It’s about time to reintroduce myself. I’ve been posting here intermittently since 2017 when developer advocacy was a new function for Atlassian. Over the years, I’ve played various advocacy and evangelism roles for both developers and Atlassian’s largest customers. Now, I play the role of partner engineer for SaaS vendors, which means I’m responsible for helping SaaS vendors as they consider why build integration with Atlassian and how to best build an integration.
Of course, Atlassian is as relentlessly self-service in these kinds of partnerships as we are with customers; hence, I often only have time enough to share a “canned response”. If your company is starting to work on integration with Atlassian, here are my 6 tips for getting started:
Everyone learns about all our products. Even if you already know what product you want to target, the full context matters for framing value and explaining the value of any given integration. Product knowledge is a critical foundation for building what customers want.
Marketing and design become familiar with the Atlassian Design Guidelines . If you aren’t building any UI inside the Atlassian products, you’ll still find useful guidance for marketing content and graphics assets.
Developers read about the options . Treat Atlassian Cloud as if it were a different product than self-managed (Server & Data Center).
Developers provision a Cloud Dev site (Jira and Confluence). Sign up through this channel to avoid limitations of Free edition.
- Sign up - Try Atlassian Cloud | Atlassian
- https://admin.atlassian.com/ You are limited to 1 Jira Service Management agent, or you start getting billing emails. To avoid this, go to your organization and select “… → Grant product access”. Turn this off: “Jira Service Management→ New users have access to this product.”
- https://start.atlassian.com/ Bookmark this to get back to all the Atlassian products. (Not quite all today, but in time it will fill out.)
Developers explore the Atlassian Developer Community. Well, you’re already here but be sure to look around. With an account, you can subscribe to notifications for announcements and security notices.
- Announcements - The Atlassian Developer Community
- Security Alerts - The Atlassian Developer Community
Marketing provisions an Atlassian Marketplace Vendor. You can work on a vendor page while your App is in progress.
If my habit-building works out, consider this the start of a series of “field notes” from the perspective of SaaS vendors and integrators. As such, please let me know what kind of resources you’d like to see as posts or documentation. For more specific SaaS vendor and integration questions please start a new topic in the appropriate category.