Atlassian rolls out several cloud-focused product updates

Atlassian on Wednesday is rolling out a number of product enhancements to improve collaboration and visibility across different corporate teams, with many of the updates geared towards customers operating on the cloud.

Already, more than 70 percent of Atlassian's existing customers are using cloud products, while more than 75 percent of new Atlassian customers start with a cloud deployment.

To solve some of the pain points that exist for Atlassian Cloud customers, the company is rolling out Identity Manager, a product with four features: SAML single sign-on for identity management, enforced two-step verification, advanced password policies, and priority cloud support. The cloud support feature promises a one-hour response time for customers facing critical issues on the weekend.

The product is primarily designed for customers that are large enough that they need identity management but may not be ready to adopt a third party identity manager.

"When we look at our customers who are growing and continue to grow on Atlassian Cloud, user management gets to be less convenient than it was when you knew everyone," Rahul Chhabria, product manager for Enterprise Cloud at Atlassian, told ZDNet. "We want customers to trust their data is secure and that our products will be up all the time."

Next, Atlassian is adding Trello boards to Bitbucket Cloud, which brings the project planning capabilities of Trello to Bitbucket, the software collaboration tool. Combining the collaboration tools bridges a gap that existed between software developers and non-technical teams such as designers or marketers.

"We find this experience makes Bitbucket a one-stop shop for software development teams and brings in everyone else that participates in shipping great software," Chhabria said.

In another move focused on hybrid customers, Atlassian is collaborating with Microsoft Azure to let customers deploy Jira Software Data Center on Azure, through a jointly developed customized template. Atlassian introduced AWS support last year.

"We're trying to provide deployment flexibility for them, for whatever environment they're comfortable with," said Junie Dinda, product marketing lead for server products at Atlassian.

Meanwhile, Atlassian is making it easier for support teams to offer help to customers with the new Embedded Portal in Jira Service Desk Cloud. Instead of having to navigate to a different page or send an email to raise a Jira Service Desk request, customers can use an embedded help button that lives anywhere.

Lastly, Atlassian is updating Portfolio for Jira, a project management tool, with two new features. With the new programs feature, business leaders can get an aggregated view of multiple projects -- this gives them visibility into projects that all tie into broader business objectives.

"This is extremely important for executives and managers to understand what's actually going on in their agile software development and how it ties to their business priorities, Dinda said.

Similarly, the dependencies reporting feature gives a visualization of factors on which a project may be dependent. The feature helps managers spot project bottlenecks and find any risks to the project.

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