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[Nikki] Good morning! I'm Nikki...

[Biro] ...and I'm Biro.

[Nikki] And this is Monday coffee with Jexo where we scan through the last week's news and updates from across the Atlassian world. The links for the sources on the topics we are going to discuss Ireland in the description below.

[Biro] All right. So the first thing we're talking today is about the benefits of moving to cloud. And this was actually a survey that was made by Atlassian. They asked around 300 of their customers that move to cloud. What are their top benefits and reasons why they move to cloud?

[Biro] So the article mentions a few... And there's actually a graph that you can see here with all of the top benefits and that people basically agree on. The number one benefit for most customers, most clients that agree on this is the peace of mind about upgrades and security. And I've personally been leading DevOps and TechOps teams for a while now.

And I know how valuable it is to use managed services, having all your tools and services run smoothly while you focus on your craft is a blessing to be honest and not to mention the security aspect of it. Having a saas partner and relying on their investment in security standards and practices helps you not have to do it yourself and put money into that.

[Biro] And that also ties into the third reason, which is improved employee satisfaction. Not having to deal with software upgrades and security issues and being able to just focus on innovation and not having to deal with all of the administrative stuff is it's honestly what makes me and my team happy. And that was in the previous roles as well as currently in Jexo. So we rely on managed services as much as we can and saas tools and such. Amongst other reasons for cloud, there was the speed and accessibility, performance, and also a low cost of ownership, which is an important one. So if you're the fence, whether to move to cloud or not, I really recommend reading this article...

[Nikki] I saw actually under community also the poll on this topic and the first option was the most picked one. So I think across the channels, the most people are picking the not having a need to do the maintenance.

[Nikki] So the next up are improvements to Confluence Cloud macros.

[Nikki] So in this community, both Jonno project manager at Atlassian announced that they revamped the Confluence macro dropdown and search. So if you remember the whole add new macro ui experience was quite old and now it should match with the overall experience you are getting in Confluence. So here you can see the little Gif about it...

[Nikki] But what's a bigger change is changing how you edit individual macros. So confluence is getting rid of edit modal and moved it to the side panel. That means that now you're able to edit macros and see the effect on the page at the same time, which is great. Again, you can see it in the Gif over here. These changes will be brought over the next few days. And Jonno also mentioned that it will be available for most used macros, but they will gradually change all of them.

[Biro] To be honest, the removal of the modal and changing to a side panel for editing Macros seems like a small change, but brings such a big benefit. I really don't understand why they didn't change it up until now. I feel that this should have been a critical change with the new editor implementation. [Biro] But anyways, I rant I rant. Let's move on to the next bit and I'll share my screen.

[Biro] First of all if you miss this webinar, the effective DevOps pipelines with Atlassian and AWS, I suggest you watch it. It's very useful. There's a link in this post. So basically in the link in the description, you open the post and then there's a post in there.[Biro] So we are personally at Jexo familiar with some of the practices mentioned in the webinar because we do use Bitbucket and Opsgene with AWS for similar purpose. This post itself just highlights the top questions and answers for the top questions that were asked in the webinar. I think there were over a hundred questions in the webinars. So these are just the most asked questions.

[Biro] And they're basically mainly around pipelines - Bitbucket pipelines. Things like running jobs in parallel, manually validating steps. And it also got me thinking of how good we have it with the Bitbucket's tight integration with Jira and having the ability to enable other team members that might not have access to Bitbucket to get an understanding of pipeline status, but also engage and update and validate steps of those pipelines within the comfort of their Jira instance. And that type of engagement is from my perspective is a very powerful one and one I've not seen done this well with any other tools out there. And, you know, I might be biased, but also I'm not being biased. That's I think that's, that's a reality as well.

[Biro] Yeah. And also at the end of those questions, there's some sample code with pipelines and integrating AWS Lambda. We also have a Lambda function that runs a script that gets updated from Bitbucket pipelines. We've done this before. We also used the Opsgene and we have it integrated with AWS, with CloudWatch and RDS instances and we monitor things. By the way, if you ever are interested in any of that for your own organization and have questions or want to see how we practice, some of these things do message me and I'll be more than happy to organize a knowledge transfer session with anyone.

[Nikki] I need to say that like comparing, for example, the Jenkins and Bitbucket, how it seems for people who don't have that much technical understanding a Bitbucket is miles, miles away and better in the experience. And I think including this in Jira is even better because you don't even need to go to Bitbucket itself. Although it's already quite clear there, what do you need to do.

[Nikki] Alright, the next up, we will have a look on announcement related to the Mindville's Insights. So last week Atlassian enabled Insights for a wider audience. And it's now available for everyone who has Jira Service Management Premium or Enterprise. So just a reminder... with Insights you can track assets, configuration items, and resources to get visibility over relationships between application services, the underlying infrastructure and other key dependencies. And there is a talk on April 7th where you can learn more about the tool. So don't forget to register if you're interested. The link is in this community post down here.

[Nikki] Oh, by the way, Insights has also this really nice video with formula 1 formula, Biro. 🏎

[Biro] Oh, really? Okay. I'll watch that. I'll definitely watch that.

[Biro] Okay. Next up, let's talk a bit about our favorite of the favorites, which is Forge. So I think not long ago, on our previous Monday Coffee News, we mentioned that Atlassian announced general availability of Forge and not long after Lively Apps had not one, but two of their Forge apps approved in the Atlassian Marketplace. So really congrats to Sven and the team at Lively Apps for being at the forefront of this transition to Forge Cloud. It's a monumental milestone from my perspective, to have the first ever two Forge Cloud apps approved to the Marketplace. Check their apps. They're very useful and also free, completely free. Give them a try and see how, how Forge feels. Take it for a drive test.

[Nikki] It's really great to see Sven leading this Forge space now.

[Biro] Yep. All right. Article of the week.

[Nikki] Yes. The article of the week. So this week's article is from Trellos blog and it is about 5 ways to successfully ditch digital distractions. So in the article, they mentioned that most people spend on average 8 hours on notifications per week... which is crazy. I hope I don't spend that much on notifications per week. But anyways, in the article, Trello mentioned steps on how to reduce digital distractions with techniques like Pomodoro clock, managing screen time, focus music, and so on. I personally like to use combination of Pomodore clok and focused music. There are some YouTube channels, like Peaceful ambience with Pomodoro clock videos. So you should definitely check that out.

[Biro] Yeah. And I think I need to start using a Pomodoro clock because I am way too easily distracted every single day. So yeah. I'll definitely try that. Because I have a feeling that's going to help me focus a bit.

[Nikki] Yeah. And it's good for taking breaks and standing up and not watching the screen, like a one-hour long, for example. It's really good.

[Biro] I don't know what you're talking about. 😂

[Biro] All right. So next up, Hey, look who's back in the news! I have a feeling that  Appfire is going to be one of, if not, the most talked about vendor on these Morning Coffees. So last week they announced the, their acquisition of the reputable Atlassian Platinum Marketplace partner - Mohami.

And the reason why this is big is because Mohami has accrued over 17,000 active installations through their apps. So they're not a small vendor by any means. And their portfolio of apps are mainly around developer tools type of apps.

This will consolidate Appfires presence in this specific category. And actually the other week, someone mentioned on a Slack channel that I don't know if this is true, I've not sat down and counted them, but someone mentioned that Appfire now has 92 apps on the marketplace, which is 😮 yeah... That's a lot. I can only imagine their support and maintenance and all of this stuff. But hey, don't acquire just app they acquire teams. Which means there's more folks around to help with managing almost a hundred apps.

[Biro] Yeah. And Mohami apps, I went through their portfolio after this announcement and the majority of their apps are Server and Data Center focus. They do have a few of them that have a Cloud version, but the majority is Server and Data Centre.

[Biro] So Nikki do you want to talk about new Atlassian Services?

[Nikki] Yes! Last news we are going to talk about today is the last week big announcement on all Atlassian channels that you can imagine that Atlassian is starting a Space Services and that they're sending one of their team members to work from space. But unfortunately, or fortunately it was just April fool's joke. But if you didn't see it yet have a look on their Atlassian Space Services landing page and watch the video, it's really, really funny. 🚀

[Biro] Yeah. Actually, I like this. I like how they've done it this this year, because it was well-produced video and announcement and clearly scripted. So they didn't try hard to make it seem that is a real thing because I don't know. I feel that it would have felt a bit too cringe. So they're clearly not banking on trying to make it as a real thing and everyone believed that that's true. But it's, it's, you know, it's nice and light-hearted and puts a smile on your face. Watch the video and watch whole announcement that comes with it.

[Biro] So I guess that's kind of it for this week. Just one last mention for some reason we didn't stream on LinkedIn. So we'll just upload the video to LinkedIn. Well, that's just technicalities, technical issues. It does happen sometimes.

[Biro] That's about it for this week of our Atlassian news in our Monday coffee with Jexo. So I hope you enjoy the news, whether you're watching live or recorded... LinkedIn and recorded 100%...

Just the reminders, links of those resources are in the description or in the comment, depending on what platform you are. If you have any questions or suggestions for us, for what we should be talking about next week, put it in the comment section. And until next week, have a great week ahead. And we'll see you next Monday at 9:00 AM. 👋