Atlassian Confluence and Jira grow closer, Jira now for business users as well

Jira not just a development tool

Atlassian Confluence and Jira grow closer, Jira now for business users as well

We were recently guests at Atlassian Team’24 Europe, the European event of the Australian software company behind Confluence and Jira. With 300,000 customers, 120,000 of which are in EMEA, the company has little to complain about. Many organizations already use Atlassian products, but the company wants more. Among other things, bring business users to Jira. Rovo AI also plays an important role.

This is a brief introduction to Atlassian’s portfolio. The name Atlassian may not mean anything to everyone, while the names Confluence or Jira are more familiar.

What is Confluence?

Atlassian describes Confluence as a team workspace where knowledge, documents, and projects come together, and employees can collaborate. It allows you to capture documentation as a team, whether it’s company policy, a marketing plan, tone of voice, or sales strategy. Project-based documents are created to help manage and complete projects from start to finish or to keep knowledge up to date within the organization.

What is Jira?

Jira was originally a true development tool. It helps developers track the software development process, whether it’s managing and fixing bugs, doing development sprints, managing source code, or executing pull requests. Jira tracks all facets of software development. Most enterprise organizations use Jira to manage software development.

What is the new Jira?

During Atlassian Team’24 Europe, the company dwelled on the new Jira as they call it themselves. This is because they have adapted Jira to suit multiple audiences. They want to appeal not only to developers but also to business users. Think of marketers, HR specialists, and lawyers. No longer do you necessarily create an issue, but you can also create a task. Furthermore, Jira has been made more visually modern and attractive.

Atlassian has copied heavily from Trello, a product also owned by Atlassian, but they describe Trello as a “personal productivity” solution. Basically, Trello and Jira are similar in terms of basic functionality. Of course, Jira is much more comprehensive, but for the new user experience, Trello has been well-copied. In Trello, background images have long been used, but they have now been added to Jira. In addition, a side menu has been introduced on the left side of the screen. Atlassian is also adding many templates to support different types of projects and contributors. Are you organizing an event or creating a marketing plan, or do you have a legal project that needs to be fleshed out? A separate template for each of these has customized overviews, forms, and views.

Basically, it all remains Jira under the hood. If you flatten it completely, it’s just a spreadsheet with more advanced features and different views.

Atlassian cloud platform for Confluence and Jira

We understand that Confluence and Jira are the same cloud platform. Both solutions run on the same stack and are fully integrated. Atlassian’s goal is to bring the world of developers closer to the business users.

Because all groups use the same platform, they can access each other’s data and gather more insights. This is a noble goal because many enterprise organizations have been trying to demolish the various user silos for years. This is not easy, however, because many solutions are not designed that way, and because those audiences do not speak the same language. In addition, there is often a per-user licensing model attached to it, which means that not the whole company but only the people who need it get a license.

In response to our questions, Atlassian says that it has priced its solutions so competitively that customers can give their entire organization access to Atlassian products. Of course, there are different roles and rights regarding access to the data, which is not entirely unimportant.

Atlassian Focus

Presentatiedia van de conferentie met de aankondiging van Atlassian Focus, een hulpmiddel voor bedrijfsstrategie en -planning.

To strengthen the collaboration and integration between business and technical audiences, not only Jira has been revamped. Solutions have also been added to the portfolio. One example is Atlassian Focus, a solution for enterprise strategy and planning. Within Atlassian Focus, management can track the status of specific projects. Atlassian Focus fully integrates with Confluence and Jira. Tickets, tasks, and Confluence documents can all be part of Focus. The beauty of Focus is that management can maintain a high-level overview of all underlying projects.

It also makes integrating different user groups into a single project easier. If you’re going to develop a mobile app, you need the IT team to facilitate the infrastructure, the development team to build the app, designers to design it, marketing to market it and determine the target audience, and legal to make sure the application is compliant with the latest regulations.

You can link all those groups into a single project managed from Atlassian Focus.

Rovo AI is powerful and keeps humans in the loop, but not autonomous

AI features are increasingly important on SaaS platforms, and Atlassian is no different. At their conference, the general availability of Rovo AI was announced.

You can easily create a document from a large case in Jira. Similarly, you can create separate tasks in Jira for the different target groups from a document with a project plan.

Simple Jira tickets can be captured and handled automatically via the Rovo AI Agents. The same goes for other repetitive tasks that employees run into.

However, we still see a big difference between Rovo’s AI Agents and those of other SaaS vendors. While others try to make AI agents completely autonomous with an elaborate reasoning engine, Atlassian always keeps a “human in the loop.

This means that, in our view, Atlassian AI agents should be seen more as intelligent workflows, with exactly what situation they are allowed to execute in. Some SaaS vendors let their AI determine which AI agents to use autonomously, with less human control.

Technically, you could say that Atlassian is just a little bit less advanced with its AI, but on the other hand, you could also argue that with these audiences and actions, it is vital to keep a human in the loop. After all, it is mainly about internal work and business development. Autonomy is then not always desirable.

Man presenteert voor een groot scherm waarop een interface van projectmanagementsoftware te zien is, met verschillende menu's en opties.

To increase the adoption of Rovo AI, Atlassian has chosen to make it available as a chat assistant in all products. It has also developed a browser plugin so that Atlassian customers can invoke the assistant at any time and on any Web page.

In addition, it has developed an internal search engine capable of searching various SaaS solutions and documents. Instead of searching for documents and pages, employees can ask questions and the search will answer based on the search data. Employees can ask questions about corporate policy questions, for example. Integration with external SaaS tools is still limited. During the Team’24 event, but will be extended over time. We ran into a partner who was busy developing a Workday integration. So that people will soon be able to search data from Workday as well.

Conclusion

Atlassian is working toward a future where all business audiences can soon use Jira and Confluence together. In our view, it would be better if the company eventually developed one licensing model for both products instead of two separate licenses. Then, you can be sure that users really can access everything. It is a known problem that organizations do not license SaaS solutions for all employees simply to reduce costs. Some groups don’t need access to do their work, but they could do it better. Despite Atlassian’s belief that they are priced competitively enough to avoid that, we have doubts.

Another challenge will be getting business users to adopt Jira, the image of Jira being that of a development tool. The new interface and templates are certainly going to help with that.

In the area of AI, very conscious choices have been made, and the company is making great strides with Rovo AI. Users of Jira and Confluence can save a lot of time by actively using Rovo AI; there is certainly a great added value there. The fact that they choose to keep a human in the loop at this time is well explained. Therefore, the lack of full autonomy is not a problem. All in all, Atlassian has a clear vision for the future that should bear fruit.