We need to talk about the rollout of Confluence Embedded Pages API

Marketplace General Discussion
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Dear Atlassian,

It’s that time again where I get to tell you how, despite your best intentions, you managed to royally screw up something that could have been great.

Apparently you have been working on a great new feature called Confluence Embedded Pages, which will probably be announced during Team’23. This is a great innovation that will help further integrate Confluence into other apps (like Microsoft Teams) and that will improve an create a lot of apps on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Also apparently, you have been sharing this with a select group of Atlassian Marketplace partners in advance to announcing it.

It was made available to developers during AppWeek in Berlin (Feb’23) and before that to a select group of partners that got to work with you on shaping this new feature.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I fully understand (and expect) that you work together with partners on creating new features that will drive innovation on the Atlassian Marketplace. It is also great that this is shared with partners during AppWeek.

What isn’t great is that you did not announce this new feature to the broader Atlassian Marketplace partner community after AppWeek, thus creating a situation in which a lot of Atlassian Marketplace partners were caught off guard when an app based on this new API was made available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

The fact that an Atlassian Marketplace partner was able to release a new app on the Atlassian Marketplace using features that are not yet available to the entire community is really questionable, especially given the role Atlassian plays in this.

I would love for Atlassian to reflect on how this feature was shared with the Atlassian Marketplace partner community, what decisions were made in regard to choosing to work with which partners and why it was decided to share this at AppWeek but not make it more generally available. Especially whilst keeping in mind that the number of attendees of AppWeek is limited, that metal-tier partners are preferred and that Atlassian get’s to pick who is invited to AppWeek.

You are meddling with the ability to compete within the Atlassian Marketplace, which is something Atlassian should stay clear from IMHO.

CC: @tpettersen

Disclaimer: I have no intention to use this API and thus have no specific interest in raising this point. However, I do think it is required to have this discussion to keep the Atlassian Economy a safe space for all partners.

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Thanks for expressing your concerns, Remie. Confluence Embedded Pages was announced at Team ‘22 and there is published documentation here. Where developers have expressed interest in using this, we’ve generally accommodated. The feature has not been broadly advertised as it is still in early access and ongoing work continues to improve it. It’s also worth noting - the process for enabling this feature is quite manual and requires back and forth communication with Atlassian. We are working on a more scalable process, but to date this has limited the scope of the early access program.

Once we have higher confidence and a self-serve method for onboarding, it will become more generally available.

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