If you’ve taken a look at the Administration page in Jira, Confluence, or our developer tools lately, you might have notice that we’ve taken the incredible add-on shopping experience that we launched with the Atlassian Marketplace and baked it right into our products. Friction-free add-on shopping and installation is here(!), thanks to the slew of updates the Atlassian ecosystem team has brought to the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM).
Shop ’til you drop
As long as you’re running UPM 2.0 or later, it’s easier than ever to discover great new add-ons. From the administration page, follow the “Find New Plugins” link to experience the Atlassian Marketplace right inside your instance. 
Doing your add-on shopping within the UPM has several key advantages:
- Easy installation Get up and running with any add-on in seconds. No need to download a .jar file and upload it back into your instance, just click “Install” for free add-ons or “Free Trial” for paid add-ons and let the UPM work its magic, installing automatically and guiding you through a simple licensing process on my.atlassian.com
- One-stop shopping With Atlassian Marketplace inside the UPM, shopping for add-ons is easy. Search for add-ons, filter lists, browse the carousel, and when you’ve selected one, get a description, screenshots, pricing information, and anything else you need to start an evaluation.
- Less context switching Browsing for add-ons within the product allows you to stay focused on the task at hand: making your Atlassian product more responsive to your organization’s needs. Easily move between browsing add-ons, configuration, and licensing without copying and pasting license keys, looking up pricing plans, or switching browser tabs.
It gets better!
The ecosystem team has been bringing dozens of other big features and small updates to the UPM over the last few months: a cleaner interface for managing add-ons, a notification system for license management and updates, disable/enable plugins at the top-level of administration, and more.
Zach Davis, a front-end developer on the Atlassian Ecosystem team, gave a lightning talk at Atlassian Summit 2012 where he dove into many of these features and explained them in detail. Check out his talk below to see video demonstrations and screenshots, or skip to 9:23 for a sneak preview of what’s coming later this year. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R020B4oU8Tk]
Get it while it’s hot
The Atlassian ecosystem team has been pushing out a steady stream of updates to the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) since its 2.0 release in January! If you’re not running the current version, 2.4.1, hop over to the Jira administration tab and look for an invitation to update the UPM from the UPM itself, a feature that launched with 2.0. If your UPM is pre-2.0, you can manually install the new UPM from the Atlassian Marketplace–it’s compatible with Jira 4.3 and up and Confluence 3.4 and up.