Announcement about announcements on CDAC

Announcements
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EDIT: Since this announcement was made, we’ve implemented a changelog solution that provides a centralized location where all changes can be subscribed from. Whilst some announcement categories are still being used, they will be closed in favor of the new solution. Visit https://developer.atlassian.com/changelog/ to set up changelog subscriptions.

Hello developer community!

As part of our ongoing efforts to better communicate what’s going on at Atlassian with you, we are standardizing how we communicate technical changes to our products using community.developer.atlassian.com (CDAC).

We now have subcategories in the product categories that are specifically for announcements from Atlassians, e.g. Jira Cloud Announcements. You may be able to comment on the post depending on whether the poster is looking for feedback or not. You’ll see we have retroactively moved our old announcements into these new subcategories.

These subcategories will also augment the changelogs on developer.atlassian.com (DAC), where we will cross post each change from DAC to CDAC. The reason we are doing this is so that you can subscribe to notifications about changes, using the Subscribe button at the top right corner of the CDAC category.

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We currently have changelogs on DAC for Forge and Confluence Cloud. We will continue work with the teams to expand this to more products.

In order to effectively stay in the loop, we recommend that you subscribe to notifications from the product announcement subcategories that you develop for, as well as the general Announcements category and the Marketplace Announcements category. (No access? File a ticket here.)

Pro tip! Want CDAC updates in Slack? Here’s how:

All categories and tags on CDAC can be viewed in RSS format, simply by adding the .rss suffix to the URL. For example, the Confluence Cloud Announcements section on CDAC can be seen in RSS this way: Confluence Cloud Announcements - The Atlassian Developer Community

With this Slack command, you can monitor an RSS feed like this: /feed subscribe https://community.developer.atlassian.com/c/Confluence/confluence-cloud-announcements.rss

That will push notifications into the channel where you ran that command.

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We hope this allows you to tailor your experience and gives you peace of mind that you aren’t missing something important if you’re not checking CDAC every day. (After all, we can’t all be Sven. :wink:)

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Hi @kmorales,

Could you please outline the rationale behind this initiative? Searching for important information on CDAC is a nightmare for vendors. E.g. recent changes to Security and New Partner programs are perfect patterns of how NOT to communicate on upcoming changes. Literally most of vendors were completely unaware, lost and unprepared for them. Instead of having a single source of truth, we all were browsing numerous random threads, comments, tickets, etc. And btw we are still figuring out how to deal with this new reality.

And instead of learning this lesson, Atlassian is pushing CDAC approach even harder. Why?..

I hope we all understand that changes to an Enterprise ecosystem of a huge public company should be posted in a more official, more easy to read and easy to subscribe channel. Ideally a public Confluence blog with links to docs and manuals plus newsletter subscription that will be automatically on for every vendor. Something like Partners portal. And yes, it’s already there.

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I actually like the way how you can subscribe to the various categories you’re interested in to stay up to date. That fits my way of working a lot better than visiting some DAC pages occasionally.

Is my understanding of the rss feed correct that it only adds new entries for new topics and not answers/replies?

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Thanks @kmorales.

Do you know how we can authenticate for the private groups?

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@kmorales - I’d like to see an announcement like that in some announcement category :slight_smile:

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Our intention is to make CDAC the single source of truth, or more accurately, the source that ties all the other sources together. We recognize that there are many places where you will go to consume more information (DAC, Jira boards, Trello boards, etc.) because those are the tools the internal teams use to update their information. The intention is to make CDAC the one place you need to check to see if there are updates to those sources with information that impact you.

This is our official, easy to read, easy to subscribe channel. :slight_smile: We have the developer blog and have used it in the past to communicate critical changes, but there were several problems with that approach: 1) it requires special permission to access, and therefore is not easily adopted internally, 2) there is no ability to comment or interact with the content (I think you’ll agree that is quite important :wink:), and 3) a blog is by nature a marketing tool, which doesn’t fit the use case here.

CDAC is the most democratic, easy to access channel that we have (you don’t even need to login to see the content), which is important for Atlassians as well as the entire developer community. The Partner Portal will never be open to all developers, and Slack doesn’t scale.

In my view the problem is not CDAC, but rather that we haven’t used CDAC to its full potential. It’s the content management practices which make or break the tool, and point taken, we have not done the best job there. That’s why it’s part of my job to work with all our internal teams and make this part of their processes. I completely understand why you are skeptical now, but please give it time, allow us to get better at using CDAC consistently, and we can revist later. :slight_smile:

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That is my understanding as well from what I’ve seen so far.

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Here is the place to request access to the Marketplace Partners only topics.

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I think this is the crux of the issue, and it’s great to see you acknowledge that.

Part of the problem is that while a lot of valuable content exists here in the form of Q&A, the A part is rarely curated or rolled up by Atlassian into FAQs or other documentation. Lots of critical information is buried in CDAC in easy to miss places. A better model for the Q&A aspect of the apparent intent for CDAC might be something like Confluence Questions or a Stack Exchange site, and failing that, some deliberate, manual curation of the Q&A by Atlassian.

Another problem with CDAC is simply the lack of timely participation by Atlassians. Much of the time it feels like Atlassians simply throw information over the wall into CDAC and never return to engage with partners on the topics they create, or when they do the sense of urgency partners bring to bear is not reciprocated. It doesn’t feel like it’s anyone’s actual job to make sure that questions are answered in a timely fashion like you’d get from a support queue with SLAs. Even when a conversation is started successfully, threads go cold mid-conversation and followups miss important deadlines. There seems to be a low level of accountability from Atlassians for their role in making the CDAC strategy effective.

CDAC itself is excellent software, at least for holding basic conversations. I think that not only is being ineffectively applied, but it’s perhaps also being asked to do more than it’s designed for.

Anyway, best of luck improving on these and other issues – I hope you are successful! I look forward to seeing the results of continued integration with teams across Atlassian.

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Ah great point, I missed that category! Here it is: Ecosystem Design Announcements - The Atlassian Developer Community

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This is a great point that I hadn’t thought of. I will try to improve this as well. :slight_smile:

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Sorry Katrina, that’s not what I meant. I am able to access those topics when logged in via the website, but how do I subscribe to those via Slack? How do I authenticate in Slack to subscribe to the private topics?

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Thank you for the initiative!

You might want to look into your subscription engine, though. When I subscribed to new topics in the channels you mentioned, I received 60 emails containing notifications of old posts from as early as 2018…

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That includes the in-app subscription announcement. Right now CDAC is kinda broken for me as I’m signing up for these announcement categories (I’m hoping though that it will go away naturally).

Is it possible to get the Jira announcement categories nested? (And have Cloud nested underneath itself etc). From a usability - having to search through 100 categories will be an area that can be improved…

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It appears CDAC only supports two levels of nesting categories.

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That’s the thing. We still have multiple sources, and there’s literally no way to check if all updates are here. For instance, there’s a partners only updates that are posted in closed Partners section here on CDAC or in the Partners’ Confluence.

Most critical/important announcements are made in those two areas, mentioned above. They have no public access, so the sentence above is not quite true. And yes, most commonly we are restricted by NDA to disclose anything posted there. Please keep in mind.

I’ve personally posted comments under blog posts in the Partner’s Confluence. No Atlassian response though, some likes, but still - Confluence allows commenting, that one of core functionalities out there.

Sure thing, do your best. But there’s one thing mentioned already quite a few times. For some reason, Atlassian is not used to listen to vendors. Instead of having an open conversation about issues we have and ways they can be improved, we are facing these announcement posts about something new. They are full of joy, happiness and smiles, they are to fix issues you think we have. And I’m 100% ok with being positive, but after years of being Marketplace vendor I would love if you start your new cool shiny thing with a little research. May be even talking to vendor council.

E.g. I’ve pointed to a very specific case with new security program many of us recently faced. But it seems like you decided to skip on that. And that is exactly what actually makes me feel skeptic about this initiative. I hope I’m wrong though.

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Considering that Atlassian receives criticism for poor quality comms. Maybe it is a good thing that comms need to be vetted?

This has been a problem on the general Atlassian Community as well. RSS feeds for this software are very unreliable and spammy.

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Ah, that was probably because I was moving old topics into the new categories. Apologies! :grimacing:

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@kmorales this recent topic is a key example of cdac failing to be the one system to rule them all: Upcoming changes to modernize search REST APIs - #35 by brendan

Hopefully it’s clear from that how cdac fails as a support system.

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Hi, you said

All categories and tags on CDAC can be viewed in RSS format, simply by adding the .rss suffix to the URL.

I am trying to add rss to the announcements about jira-cloud. Url is Topics tagged jira-cloud
adding rss to the end is not working (ERROR 406): https://community.developer.atlassian.com/tags/c/announcements/jira-cloud.rss
I have the same problem with other tags. Any idea why?