I am beginning to loathe working with Atlassian products as both a user and an administrator.

I don't hate ALM products. I was the original user experience designer of what is now Azure DevOps. I love knowledge management and content management systems.

But. Atlassian products continue to cause me, my colleagues, and my company so much pain. Both of Atlassian's core products - Jira and Confluence - are incredibly fragmented and full of technical and user experience debt. The answer from Atlassian for every single issue I’ve had in the past year has either been “Won’t fix” or “Spend money on the Marketplace to fix this long known problem”

This is one small example of literally dozens in the last 6 months alone.?It has eaten 40+ hours of productivity from my team over the last two weeks, only to find out the root cause comes from multiple known issues that Atlassian has refused to address for years.

Scenario: Use a Jira project to track production of some marketing assets and a Confluence Page to distribute those assets.

In the issue we have a URL Field that points to a Google Drive File to download said asset.

We use a Confluence Page to enable internal staff to find and download these assets for use.

So we first try using the /jira macro to embed these URLs programmatically into the Confluence page. Except this macro will not embed Jira URL fields as clickable links within Confluence.?This was a regression in Confluence in 2018 - that Atlassian says they cant reproduce despite many customers continually and directly telling them otherwise (and the many, many support forum posts complaining about it).

So then we move on to using the Stiltsoft Tables app to fix the problem Atlassian has ignored for 4 years, on one of the most basic macros they provide (side note, the Jira macro in confluence has dozens of other basic UX issues that have also been completely ignored by Atlassian for years – and this is the ONLY official content integration between Confluence and Jira, which Atlassian touts as a major feature)

We get this working, or so we thought, until we start getting reports of Google Drive blocking the downloads of these assets.?Which happens because Stiltsoft has to use iframes to process the content for their plugins, because Atlassian doesn’t have any server-side mechanism for Cloud Marketplace apps to do this securely, apparently.?And Google rightfully blocks iFrame embedded links to GSuite apps.

So fine, we will just manually set these links to open in a new tab/window, a basic feature of html links, right??Nope you can forget about that - https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-11194 Atlassian has refused to enable this for the past 6 years, despite literally hundreds of customers telling them otherwise, under the guise that it would be a poor user experience.?Instead the official line is to use yet another marketplace application to accomplish this.

So in the quest to display a URL from a Jira field on a Confluence page in a clickable, user-friendly format, instead we have to post an ugly workaround warning message at the top of every confluence page letting them know how crap Atlassian's products are.