As a company, few things make we Atlassians prouder than our amazing ecosystem of developers building add-ons for our products. So, tucked away in a corner of our San Francisco office, the Atlassian Ecosystem dev team quietly works to ensure that the integration between third-party add-ons and our core products is absolutely seamless. And they’re proud to announce a massive update to the Universal Plugin Manager. In fact, it’s the biggest release of the UPM since we launched the Atlassian Marketplace in June 2012.

Here’s a brief description of the UPM. The UPM is a tool for Jira, Confluence, Stash and our developer tools that allows administrators to manage all their plugins, whether bundled, Atlassian-made, third-party, paid, free…if it’s not in the core of the product, it’s handled by the UPM. You can:

  • Browse the Atlassian Marketplace, read reviews, see screenshots, and start evaluations in one click
  • See all the add-ons installed in your product and enable or disable them
  • Access add-on configuration screens
  • Update add-ons
  • Check add-on compatibility before you update your Atlassian product

Get the new UPM today!

(Re)introducing the UPM

Cool. What’s new?

We’ve made numerous improvements to make life easier for admins using the UPM, integrate more tightly with the Atlasisan Marketplace, and help extend the UPM to reach more Jira and Confluence users who don’t have admin rights.

New in UPM 2.8: Automatic Updates

We laid the groundwork to begin automatically updating add-ons via the UPM. Administrators can check a box in their UPM settings to enable automatic Atlassian-selected updates. This option is disabled by default–we want to ensure that automatic updates always go smoothly. We’ll start by automatically updating the UPM itself, then extend the functionality to Atlassian add-ons like GreenHopper and Team Calendars. Updates are a complicated process for many admins–our goal is to make life a little simpler.

UPM 2.8 automatic updates

User Add-on Requests

Across Atlassian, we’ve been trying to reach more of our end users. We know many visitors to the Atlassian Marketplace are not necessarily admins, so we want to bring the same in-product Marketplace experience that admins see to all users. Late this summer, as part of a team innovation week project, we introduced a UPM for end users. You can try it yourself! Just click the “Atlassian Marketplace” item in the user menu in the top right corner of Jira or Confluence. You can browse the entire Atlassian Marketplace. If you see an add-on you like, you can send a request to your admin to have it installed.

UPM user add-on requests

New in UPM 2.8, administrators can sort the add-ons in the UPM by “Most Requested”. Each add-on will display the users that have requested the add-on and their comments.

User add-on requests admin view

Rate and Review Add-ons from the UPM

In UPM 2.8, we’re introducing the ability to rate and review add-ons directly from the UPM. Removing friction for rating and reviewing add-ons will lead to more reviews and better add-on search for everyone in the Atlassian Marketplace. If you have an Atlassian Marketplace account (soon to be Atlassian ID) that matches the email of your Jira, Confluence, or Stash login, there will be a box to leave a rating and review for each add-on. Once you save your review, it will be posted to the add-on’s listing on the Marketplace. You can even update your reviews, straight from the UPM. See a demo here.

UPM 2.8 rate and review add-ons

Add-on recommendations inside the UPM

Once of our goals in developing the UPM is to ensure that all the functionality of the Atlassian Marketplace is replicated in the UPM. For a long time, add-on recommendations have been a big component of Marketplace listings, but absent in the UPM. In 2.8, we’ve finally brought recommendations to the UPM. The expanded view of add-ons in the UPM now displays a “People who installed this add-on also installed…” recommendation for similar add-ons. How do recommendations work? Our algorithm uses data from thousands of update checks from every product’s UPM to determine which add-ons are most commonly installed together, then uses Bayesian inference to make suggestions.

UPM 2.8 add-on recommendatios

UI cleanup

It’s been a slow transition, but the UPM now reflects our new terminology. The future of Atlassian is bigger than plugins–now our integrations include not only plugins, but web apps, mobile apps, browser extensions, libraries, clients, CLI tools, and much more. Hence, “add-ons”. We’ve also renamed Administration menu items and consolidated five screens into two. Everything else got moved into one settings screen (show in the automatic updates screenshot above).

UPM 2.8 UI Cleanup

Coming Soon

A “purchased add-ons” page, more design improvements, and add-ons for Atlassian OnDemand.

It’s never been easier to use add-ons in Jira, Confluence, Stash, and all our products. And there have never been more to choose from! Update to UPM 2.8 today to make sure you’re seeing the latest and greatest from the Marketplace team, and browse the Marketplace to discover the missing piece in your team’s workflow.

Get the new UPM today!

Admin Love, User Power: Atlassian Releases Universal Plugin Manager 2.8