Catching Our Breath After Atlassian Summit Europe

6 min read /

Even though the first-ever Atlassian Summit Europe took place more than two weeks ago, our team feels like we're just now catching our breath. Between the two days of the Summit conference, and the following two days of the developer-focused AtlasCamp, we sent 19 teammates to Barcelona and back.

The robust crew allowed us to have hundreds of great conversations with booth visitors about Confluence content and documentation management and JIRA data synchronization. In between we attended dozens of valuable talk sessions and clinics, gave some talks of our own, and soaked in Atlassian's big messages during the Keynote presentations. We even had the chance to present Bobbleheads, a fun project that won one of our Hacketse Hackathons, on the big ShipIt Live stage – where it took home the winning honors!

Backbone continues to gain momentum

Backbone Issue Sync for JIRA demos at Atlassian Summit Europe 2017

The latest news from the Backbone Issue Sync for JIRA team is that this powerful add-on is now fully Data Center compatible, giving enterprises the confidence they need to synchronize issue data across instance boundaries. We were thrilled to have many booth visitors approach our team specifically asking about Backbone – it has clearly generated some buzz in the ecosystem. Companies and teams of all kinds are opening their eyes to the efficiencies gained from data synchronization from JIRA to JIRA.

More organizations are doc-ing better together

Scroll add-on demos aplenty at Atlassian Summit Europe 2017

The other hot topic at our booth was all about managing content and documentation collaboratively with the bestselling Scroll add-ons for Confluence. At Summit we launched an all-new visual template designer for Scroll PDF Exporter for Confluence Server, which is a game-changing feature that allows the creation of flexibly-styled PDF exports directly from Confluence without the need for coding skills.

Giving back is essential for Atlassian

Atlassian Foundation and Scott Farquhar at Atlassian Summit Europe 2017

As a Pledge 1% member, something that really connected with us during the opening keynote of Summit were Scott Farquhar's words about how Atlassian gives back. From the employee time, to the equity and profit, to the free product licenses, we think the company is taking the idea of doing good for the world quite seriously. Two videos were shown with touching stories of the work that Kiva and Mercy Ships are doing with support from Atlassian's free tools for non-profits.

Cleaner and simpler: the new Atlassian user experience

New user experience rollout at Atlassian Summit Europe 2017

Throughout the keynote and breakout sessions there was quite a lot to hear about the pathways Atlassian as a company, and its individual products, will be following in the coming months and years. One thing that was particularly exciting for us was to see the sweeping new user experience that will be rolled out across the entire Atlassian tool stack. Head of design Jürgen Spangl presented the results of this new design language, then 'nerded-out' on the process that his team used to get there. We're loving the new simplified experience – you can see the Confluence changes in effect at https://atlassian.design/

A little project gets a big win

Bobbleheads wins ShipIt Live at Atlassian Summit Europe 2017

The highly-anticipated wrap-up event at all Atlassian Summit conferences is ShipIt Live. This is where a selection of 24-hour hackathon projects are given three minutes each on the big stage to wow the audience with their stories. A vote follows to choose the favorite. At K15t Software we've run nine Hacketse hackathons – they're a big part of our culture, so we were over the moon when asked to present a project on the ShipIt Live stage. See the video here on YouTube.

Tobias introduced the audience to Bobbleheads, a Hacketse-winning project by teammates Simon and Paul, which embeds a fun video chat experience directly into the collaborative editor in Confluence. We knew it was a hit when the crowd actually stopped Tobias mid-way through his presentation to applaud and cheer, and sure enough once the votes were tallied Bobbleheads was crowned the winner of ShipIt Live! If you want to stay in the loop about Bobbleheads as we develop it further, go here and let us know.

Tired and happy - the end of Atlassian Summit Europe 2017

The whole K15t Software team was humbled by our ShipIt Live success, and thrilled to have such a perfect ending to an exciting event in Barcelona. Of course planning is in full swing for our Platinum sponsorship of Atlassian Summit in San Jose in September, so stay tuned for more info on that. We're sure to be out of breath again in no time!