Summary

• Atlassian’s Service Collection is the latest bundling of Atlassian products into a single offering focused on service management. It includes Jira Service Management (JSM), Assets, Rovo, and a new app, Customer Service Management (CSM).
• Existing JSM customers don’t lose anything, but they will gain access to a new app, CSM, for free.
• Like the Atlassian Strategy Collection, you can’t buy the apps in the Atlassian Service Collection individually (unlike the Software Collection and the Teamwork Collection, where you can).
• The new CSM app is a dramatically enhanced version of JSM’s existing functionality for external customer service.

What are Atlassian’s ‘collections’?

The Atlassian Service Collection is part of Atlassian’s strategy to bundle their products together into collections based on common use cases.

In effect, they’re going from product-centric to problem-centric to help customers decide what they need.

Before Collections, customers would have to research what Jira, Confluence, Align, Loom, Bitbucket do, to work out which product/s they need. Now Atlassian is showing them which products they need. Instead of trying to choose between products, customers can choose collections that match the type of work they’re doing.  

First, Atlassian released the Teamwork Collection and Strategy Collection. Teamwork brought together Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo to help with work management and collaboration. Strategy combined Jira Align with two new apps, Focus and Talent, to help with enterprise strategy and planning.

Now they have launched two new ‘collections’: the Atlassian Software Collection and the Atlassian Service Collection. The Software Collection is for development teams and combines Rovo Dev, DX (pending the closing of Atlassian’s acquisition of DX), Pipelines, Bitbucket, and Compass.

But you’re here to learn about the Service Collection. So let’s get to that and answer some of your burning questions.

What is the Atlassian Service Collection?

The Atlassian Service Collection is Atlassian’s service management offering, designed to be a complete toolset for delivering service to internal and external customers efficiently, with lots of AI-powered automation. So, if you need service management, the Service Collection has all your needs covered.

The bundle includes:

• Jira Service Management (JSM): Atlassian’s core service management offering for IT, development, and business teams
• Customer Service Management (CSM): a brand new app designed for external customer support
• Assets: a database for managing assets such as hardware, software, facilities, equipment, and custom objects, and connecting them to requests, incidents, and changes
• Rovo: Atlassian’s AI agents, which help improve productivity across service work by triaging and fulfilling requests, resolving incidents, and summarising information.

How are existing Jira Service Management customers affected?

The interesting thing is that this new package isn’t that different.

JSM Premium or Enterprise plans already included Rovo and Assets. All that’s changing is that you’re getting another app thrown in for free: Customer Service Management. And you’ll move to a Service Collection Premium or Enterprise plan.

Can new customers buy the Service Collection apps individually?

Bear in mind that you couldn’t actually buy Rovo or Assets separately from Jira Service Management anyway. They both came with a JSM Premium or Enterprise plan. This isn’t changing. Assets and Rovo still can’t be purchased individually.

So the question becomes, can you buy Atlassian’s new Customer Service Management app on its own? And the answer is no, you can’t.

Why? Well, Atlassian are designing these collections to be a single bundled product, rather than a ‘pick-and-mix' set of apps. The Atlassian Strategy Collection is the same; you can’t buy Align, Focus, and Talent by themselves. If you want one app, you get all of them.

Interestingly, the Atlassian Teamwork Collection and the Atlassian Software Collection are different. Although Atlassian recommend buying the full collection to leverage the combined strengths of each app, the apps can still be purchased individually. Maybe this will change in the future but at the moment you can still get Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket etc. without the others.

So the question remains why the apps in the Atlassian Service Collection aren’t available separately.

We think there’s two reasons.

One is that Assets and Rovo were never available individually.

The other is that although Customer Service Management (CSM) is its own platform, it’s very much an offshoot of JSM. In simple terms, CSM is a souped-up version of the external customer service functionality that already existed in JSM.

What is the new Customer Service Management app?

Before the new Customer Service Management app was born, Jira Service Management was a tool for internal and external customers. Now Atlassian are saying that JSM is for internal users, i.e. employees and contractors, and CSM is for external customers.

CSM has numerous similarities to JSM but a lot more power and customisability for delivering external customer service than JSM ever had. It offers flexible support environments for different customers called customer experiences, and a sophisticated AI agent that collaborates with your team, rather than just providing answers.

In the next blog, we’ll take a closer look at CSM’s features and how it’s better for external customers than JSM.

If you’re interested in purchasing the Atlassian Service Collection, Togetha’s ITSM implementation package can get you up and running in just two weeks. We also offer packages for configuring and supporting all the platforms on an ongoing basis.