Atlassian provided new release notes, which include some noteworthy updates coming to their cloud products. We've picked a few to explore and explain why they could be valuable to your business. Keep in mind that these changes may or may not be rolled out to your site yet, but they should be very soon.
Activate Atlassian Intelligence for Your Organization's Products
UPDATE: “You can now activate Atlassian Intelligence features for your team's products. Atlassian Intelligence helps teams accelerate work, increase efficiency, and provide value faster using artificial intelligence (AI).”
Everyone wants in on AI technologies, and Atlassian is no exception. Atlassian's integration with OpenAI has emerged from the Early Access phase and is now available for everyone to try. Atlassian Intelligence has applications involving both generative AI and natural language searching. This offers some interesting benefits for businesses, especially if you hate creating documentation.
Jira and Confluence Natural Language Search - Never got around to mastering JQL? Now you don't have to! Natural language search lets you find issues with queries like, "What are all the highest priority bugs in project XYZ?" You can search for content in Confluence by just using something like, "Where do we document the reports for project XYZ?" This functionality alone is incredibly useful for anyone navigating Confluence and Jira who's not a power user.
Confluence Page Summaries - The TLDR? This AI is for you. Atlassian Intelligence can generate a page summary of any Confluence content page.
Editing Content - If you want to just change the tone or spruce up the description on your page, you can also use Atlassian Intelligence and highlight the content using the /ai macro.
If you're looking to dip your toes into AI, you can activate Atlassian Intelligence across your projects by following these steps:
- Go to admin.atlassian.com. Select your organization if you have more than one.
- Select Settings → Atlassian Intelligence.
- Select Select products.
- Choose the products where you want to activate Atlassian Intelligence features.
- Select Next.
- Review the products and accept the terms and conditions.
- Select Save to confirm.
For now, there's no cost associated with Atlassian Intelligence, but that could change in the future.
Confluence Guest Role Counts Towards Your Access Bill
UPDATE: “We're notifying you about changes to Atlassian Access billing for people assigned to the Confluence guest role. This change applies to individuals (managed accounts) in your organization with the Confluence guest role.”
This update is kind of a big one. Atlassian released the Confluence Guest Feature back in October of 2022. Up to this point, leveraging guest access in Confluence allowed companies to streamline their licensing and grant larger populations of users access to their Confluence spaces with limited functionality. This is a great option for anyone in the organization who largely just consumes content within Confluence and occasionally comments on a page.
With these changes rolling out, there is still no licensing cost for the individual at the product level. However, if those users are managed user accounts (meaning if the company leverages Atlassian Access to manage their users), they now count towards the Atlassian Access cost. This still makes guest users a cost-saving option but is reduced somewhat. For those companies with large amounts of managed users with only guest access to Confluence, it has the potential to be a price increase come their next billing cycle.
This is one of those changes that most customers will just have to accept. You do have the option to move the managed user to a non-billable authentication policy, but then you lose capabilities like single sign-on (SSO) and 2-step authentication for that user.
New Data Residency Regions and Data Residency for Apps
UPDATE: “We're launching data residency in the United Kingdom, Japan, India, Brazil, South Korea, and Switzerland to allow you to control where your data is stored.”
This update is pretty straightforward, but its impact is huge for companies with data residency requirements. Do you want to pin your data to the UK? Now you can! India? Brazil? Sim! Same for Canada, where Atlassian launched data residency for its cloud products in 2023.
For those unaware, Atlassian Cloud is hosted on AWS, so the data residency options should eventually expand to encompass all of the AWS regions available. These additional regions are being rolled out in phases over time, and there should be some additional updates coming in the near future.
Because of the way Atlassian Cloud’s architecture is built, there are a lot of the apps from third-party vendors are hosted on their own server and not with Atlassian. This can mean that companies trying to adhere to data residency compliance in the cloud can have a hard time being absolutely sure all of their data is covered.
Apps will now indicate available data residency options to assist you on your journey to total data residency. In the Atlassian Marketplace, apps will display what their data residency options are under the 'Privacy and Security' tab:
For more information on data residency on apps, you can check out Atlassian Documentation.
Runner-Up Release Notes
Here's a quick list of some of the other updates that might be of interest to you:
- Developers can now quickly determine what to work on next with automated suggestions.
- Early access program: Customize priorities for your projects. - This is especially a big one for those of us that do Atlassian Cloud migrations, but it probably doesn’t make a huge impact for those already in the cloud.
- Retiring the possibility to manage the atlassian-addons-project-access role.
- Automation: Create sprint action.
- Custom name for Story points now shows in plans.
- Introducing a new workflow editor in company-managed projects.
- Add anyone as a stakeholder, no agent license needed.
- Transfer of page ownership between users.
- Open Beta: Surface your Assets objects in Confluence.
For a full list of changes, you can reference Atlassian's Release Notes.
Maximize The Value of Your Atlassian Tools
Whether you need support with migrating to Atlassian Cloud or empowering your teams with AI, Praecipio can help you drive your business forward with the Atlassian Platform. As one of the fastest-growing Atlassian Solution Partners, we know what it takes to maximize the value of your Atlassian tools.
Contact our team of experts about putting your Atlassian tools to work for your teams.
