Another example of an announcement that did not make it to the partner community

Confluence Development Confluence Cloud
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There is no mention about this on Partner Portal, CDAC or Confluence Cloud change log

cc @amardesich @tpettersen

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Is there any information available for vendors?

Can we search for guests? Do we get access to the email address of guests when we have access to the emails of Confluence users?

How are we supposed to integrate guests with our own access controls and permissions?

Are we expected to provide our addons for free to guests?

So many questions.

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Sorry about this folks, I agree this should have been messaged to the partner community ahead of time with details of any potential impacts to and opportunities for apps. I don’t personally have much context for this feature at present but I will follow up with the responsible team when they come online on Monday.

Thank you for sounding the alarm @remie and for your specific queries above @marc. One thing that would help with the escalation with the R&D team who are working on this feature is:

(A) any other questions that you may have, and
(B) in particular, any other specific concerns you have about adverse impacts to your existing apps.

This will help the team better craft partner enablement materials and reason about how to roll this feature out without disrupting our ecosystem.

My apologies for the disruption and concern that this has no doubt caused you all.

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@tpettersen - I seem to be under the impression that Atlassian made this big hubbub about consolidating messaging, and improving communications, and so forth. Once you’ve followed up with the relevant team, can you shed some light as to what went wrong here for something like this to get missed, and what it going to change internally to start addressing this more systematically?

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Hi @tpettersen - I am not personally affected so for me it is not a problem, but I noticed something had changed from the EAP where guest users were “licensed” to the community announcement that stated

For each paid user on a Confluence site, Admins will be able to add up to 5 guests for no additional cost.

I am under the assumption for user handling, this means these guests will show up as normal users for third-party apps as well. But it would be nice to have this confirmed.

Also, a few vendors have based their pricing model on users being paid and licensed, so for those vendors, they will see increased usage of resources from this.

For most of us, I think we can live with a little bit more HTTP traffic

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Thanks for the additional detail @ernst.stefan!

@ademoss the planned comms improvements are still in flight I’m afraid. Atlassian is a very large organisation these days and we don’t (yet) have a consistent launch process that is used across all of R&D. Individual teams have rather a lot of autonomy when it comes to shipping features, and given the expansive nature of our cloud platform impact to partners is not always anticipated ahead of time. We are acutely aware of this problem and have a process that is somewhat effective when applied correctly, but needs to be made more robust and is not yet adopted universally.

For this particular change I’m still not quite sure yet how it was launched ahead of partner comms, but I will find out. On that front I’ve identified the team internally that is working on this feature and passed this post on, and am just waiting on a response.

The rollout appears to not be planned until October so we have a little time to sort this out, but I’ll endeavour to get some more technical detail and an understanding of any potential ecosystem impact assessed and published to partners ASAP.

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@tpettersen were you able to find out any more information about the impact of this feature on marketplace apps?

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Well, that’s an assumption until we know more. HTTP traffic isn’t the issue - every Cloud connect app these days pretty much needs to have backend code running to satisfy security requirements.

A 500 user subscription now might have to support 2,500 actual users. That’s a big jump in resources consumption.

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Hi @remie , @marc , @ademoss , @ernst.stefan and @james.dellow ,

Thanks for pointing out these concerns. I’ve had a chat with the Confluence Cloud team and my understanding is that they thought there would be no impact on apps. We discussed the questions you posed and how impact can occur even when there are no formal/obvious API changes†.

The Confluence Cloud team now intend to research how this feature may impact apps, including the areas you have highlighted above. Once that research is complete, the team will be in a position to communicate this in the Confluence Cloud changelog. The team won’t make any changes resulting in impact without sufficient notice through the changelog.

Regards,
Dugald

† Note that I have been maintaining a classification of API changes and this change prompted me to add a new type which I’ve labelled cardinality. You can see the definition here.

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They also did not bother to double check their assumptions with DX or TPM teams. Now that’s the core issue isn’t it. Y’all need to do some serious soul searching about the type of ecosystem/economy you want to have

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Hi @dmorrow ,
It is hard for us to judge the impact, because we just don’t know much how the feature is supposed to work.

However there is at least impact on:

  • backend load for vendors
  • security and access controls, especially related to SSO
  • background tasks and external systems, e.g. email sending and opt-in/opt-out of guest users
  • how do “guest users” relate to the Atlassian Partner Marketplace agreement? If I understand correctly, they are not paying, and as such not covered by the agreement?
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There has been an up date on the original community post, with some relavent answers

Including:

Guests can use marketplace apps for free, however, we are providing app developers with the ability to opt out of providing guests access to their app.

Yes, guests can use apps and macros of apps on pages. They can also request the installation of new apps. They cannot install new apps by themselves.

guests cannot @ mention any other user or guest. They can be @ mentioned themselves by regular users.

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Hi All,

We have consolidated information about the feature into this post and hope that it addresses most of the questions that might arise around how this feature would work with marketplace apps.

We understand this is a completely new feature that provides advanced collaboration and could present some unanticipated challenges or use cases. To help mitigate these risks, we’re releasing it as a beta and are prepared to make changes and improvements based on feedback.

Thank you in advance for working through these changes and for your continued support!

Marketplace Partner-specific resources are published on the Partner Portal here*. We are open to your feedback as we provide developers and partners with a consistent way to stay updated with Atlassian changes.

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*Marketplace Partners with at least 1 paid-via-Atlassian app qualify for Partner Portal resources. If you experience any issues getting access, and meet the eligibility criteria, please open a support ticket and our team will work to get things resolved as quickly as possible.

Best,
Nidhi Raj
Confluence PM

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