We just wrapped another successful Atlassian App Week! During App Week Cloud | June 11-15, App Week went back to its Cloud roots while traveling to Portland, Oregon for the first time. While the previous two App Weeks had brand new focus areas – App Week Data Center (November 2017) and App Week Experience Design (March 2018) – App Week Cloud was focused on customer announcements we are working on with SaaS partners and Marketplace vendors in preparation for Summit Europe, as well as migration of top Server apps to Cloud.
In particular, our goals for this App Week centered around Cloud by helping select SaaS partners and Marketplace vendors with popular Server apps either build new Cloud apps, or improve the features or performance of existing Cloud apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. SaaS partners including Google, InVision, Box, New Relic, Cloudability, and BlueJeans, plus Marketplace vendors with popular apps such as Adaptavist, Wittified, EasyAgile, Refined Wiki, CodeBarrel, ALMWorks, and EazyBI traveled in from around the US, Australia, Mexico, and across Europe. These companies represent just a few of the 35 Marketplace vendors and SaaS partners who applied to, then attended App Week Cloud to build or improve existing Cloud apps for Atlassian products.
What makes App Week such a hit with app developers is the access to our talented Atlassian engineers and product leads who can help them solve code issues in minutes versus weeks. Team members from Jira Software Cloud, Jira Service Desk Cloud, Confluence Cloud, Bitbucket Cloud, Stride, Trello, and Statuspage were all on deck to help our app developers build, as well as present the latest and greatest product updates, tips and tricks, and best practices. On the last day of the conference we encourage attendees to demo what they accomplished during the week, and show off new functionality they plan to ship for Atlassian products – some of which will be part of customer-facing announcements at Summit Europe 2018. Get ready for Barcelona!
To better understand the value of App Week Cloud to the Marketplace vendors and SaaS partners who attend, we wanted to share stories from three of our newest companies building Atlassian apps who attended App Week for the first time last week: Hugo, Rollout.io, and Cloudability.
Hugo’s first App Week resulted in 3 new apps – for Confluence Cloud, for Stride, for Jira Software Cloud
"App Week gave us the opportunity to 'join' the Atlassian team for a few days, working next to the designers, engineers, marketers and product gurus behind the apps that we work with everyday. We were able to build faster and deeper into the Atlassian ecosystem, providing an even better experience for our mutual customers."
– Hugo's Co-Founder, Darren Chait
- Team Hugo applied for their first App Week in Portland planning on building a Stride app , allowing Hugo users to share meetings insights where teams are already talking to each other, and support commenting and notifications when it is time to save a note.
- Hugo had previously built for Trello and Slack, building integrated meeting note apps that make insights and actions coming from meetings more visible in people’s tools they already love to use.
- Being able to sit next to 2 Stride engineers for the first 2 days, the Hugo team was quickly able to build in days what would normally take weeks, delivering the first meeting note app for Stride.
- Next up, the App Week environment provided app partners amazing access to Atlassians from the Confluence, Jira, and Ecosystem teams to be exposed to play as a team . – work, eat, drink together and share new ideas. Hugo team saw opportunity beyond their first Stride app to raise the bar and aspire to become the best meeting note solution across all Atlassian teams. After a few all-nighters and lots of help with auth issues they ran into, Hugo ended the week by adding two additional Marketplace apps they hadn’t planned on building: Jira Software and Confluence apps for Hugo!
- When Atlassian teams use Hugo, they are more connected to each other and their customers. Meeting insights are shared with the right people via Stride, those same notes can create work like feature requests and bugs in Trello and Jira Software Cloud, and everything syncs with Confluence Cloud to enrich the team knowledge base with key learnings and decisions.
Rollout’s first App Week helped them build cross-functional features across Bitbucket Cloud and Jira Software Cloud into Stride
Rollout built a Stride bot at App Week that opens a pull request in Bitbucket Cloud for the flag and relevant code to be removed. It also creates a Jira Software Cloud issue to track the flag removal request. This is our first feature flag app integrated across multiple products.
At App Week, Team Rollout met top-notch technologists from Marketplace vendors and SaaS partners across the Atlassian ecosystem. App Week also provided a very collaborative environment to bounce ideas and consult with others working on Atlassian Marketplace apps. Last but not least, they found the talks very useful and insightful (not just for engineering), from an app onboarding session, an OAuth 2.0 code authorization grant talk, and updates to the Connect framework lecture.
Cloudability built their first Jira Software Cloud app based on an Atlassian team being power users of their product
Cloudability came to their first App Week ready to address user feedback they had received from power users of their product: Atlassian Cloud Engineers based in Sydney. After using Cloudability to get better insights into Atlassian’s cloud infrastructure spend, Atlassian’s engineers sent the Cloudability team feedback on their product: “Wouldn’t it be great if instead of having to pull data out of Cloudability, put it in a spreadsheet, then paste data into separate Jira tickets assigned to different teams responsible for managing cloud spend, we could just use a Jira Software app integrated with Cloudability? Your team should talk to Atlassian’s SaaS partnerships team about that. We (and a lot of your other customers) would use that app!”
As a result, Team Cloudability applied to and came to their first App Week Cloud. They received valuable feedback from Jira Software product, engineering and design Atlassians that will strengthen their features and app integrations going forward. The Atlassian SaaS partnerships team has been working with Cloudability for several months on getting this out, and App Week was what got the app to completion! Cloudability was also able to demo their new Cloudability app for Jira at their very fun App Week Cloud happy hour that Cloudability hosted at their Portland offices. They also enjoyed meeting like-minded developers from other companies building Atlassian apps located around the world, whose excitement was contagious and energized their team.
Demand for cloud spend management tools is growing, so integrating Jira Software functionality directly within tools where DevOps and IaaS management teams already work is super useful. Just ask the Atlassian engineers who suggested it!
Next up: Atlassians that work directly with our extended Ecosystem TEAM of external Marketplace vendors and SaaS partners are next looking forward to Atlas Camp, Atlassian’s annual developer conference happening Sept 6-7 in Barcelona.
See you at Atlas Camp
-Delyn Head of Ecosystem Marketing