The Atlassian Summit was jam packed with keynotes, series of valuable sessions, lots of information and variety of palatable local food and deserts. We learned a lot from customers and partners, gained valuable insights into Atlassian’s products, compared technical details with their product teams, discussed roadmaps, and scoped out the competition. We not only brought home a whole bunch of ideas to experiment with, we also carried back a few extra pounds around our waistlines.

Below is a summary of what I found to be the three most valuable sessions I attended.

JIRA State of the Union:

Brian Rollins, Product Manager of JIRA gave a sneak peak of the new features coming out in JIRA 5.1. While inline page edit and even fewer page reloads would make life easier for a JIRA user, their improvements in performance and scalability makes JIRA a even better fit then before for large enterprises. Issue collector will open up doors for issues to come from anywhere, in any form that fits the requirement. The next versions of JIRA will have roadmap planning and maintaining, as well as newer and easier ways of performing searches.

GreenHopper State of the Union:

The GreenHopper State of the Union was presented by Shaun Clowes, Senior Product Manager at Atlassian. Shaun explained how easy it is for any non agile team to adopt agile through Kanban without adding any extra process layers. Agile is the way to go for your next project and if you have never done it before, try Kanban and user Greenhopper to manage the process. Rapid boards, drag and drop support for planning and some newer features in Greenhopper left the crowd salivating.

Remote Apps:

We always believed that remote apps are the only scalable way to grow plugin systems. It was nice to see phenomenal progress (led by Dan Brown) in that direction. Also saw the making of Lucid Chart’s remote application for OnDemand. Although there are still a bunch of kinks to straighten, a few more bells and whistles to be added in the framework, this effort by Atlassian is commendable and immensely encouraging. I spoke to Dan about the possibility of a common remote apps architecture that could work for onDemand as well as for onPremise version. He agreed in principle, but mentioned that it may be a while before this could become a reality.