Someone recently asked a me the following question about Atlassian Summit: what’s in it for systems administrators?
The challenge of creating a worldwide user conference for Atlassian is the sheer diversity of our user base — developers, sys admins, QA, database managers, director-level, end-users, and just about every classification.
We’ve created a diverse agenda full of a variety of topics, including several practical sessions and examples of how to configure, scale, and support Atlassian products in different environments.
The Sessions at-a-glance
We have several talks for Jira and Confluence administrators for fine-tuning the products, admin tips and tricks, and unlocking new uses of the products for different teams. 
These talks include:
- Confluence State of the Union
- Scaling Confluence
- 10-must-have Confluence Plugins
- How Confluence Plays Well with Others
- Jira State of the Union
- Administrivia: Golden Tips to Make Jira Hum
- Three uses of Jira Beyond Bug Tracking
Reconnaissance
After attending these sessions and others (full agenda), we’d hope you can bring back ideas for your entire team — on the plugins to use and performance improvements to tackle on the product. If you’re supporting dev teams that do continuous integration, or need a product like Fisheye to tap into their code repository, then Summit is a great place to learn about the products, add-ons, how they’re being used by other customers, and how you can manage them.
Networking
In addition to the sessions, lots of networking opportunities, general sessions and keynotes, an Atlassian “genius bar,” birds-of-a-feather, and plenty of time to get new ideas and answers for making your apps hum.
A final point
Lastly, I’ll point out that Summit is a two-way street. When you’re here, you can meet with the product managers for Jira, Confluence, and all of our products. How can we make our products better for systems administrators? How can we improve user management and authentication? Anyone got an opinion about clustering and large-scale deployments? We’d like to know. Should we be doing more to support other app servers and databases? We want to hear from you at Summit.
We want to hear from you before the conference, too.
The agenda is published, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need your feedback. Got some suggestions? Would you like to see some lightning talks dedicated to more sys admin-y topics? Want a different session for systems administration? Please start a thread on our forum.
