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[Nikki] Good morning! I'm Nikki and this is Biro and this is a Monday coffee with Jexo. Where we go through the last week's news and updates from across the Atlassians world.

[Biro] Right, so another Monday, another bunch of news. And we'll start today with the Forge announcements. So it was actually a couple of them. Forge has officially come out of beta and it's now in general availability, which is great to see as well as the announcement of the early access program for the Marketplace apps. So you can actually now submit your interest for the early access program and submit your apps to be listed in the Marketplace. This, to be honest, it's a huge step forward for Forge. I've also noticed that Atlassian is starting to position only for the cloud development platform. One of the main questions from now on when starting to build a new app will be building with Forge or will be building with Connect. And I think the future question will be when do we actually port our current apps to Forge? And that's the announcement, which we will have the links in the, either in the description or in the comments as well.

[Biro] All right, Nikki, do you want to go?

[Nikki] So the next up is a new release in Next-gen project. The long-awaited Original Time Estimate field is not available in Jira Next-gen projects. And this article explains a few nice use cases, also, including some nice automation examples. Here you can, for example, see how to aggregate the Original Time Estimates from the sub-tasks to the parent issues. So that's quite nice. You can pick this up and try it on your project. And there is also an explanation of how this Original Time Estimate field works together with the time tracking, which is by default in JIRA. And it works completely the same as under Classic projects in JIRA. So the original estimate is basically the base for the Remaining time in your time tracking. So this is great to see added some Classic features are also coming to Next-gen and we are definitely awaiting a little bit more of them to come up pretty soon, I guess.

[Biro] Yeah, we also make use of those fields in some of our apps. So it's great to see that Next-gen it's getting there. And speaking of Next-gen and Classic, another bit of announcement from last week was simplifying how you create projects in Jira Coud. And actually, these are, I would say nonfunctional changes, more positioning showing where Atlassian thinking is in terms of the future of the projects and focus. The first bit is the templates they're getting a new central hub, and it really shows the importance place of teams. We also started to introduce the notion of templates we currently have in one of our up and Foxly, prioritization methods as templates. And we're planning to introduce more of this notion in all of the other apps. Kind of aligned to where Atlassian thinking is in supporting teams as much as possible with, I would say deployable methods that you can utilize.

[Biro] The second part of this announcement is the rename/rebrand of Next-gen and Classic projects. They will, from now on, will be addressed as a Team-managed for Next-gen and Company-managed for Classic. I think this is a way better definition from my perspective. It helps convey when they should be used, by under what circumstances and by what teams. It also helps squash the rumors that classic projects will go away. And the focus is strictly Next-gen with this modification. And the other thing that I've noticed in it, there's a paragraph in there. Let me just highlight it.

[Biro] "We're working towards a world where the only fundamental difference between Team-managed and Company-managed projects will be how they are administered" Which it's a very interesting statement, to be honest. Because the way the future of these project types is explained, makes it sound that they will both have the exact same capabilities in the future. But just the way they're setting up is different. So that's also an interesting insight to know that one day you will not have this Next-gen, I mean Team-managed limitations the way you have them today.

[Nikki] Yeah, but it's definitely going there also from the feature perspective, as you can see. Of course, there are some limitations now, some things that you cannot do in Next-gen and you can do in Classic, but it's definitely going away with new improvements. Remember three years ago or two and a half years ago, I think, when they first launched the Next-gen, it didn't have much. The best feature was the Roadmaps - that's why we used it. But they're getting there over this year. So I think soon, especially with the ability to administer custom fields across multiple Next-gen projects will definitely be a big step forward.

[Biro] I remember it. I remember it very clear, especially the fact that there were no releases in Next-gen and all of a sudden out of the blue "poof" releases.

[Biro] All right. Let's move on. Next up. Nikki, do you want to talk about certification?

[Nikki] Definitely. So last week, there were a few announcements about new certification programs. So first announcement was this Certification Accelerator Experience. So this specifically developed, at least they say it in this article, for attendees of Team 21. So when you are registering for a Team 21, and you would like to be part of this Certification Accelerator Experience where you can learn in the groups about Jira and prepare for the examinations, the examinations aren't part of this program, it's just the preparation for them, then you can register and tick the box during your registration for Team 21. There was also another announcement. So let me quickly re-share my screen.

[Nikki] So this is the second announcement that was done last week. They announced the new beta version of the Atlassian university. And when I was having a look on it, basically what they've done was, at least it seems like that, they created this centralized place where you can go and have a look on what certifications or what classes you can take. So you have information there about what the class is about, how much it costs when the class is going to be run and by who. These classes are not necessarily run by Atlassian themselves, but they're run by authorized training partners. So you can definitely go and have a look if you need to take some examinations and you can find them on this Trello board.

[Biro] Yeah. I never actually liked learning on my own. I really love this concept. It's really useful for those of us that like to share. And listen to peers as a more let's call it a collaborative way of learning. So that's pretty neat to be honest.

[Biro] Okay. That's some good stuff there let's go to the next piece of news, which is a very much awaited Jira Cloud to Cloud migration. And this has been a popular feature request. So it's really great to see this being actively worked on. It is early access, but to be honest, it's exciting because as more enterprises move to Cloud, we've started seeing this approach where organizations, rather than moving to one single large Cloud instance, separate their departments or even types of projects or types of portfolios into smaller JIRA instances.

[Biro] So having this ability to migrate projects from one instance to another will be a valuable piece of functionality to attract more companies to use Cloud. Having this ability, as I mentioned, is early access with limited features. So if you're interested in migrating Jira classic projects or core projects, then you can apply for this early access. I don't think they have the ability for Next-gen yet. And basically, you're helping them test the feature and give feedback. So yeah, there are a bit of instruction in there on how to participate, the link for submission and also what they're looking for exactly. So go through that article and see if that's something that you're interested in participating.

[Biro] Okay. Kind of related to that around migration and moving to the Cloud and such. Let me share my screen again. [Biro] We have this, a wee bit of a quiz here, which is a very simplified six questions quiz. Probably picked up from their most popular FAQ's from server clients, looking to move away from what is now or will be a deceased product. Based on your answers to these six questions, Atlassian will either recommend you moving to Jira Cloud Enterprise, Data Center or Cloud Standard. It's an interesting quiz to take, to be honest, but I know that organizations have a lot more complex factors and decision-making factors in where they want to go and where they want to place their future, to put it like that. So just don't take it as a deciding factor. It's a super basic quiz.

[Nikki] Yeah. I found it on a forum under one of the questions about the migrations from Server to Cloud. So I think it's a fun thing to do, and it might give you some base. You always need to start from somewhere, right?

[Biro] Yeah, exactly. Okay. Article of the week.

[Nikki] Yay! So for the article of the week, I have here "How to run effective meetings and thrive". So when I read this article, what they're describing here is what is the difference between an effective meeting and an efficient meeting and that they are definitely not the same. So if you're interested in that, you can go and have a look. There is also this pretty nice chart that should help you figure out if you really need to have a meeting, or you can just go and buy doughnuts yourself, and you don't need to call people in order to do that. Or, you know, if, if you can just figure out in the messages or via slack, and it's quite interesting.

[Nikki] And in the end, there are describing when is the best time to have a meeting for certain types of decisions. So if you need people to be creative and you need to run some brainstormings or creativity meetings, it's better to do it in the morning because people are most creative after they wake up - or at least some of them. And in the afternoon, it's better to have meetings around some kind of decision-making because people are better at taking decisions and problem-solving in the afternoons. So it's quite interesting.

[Biro] Yeah. That's cool. Where's the part about doughnuts?

[Nikki] The part about doughnuts. Okay. Let me just find that part...

[Biro] I only care about doughnuts, I don't care about meetings. Tell me about the part of the doughnuts 🍩

[Nikki] Do you just want an excuse to eat doughnuts? That's Biro 😂

[Biro] All right. Okay. And also another bit from, in the news from Atlassian Ventures, actually. So Atlassian invested in Snyk. Atlassian was already partnering up with Snyk, I believe. We got some, like some free benefits from Snyk by moving to Bitbucket as well. So Atlassian did integrate, Snyk into Bitbucket and the service offering, and it really made sense for them to help fund as well. The investment was made from a recently announced Atlassian Venture fund. So it's really nice to see that they're putting that money to good use, to put it like that. And Atlassian joined as a new investor in Snyk and joined the existing likes of Salesforce and Google venture in what is, I think, sneaks fifth investment round of over 300 million. And I personally backed that up, to be honest, I don't know how much my opinion matters, but I like Snyk and I praise them a lot for their passion for revolutionizing the cloud application security space.

[Biro] We also use them for detecting dependency vulnerabilities on a Bitbucket and such. So I think they're doing great things. And I'm pretty sure that this round, the fifth round, which seems quite a lot, this fifth round of investment is well thought through.

[Biro] And I guess that's kind of it for this week. Thank you everyone that joined us live or watching this in a replay. We'll continue this next Monday at 9:00 AM GTM with hopefully more juicy news from the Atlassian ecosystem. So thank you for watching. Have a great week and we'll see you next week.

[Nikki] Thank you for watching. See you 👋