Looking for a digital solution to improve agility, efficiency or organization? There’s an Atlassian solution for that.
Atlassian’s suite of tools (Jira, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket and more) have been adopted by thousands of companies worldwide. And with help from Contegix—the only Atlassian Platinum Partner that offers application support services, and private and public cloud deployment assistance—Atlassian tools can be successfully adopted and implemented by any company across a multitude of use cases.
With many offerings to choose from, it can be challenging to understand which solution—or solutions—to adopt. Here’s a quick run-down of Atlassian’s tools and what they can do for your business:
Jira Software: Regarded as one of the best software development tools for agile teams, Jira Software is built to help software developers and their teams plan, track and deploy projects with ease. The tool creates a project roadmap for developers that keeps team members aligned from start to product release. With Jira Software, teams can assign work, track progress, change workflows as they go and track for bugs every step of the way. The solution’s planning features are designed so they can be easily integrated into a team’s existing frameworks, like Scrum, Kaban and other mixed methodologies, as well as with Bitbucket, another developer-specific Atlassian tool.
Jira Align: This Atlassian tool was designed to connect a company’s business strategies with its technical ones. Using Jira Align, companies can aggregate data on specific teams and use this information to determine scope, roadmaps and dependencies across teams and portfolios. And this solution can be applied to a variety of enterprises and roles: Portfolio managers can use it to communicate the value of funding strategic initiatives to investors and analysts; digital transformation teams can use it to create a customized framework for driving digital initiatives forward at their company; delivery teams can use it to make sure that their sprint work aligns with a company’s high-level strategy. Jira Align is flexible enough to help any company, from any industry, connect everyday tasks with long-term goals.
Jira Core: This business project management tool is designed for non-technical teams in need of a tool that facilitates better team collaboration. Jira Core is very similar to Jira Software, but without the software-specific elements, making it more accessible and less confusing for users. Jira Core comes with customizable workflows, task management capabilities and performance measurement tools and provides detail-oriented processes that keep teams organized—no matter the size or scale of a project. This tool can be applied to numerous use cases across a company, including its HR, legal, finance, operations or marketing departments.
Jira Service Management: This Atlassian tool transforms the way an IT department operates. It’s a flexible, collaborative IT service management (ITSM) solution that allows IT teams to easily receive, manage and track customer requests in one central location. Jira Service Management also comes with customizable help centers and embeddable widgets that IT teams can integrate into their platform. These features enable easier collaboration and communication so that IT departments can respond to incoming service requests and issues faster and more efficiently.
Opsgenie: With Opsgenie, companies can respond to critical issues before they ever impact their business operations. With its flexible rules engine, companies can program Opsgenie to notify certain people and teams when issues arise using their existing infrastructure. And after an incident occurs, companies can use this tool’s incident investigation features to determine its source. Opsgenie is a particularly useful solution for companies with complex infrastructures who struggle to oversee all of their software and services. With this on-call and alert management tool, companies can make sure that they never miss a critical alert.
StatusPage: This Atlassian tool enables fast communication to an enterprise’s customers and users when one of its services or systems is experiencing an issue. With StatusPage, companies can avoid negative reviews and an avalanche of support tickets that come with downtime. For example, if a network issue or third party error renders a website inoperable, a company can update their StatusPage to alert customers of this issue and let them know that teams are taking steps to address it.
Confluence: Companies use Confluence to not only organize all of their documents, databases and employee information, but for secure and accessible data storage. This Atlassian tool provides a digital ‘knowledge base’ for a company’s essential documents with customizable permission levels so that only certain users can view or edit pages. Confluence also provides customizable document templates that can be applied to any department. Legal, HR, marketing and finance departments don’t have to create new templates for every new process—they can use Confluence’s templates to create efficiencies.
Trello: Unlike Jira, which is designed for software teams and mainly targets software builders, developers, or project managers working on software projects, this popular Atlassian tool provides project tracking tools for any kind of company—it can even be used for personal planning! With Trello’s boards, lists and cards, teams can understand every aspect of an ongoing project, from completed tasks to future ones. This solution was designed to give teams all the information they need to understand a workflow at a glance. Teams can also hide attachments, due dates and other materials inside shared Trello boards and lists. This prevents information overload: They can get an overview of a project from their shared Trello board, and then click into their assigned tasks to gather more information or details if or when necessary.
Bitbucket: This Git code management solution provides software development teams with the collaborative tools necessary to code quality software. Known for its code collaboration and version control capabilities, Bitbucket helps establish code review processes that make sure projects are rigorously tested before being deployed. The solution also creates a centralized location for teams to plan projects and manage or share their Git repositories. This ensures project visibility for every team member, so that nothing is missed during the building, testing or deployment phase of a software release. Bitbucket can be easily integrated into Jira Software to create a superior solution that not only supports better workflows for a company’s software developers, but boost their CI and CD abilities as well.
Sourcetree: Sourcetree simplifies how software development teams interact with their Git repositories so that they can focus on coding. This tool provides a Git graphical user interface (GUI) that allows developers to edit, manage and visualize these repositories. Sourcetree replaces command lines with simplified distributed version control capabilities that help beginners get acquainted with a Git client, but it’s powerful enough to help the experts as well. Advanced users can use Sourcetree to be more productive in how they review changesets, stash or cherry-pick between branches.
Bamboo: Software developers use this continuous integration (CI) tool to tie automated builds, tests and releases together into one streamlined workflow. While developers focus on coding, Bamboo enables CI and monitors build servers. With Bamboo, software teams can create multi-stage build plans, set up triggers so that builds start upon commits, and assign agents to your critical builds and deployments. Bamboo also supports continuous deployment, automating the tedium of releasing new code into every new environment while also letting teams control the flow with per-environment permissions. What’s more, Bamboo can be integrated with Jira Software and Bitbucket.
Crowd: This Atlassian tool streamlines identity management processes throughout a company. Using Crowd’s single sign-on (SSO) functionalities, companies can give their employees and users one username and password to log in to all of the applications they need to access. Crowd can also help companies organize any combination of directories into a single application, making it easier to manage authentication permissions for users inside or outside of their organization. This solution is compatible with connectors like AD, LDAP, Microsoft Azure AD, Novell eDirectory, and more.
Atlassian Access: Organizations that use more than one Atlassian product should consider investing in Atlassian Access, an enterprise-wide subscription that provides enhanced security and centralized administration for every Atlassian cloud product, including Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello. Safeguarding users and data across multiple cloud products is no easy task, especially for fast-growing organizations. But with Atlassian Access, companies remove the possibility of shadow IT. This tool helps administrators oversee all of their Atlassian cloud products with enterprise-grade security controls and accessibility functions that empower administrators to build scalable governance plans—without stifling agility or collaboration.
Is there an Atlassian tool that could work well for your organization? Check out the Atlassian website to learn more about these products. And if your company needs help integrating or managing these tools, head over to Contegix’s Atlassian Solutions page to find support.
