Mixing the Cocoa Beans

A week ago RightStar held a Jira Service Management webinar for approximately 30 attendees featuring Theo Chocolate.  Although we did an excellent job presenting what’s new with JSM, the main draw was definitely the chocolate. (How can anything compete with chocolate?) And afterwards, Atlassian described the event as fun and delicious–two words that normally don’t go together at an Atlassian webinar. A good time was definitely had by all!  Here’s a brief summary of what’s new with both JSM and Theo Chocolate.

The 2020 Jira Service Desk rebranding was somewhat lost in the shuffle as Atlassian’s cloud and end of server announcements overshadowed last November’s JSM announcement. Atlassian is making a big-time play for JSM in the enterprise space and is taking on ServiceNow in the process. As a result:

• Alert Management from Opsgenie is now bundled at no additional cost with all JSM cloud plans. Opsgenie includes on-call scheduling, alerting, and incident swarming. Also included are deeper integrations with Jira Software, Bitbucket, and Confluence, which offer incident resolution processes that span development and IT operations teams.
• Coming soon is the Mindville CMDB richer asset and configuration management as well as best-in-class conversational ticketing capabilities from Halp, both from recent acquisitions.

These new features combined with Atlassian’s thousands of existing Jira Software enterprise accounts along with JSM’s attractive pricing and ease of implementation bodes well for rapid growth for JSM in the enterprise space.

Next up—an overview of Theo Chocolate, a factory tour, and a sampling of several types of chocolate bars. Theo Chocolate founded in 2005 in Seattle, Washington was the first organic, fair trade certified chocolate maker in North America. We learned where cocoa beans come from and how Theo makes its chocolate. And the best part—sampling the different chocolate bars—Sea Salt Dark Chocolate, Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter and Jelly Cups, Root Beer Barrel Dark Chocolate, Bread and Chocolate, Pure Dark Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, and Raspberry Dark Chocolate. A great way to end the day….