I’ve got great news for you: JIRA 6.0 is coming soon!  Amongst many great new features, this release of JIRA will support bulk watching of issues.

Atlassian has a public JIRA instance, jira.atlassian.com, where we get a massive amount of feedback from our customers.  When making decision about how to evolve a product like JIRA, the product managers consider a wide variety of factors: customer content, community forums, support, Atlassian Experts, in-product feedback, as well as votes and issues from jira.atlassian.com.  We heard y’all loud and clear on JRA-2429: Bulk Watch.  That single issue has 229 votes!

So, how will you be able to bulk watch issues in JIRA 6?

First, Subscribe

Subscriptions and bulk watch go hand in hand to keep you connected to JIRA.  Subscriptions keep you abreast of a large set of issues, while bulk watch keeps you informed about all the small updates.  Let’s walk through a simple example to see how these features work hand in hand.

• Subscriptions let you stay on top of a large set of related issues. You can subscribe to any filter in JIRA, and you’ll be emailed a consolidated version of those issues.
• Bulk watch lets you subscribe to individual notifications for each issue at once.

You are a development manager with a program nearing release.  You want to be notified when someone files a blocker or critical issue.  You can create a filter in JIRA that matches those criteria.

Let’s set up a simple filter in the Issue Navigator.  In JIRA, click Issues->Search for Issues from the menu bar.

In this example we are looking for all open issues for the JIRA project that are blocking or critical for version 6.0. We then save this search as a filter. If we click details, we can then subscribe to that filter.

Whenever a new issue matches that filter, JIRA will email you.  You can set notifications to whatever period you want. For example, you can make sure the list of critical issues are in your inbox every morning.  As new issues come in, you can decide if you want to watch them to follow all the issue traffic.

Now, Bulk Watch

Watching an issue notifies you of any changes to that issue.  In JIRA 5.0.3 we enabled autowatch by default.  This feature adds anyone who comments on an issue as a watcher.   As a development manager nearing release I want to get detailed notifications on some key issues in my program.  In prior versions of JIRA you’d have to find each issue individually and watch it.  Now you can do so in bulk. Using our filter above, we can use the bulk change feature to watch a set of issues.

The first step in the bulk change wizard is to choose the issues from the filter results you want to change.  It’s OK if your search is a bit broad.  As the development manager I may only want to watch most, but not all of the issues that match my search.  In the bulk change wizard it’s easy to opt out of some of the issues.  When you press next, the highly voted option appears!

With two more clicks you will become a watcher on all the issues selected in the prior step.  Pretty cool, aye?

WARNING: While bulk watching issues is useful, it can also generate a lot of email traffic.  Once you no longer need to watch an issue, you can bulk stop watching issues to ensure that JIRA is only sending detailed emails on the issues you care about.

This is only one of the great new features in JIRA 6. Be the first to find out when JIRA 6 is released.   Sign up for the JIRA Insiders Email!

Subscribe

What We Need From You

1. Download your favorite distribution. Along the way you’ll be asked for your email address. This tell us how many people are actually participating vs. how many indicated interest, which helps us plan for future beta programs, and ensures we have an open line of communication with each participant.
2. Learn about the benefits that Deployment Projects, the foundation of Bamboo 5.0′s new deployment capabilities, have to offer your team.
3. Install Bamboo 5.0 and start exploring! You can set up a test instance and import a copy of your Bamboo data (If you need a new license, you can get a evaluation license from my.atlassian.com). We’re especially interested in the setup process, so if you remember to note how that goes for you, we’d love to hear about it.
4. Look for an initial survey from us about 1-2 days after you download and install–should take five minutes or less.
5. As you’re using the beta, relay your thoughts about things you like or dislike by clicking the “Feedback for Bamboo 5 Beta” button, found at the top of each page.
6. Look for a second survey after you’ve been using the beta for about a week. Again, shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

What We’ll Provide in Return

1. Participants who step through both surveys will get a nerd-tastic Bamboo t-shirt.
2. Our product owner and user-experience specialist will follow up personally with as many participants as possible to dig deeper into the aspects of Bamboo 5 that you don’t love (yet).
3. The development team will prioritize their work between now and release time based on your feedback.
4. A final release of Bamboo 5 that is tailored for our users, by our users.
5. Our eternal gratitude n’ stuff 

Ready… Steady… DEPLOY!

We’re excited to usher in a whole new era of build & deploy orchestration with Bamboo 5, and can’t wait to hear from you!

Download the beta

1. Creating content

This one’s a no-brainer. The must fundamental thing you do in Confluence is create content you need to get work done. Here’s the fastest way to create content, without touching your mouse.

Create new content by pressing:

Then select what you want to create:

If you’re anything like me sometimes you don’t want the structure of a Confluence Blueprint or page template, instead you want the freedom of a blank page. No sweat.

Create a blank page by pressing:

2. Editing content

You’re not always creating content from scratch in Confluence. More often than not, you’re updating a page you’ve already created or contributing to someone else’s work. For that, there’s one key – e.

Edit an existing page by pressing:

3. Saving content

Finished making edits? There’s still no need to touch your mouse. You’re just two keystrokes away from publishing your changes to a page or adding a comment to a page.

Save edits and post comments to pages by pressing:

Using Windows or Linux? Just sub ‘⌘’ for ‘control’

4. Sharing content

There are times you need to make sure your team sees a particular page. There’s a shortcut for that too.

 Share pages with co-workers by pressing:

Then enter the names of co-workers or any email address:

5. Finding content

This one’s my favorite. It’s quick to find content – pages, blog posts, file attachments, and people – and navigate to other Confluence spaces using Quick Navigation.

Search for content by pressing:

Start typing to find what you’re looking for:

Shortcut for more shortcuts?

You bet. These are just 5 of the many shortcuts I use in Confluence every day to help me get my work done, faster.

View a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in Confluence by pressing:

What’s your favorite keyboard shortcut?

Try Confluence for FREE

This is a guest post from K15t Software, Atlassian Experts and makers of Scroll Office, Scroll Versions, Scroll PDF Exporter, and many other Confluence add-ons.

If you manage complex content in Confluence, Scroll Versions is a must-have add-on for keeping your Confluence instance organized. With it, you can manage concurrent versions of pages or product documentation in one space, enhance content-reuse, improve SEO, and now publish to an existing Confluence space!

We’ve taken all the customer feedback we’ve received since we launched Scroll Versions last year, and today we’re proud to announce what’s new in Scroll Versions 2.0.

Page Info Panel

Scroll Versions introduced the “Page Info Panel” and in Versions 2.0, we’ve overhauled it completely. Its primary function is still to select the working version in which you are making changes, but it now also provides all the important information you need to know about the current page, including:

• A list of all page versions
• Which variants of the page are available
• Where it has been reused
• Where it has been published

But the best thing: It’s fun to work with! We’ve incorporated the Atlassian Design Guidelines to give it an awesome look and feel. (My personal favorite: you can now double-click to expand and collapse the page info panel.)

Variant Management

Variant Management is especially important when you need to document slightly different variations of the same product or service. It’s necessary to define which content is relevant, in the right context, to the right users.

So we allow you to get content attributes at the page level or within pages (using the new Conditional Content macro), and variants define which attributes are required to make the content relevant to a variant.

See the Variant Management feature in action:

The one thing we heard loud and clear is that you’re looking for a way to share all the tips and tricks out there with the rest of your colleagues. Enter the JIRA Tutorials YouTube playlist!

This playlist is where we keep our best up-to-date tutorials showing off keyboard shortcuts, tips about searches and filters, and killer admin tips like editing the set of workflows in your project. And if you’re keen to get tips and tricks straight in your inbox, sign up for the JIRA Insiders email list!

Sign up for JIRA Insiders

Ever since the initial release we’ve been heads down making improvements to the Confluence Blueprints experience. Here are two of the many improvements available to Confluence OnDemand customers today:

1. Add viewing restrictions to your File Lists

The File List Blueprint makes it easy to create a list of files that teams need to get their work done. You can use File Lists to give all your employees one place to find approved company graphics and logos, download the latest version of sales and marketing presentations, and store all documents related to a particular project. Features like drag-and-drop file sharing, automatic versioning, instant previews, and full-text search make for a powerful case to ditch your shared network drive.

While making files and documents more accessible and easier to find will undoubtedly boost your team’s productivity, there are times when you need to restrict the viewing of certain files to individual co-workers or groups. Now you can.

2. Define custom page titles and location for new pages

Blueprints are more than page templates. When you create a page using a Blueprint, Confluence automatically organizes your Meeting Notes, File Lists, and Product Requirements in each space under ‘index pages’. Automatically generated Space Shortcuts in the Space Sidebar provide quick access to these index pages so teams have one place to find the work they need to get their jobs done. From any index page a user can create new Meeting Notes, File Lists, or Product Requirements in a single-click.

Creating new Blueprints from index pages is made easy using the ‘Create from template’ macro. While this macro was originally created for use on Blueprints index pages, it’s possible to use it on any Confluence page. We’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining other business practices, such as creating project plans.

Two new parameters, editable in the Macro Browser, allow you to define dynamic page titles and can specify which space the page is created in to help everyone keep content organized in one place no matter what space they are working from.

Try it Today

Using OnDemand?

You’ve been auto-updated –  log in and make use of the new improvements now!

Using Confluence Download?

We’re currently working to make these improvements available to you via plugins that need updating in the Universal Plugin Manager in the Confluence Administration Console. Please stay tuned and we’ll let you know as soon as they are ready.

New to Confluence?

Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free 30-day Confluence OnDemand trial.

The Tip of the Month, brought to you by Atlassian University, is a monthly series to help master Atlassian tools. Products are more fun to use when you know all the tricks.

One of the great things about our customers is that we see great diversity and individuality across our customer base. That’s you, our reader! Some customers build software with JIRA, others design clothing, educate students, and some even make cars! One of the great things about JIRA is that it can be customized to really reflect your organization. Custom fields are a great way store additional data in JIRA. For example for an issue type of bug your team may need a field called platform (Mac, PC, Mobile) to know the environment where the issue reproduces. If you track customer leads in JIRA you may need to add in a custom field for company. Once all that data is in JIRA, it’s helpful to see it in a table so it’s easy to see at large.

Want to scan issues faster?

The Issue Navigator is one of the core views in JIRA. It’s the view that shows a set of issues from a search result. For most software projects JIRA’s defaults work pretty well. Many different types of teams use JIRA to track very different types of processes. Have you ever wanted to change what shows up by default? You can add that new field into the search results to see that data in context.

Why Customize the Issue Navigator?

Customizing the issue navigator allows you to see the right data at the right time. This month’s tip focuses on getting the most out of the list view in the issue navigator. Let’s say we need to review a set of bugs for the next sprint to prioritize what the team fixes. Knowing what version a bug surfaced in can help guide when that bug should be fixed. To customize what shows up by default, just click Tools -> Configure Columns when in list view.

Changes in the column configurator don’t affect JIRA’s search results. It only changes what fields JIRA returns with each search results. Let’s add the affects version field to our search results. To add that field, just choose affects version field in the add new column dropdown.

Once we add it, we can see a preview of the new data in the table below. Using the JIRA team’s project as the example we can see:

What’s truly great here is that you now see this data inline with the other issue attributes. You can sort this column to group all the issues with the same version together. This way it becomes easy to see all the open issue that came in by version. Having that data makes prioritizing issues much easier.

JIRA uses the last search to populate the data below so you can see example data below. Changes using the above method will only show up for the current user. We don’t recommend removing the issue key column. The issue key is the only guaranteed unique identifier on an issue. It’s of special importance to JIRA. It’s the only way to ensure you are referring to one issue in the context of work or conversation. Also, the summary column is the visual cue to what the issue is. We recommend you keep that one as well in all views.

You can change the order of columns by using the arrows underneath the column header. To remove a column just click the trash can icon. Also, keep a watchful eye on the number of columns on the screen. Ideally you will have enough screen real estate to ensure that the browser does not need to scroll horizontally. If you need to view a large number of columns in a one time scenario, we recommend to use the export to Microsoft Excel. To do so, click Export->Excel (all fields).

A Note for Admins

Want to make the change globally? As a JIRA admin, you can set defaults for all users by going to JIRA Administration -> System -> User interface -> Navigator Columns.

Have the latest JIRA?

If you do not see list view in your JIRA 6 or OnDemand instance you may be in a new view in the issue navigator called detail view. To follow along choose the list view option from the Issue Navigator.

As a side note, we encourage you to try detail view. It’s one of the great new features of JIRA 6!

Did you discover a setting you didn’t know about? Post a comment below.

If you found this helpful, please visit Atlassian University – interactive tutorials and videos with tons of tips just like this one.

Epics, which were introduced in GreenHopper 6.1, are a group of related user stories and usually capture a large body of work or a big project.  For example, the University team currently has an epic for all work related to an upcoming homepage redesign.  We had an epic for all work related to our better, faster, stronger lesson type we released in March, but since all the user stories were marked as ‘Done’, we also marked the epic as ‘Done’.

Epics help organize user stories in the Plan, Work and Report Mode.

• In Plan Mode, it is possible to sort user stories by epics.  Also, all user stories in epics have color coded tags so you can quickly see which backlog issues are related.
• In Work Mode, it is possible to set up swimlanes by epic.
• In Report Mode, there is an Epic Report which shows a list of complete, incomplete and unestimated issues in an epic. This is useful for planning work for an epic that extends over multiple sprints.

To create an epic:

1. Go to the plan mode of the board you are working on (note: Epics are only available for Scrum Boards)
2. Click ‘Epics’ on the left side (or select Tools> Show Epic Panel)
3. Click the Create icon (the “+” sign) at the top right of the Epics panel
4. You will be prompted to create an issue of type “Epic”
5. In the Epic Name field, enter a short name. The Epic Name (rather than the Summary) will be used to identify your epic and to label issues that belong to it.

Great, the Epic is now added to the board

To view or add an epic, click the EPICS link on the left side of the screen. The yellow ‘Rich Media’ tag is an Epic tag. The ’2.0′ and ’2.1′ tags are Version tags.

Plan mode with the Epics panel open. Clicking on any epic will filter the backlog to only show user stories in that epic.

If you found this helpful, please visit Atlassian University – interactive tutorials and videos with tons of tips just like this one.

Mike stressed that in today’s age, software development goes way beyond development teams. This was echoed by Jim O’Neill, CIO of HubSpot, who shared how his company used Confluence to scale from 10 to 500 employees while preserving a culture of innovation and togetherness.

Chris Kohlhardt of Gliffy spoke about his company’s beginnings and the growth of the Atlassian ecosystem, as well as the potential that Blueprints provides for both customers and third-party developers.

See what went down at First Look

Join us for a live demonstration of Confluence Blueprints

Want to learn how Confluence Blueprints teams can give your team a new and simpler way to create and share work? Join us for a live webinar on Tuesday May 28th at 8:30 AM (PST) where we’ll cover Confluence Blueprints top to bottom.

Register Now

In 60 short minutes we’ll show you and your team how to:

- Hold effective meetings using the Meeting Notes Blueprint
- Share files and documents in one place using the File Lists Blueprint
- Define product requirements documents using the Product Requirements Blueprint
- Make and record decisions using the new Decisions Blueprint
- Customize Blueprints for your own business processes

Registration is limited, so reserve your teams’ spots today.

Register Now

One of the highlights of our tour was teaming up with London Girl Geek Dinners to host a night of tech talk, beer, wine and munchies. Held at London’s Google Campus, the event followed on from our San Francisco Girl Geek event in November. The theme of the evening was remote working, inspired by Yahoo’s recent decision to revoke the right of staff to work from home full-time.

Watch highlights of the evening:

Atlassian’s own Director of Corporate Communications Catherine Norman and Judith Lewis of London Girl Geek Dinners hosted the evening. Astrid Byro, remote worker extraordinaire, was the guest of honor and main speaker. Managing IT projects and teams from the mountains of the Himalayas using JIRA on a Kindle Fire, Astrid was the perfect speaker for our controversial subject of teleworking.

Flexibility is the new black

Attendees took a great interest in Astrid’s tales of working from horse trails and cliff edges, and bombarded her with questions about connectivity, software, batteries, data files and management skills. Astrid’s talk was followed by a lively debate on remote working with members of the audience who expressed their views and experiences of the practice in the tech industry. Not surprisingly, most women felt that too many firms have old fashioned, outdated approaches to the concept of remote working, and that more flexibility should be given to workers. The audience agreed that most issues with flexible work arrangements can be overcome with a little trust and communication.

For more extreme instances of remote working (such as Astrid’s scaling the Himalayas), Astrid offered the following tips and tricks:

• Find the right power/weight of equipment ratio.
• Check out power bars – many people aren’t aware of them and they are massively useful for remote working (and daily life).
• Use li-on batteries carefully and alternate them with spares.
• Use a device with a built-in cellular connection rather than tethering a mobile or using MiFi – the latter two burn batteries and may not work across different devices.
• Avoid unforeseen complications by testing your gear on outings before you need it for work.

We also made sure that no geek left empty-handed, dishing out a plentiful supply of our rockin’ Girl Geek t-shirts to all in attendance.

Thank you, London. We hope to see you on our next trip. And if you can’t make it, just connect remotely. Even if you are halfway up a mountain, you no longer have an excuse!