2022 so keep an eye on the updates. If you have any feedback you can leave your comments on this post!
Cloud-to-cloud migration for Jira is here
A feature useful for everyone, cloud-to-cloud Jira migration is now possible. With this early version, you can move users, Jira Software, and Work Management projects between Jira sites.
This will enable you to: combine data across two or more cloud sites split a cloud site into multiple cloud sites duplicate a cloud site copy specific projects from one cloud site to another.
Removing the Companion app from Confluence Cloud
Important announcement you don't want to miss if you're using the Companion app for Jira Confluence Cloud. Last week Confluence team announced that after recent feedback about the usability of the Companion app they took the decision to remove the app from Confluence Cloud.
You won't be able to edit the documents using the app after 31st March 2022.
Companion app for confluence allows you to edit the Confluence files from the desktop app and automatically save changes to Confluence.
If you use the Companion app on Confluence Cloud then have a look at this post where you can find suggested workarounds and you can also leave your feedback.
Survey: Partners help Atlassian improve the Partner Directory!
Atlassian is planning to improve the Partner Directory, and Bridget is looking for Partners to fill in a short 7 questions survey with feedback about the current portal. Spare a minute of your time if you're a Partner and get a $10 Visa cash e-card.
Compass is in open alpha now!
Exciting news for everyone who's waiting to try out the new Atlassian product Compas Alpha that was announced on Team'21. The Atlassian team last week announced that Compas alpha is now in the open alpha program and anyone can go and give it a try! Exciting, right?
Compas alpha is a tool designed for engineers to help them better navigate distributed architecture and improve cross-team communication and collaboration.
Compas alpha allows you to create a components catalog, define owners, and connect components to tools like Bitbucket or GitHub so it can then inform you about the latest changes to the components in the activity feed. There are many more features like scorecards, dashboards, dependency management and so on so do have a look at the post if you're interested.
Security issue in Log4J
Last Friday, when everyone was getting ready for the weekend a major security issue was surfacing in the world of Java that is still causing widespread panic.
A critical vulnerability was found in Log4J, one of the most widely used logging frameworks in the entire Java ecosystem. This vulnerability allows an attacker to run arbitrary code on the target system. The Log4J library is widely used by many reputable services like Steam, Minecraft, Apple iCloud, Cisco, and even Atlassian products.
The Atlassian security team is investigating how the vulnerability impacts Atlassian products. There was an FAQ page published on Friday answering some burning questions. It seems that if you run on-prem Atlassian products and if you have modified the default logging configuration to enable the JMS Appender functionality, remote code execution may be possible in Server and Data Center versions of Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, Crowd, Fisheye, and Crucible.
The recommendation is to work with your internal security team to mitigate the issue. have a look at the FAQs to get suggestions on how to mitigate.
📚 Article of the week: 4 tech stories that gave us hope this year
And we'll finish this year with a great article describing 4 tech stories that bring you hope this year.
Read about floating robots that are aiming to clean up the great pacific garbage patch that is currently 3 times larger than France. There are a few companies developing and deploying cleaning boats that run on solar power to lower the carbon footprint.
Another interesting tech story is about wind walls that can produce energy. Go ahead and read it to learn more about these cool tech ideas and projects.