Since I started working at Atlassian almost 2 years ago, we've wanted to give the User Group site a makeover. We've finally done it! Check it out! Here's the story:

The Background.
We run our user group site on a public extranet that runs on Confluence. Confluence was perfect because it allows us to make changes without bugging our website developers. In addition, we could give permissions to user group leaders so they could modify the content on their respective user groups.

For many groups this page is home base, hosting all of the groups info including RSVPs, agenda and updates. The organizers each have unlimited access to this page, and don't need anything from me to make changes and add new meetings. However, I'm never left out of the loop. I'm "following" the user group space. So when any change is made to any part of the site, I am notified via email.

It's also simple for me to pull outside content in using macros. For example, the map feature at the bottom of the new homepage is pulled directly from Google maps using the Widget macro.

The Problem.
Plain and simple the site was ugly, and not very usable. I was the ahem.. designer.. of the user group page. And unfortunately the user group page didn't fair any better then my ceramics in 9th grade pottery.

The Solution.
I reached out to our Confluence Product Marketing Specialist, Matt "the Wiki Whisperer" Hodges, for help. He contacted our partner, RefinedWiki. RefinedWiki's mission is to deliver a powerful and user-friendly wiki solutions. They created a beautiful Confluence Theme for the new user group page. The new site keeps all the benefits of the old site, but...looks pretty, yay! Let us know how you like it.

Want to start your own user group? Here's how...

Old version

New version

Read more about the design in a guest blog post from Refined Wiki.

Increase usability, navigation and new users adoption rate within Confluence

This is the first of two guest posts by Jimmy Lundström from RefinedWiki, a Confluence plugin that provides a whole new interface which increase the usability of Confluence with improved navigation and with features where you can customize dashboards and space layouts with wiki markup. 

RefinedWikis first post focuses on how you, with enhanced usability and interface design, can organize content better, increase non-technical users adoption rate and take your first step to use Confluence as an intranet. Our second post will be a new product release for Confluence, so please stay tuned.  

First, I would like to thank Atlassian for being a great platform which gives possibilities for people like us in RefinedWiki to start an international business and at the same time being part of something that will shape the future enterprise 2.0 business area. 

Experiences from Confluence users lead to a new business 

RefinedWiki became a business after experiences of doing consultancy jobs for companies using Confluence. While working with Confluence customers we have noticed three common issues:

• Organizing content can be hard, especially when it grows and when more departments gets involved with submitting content.
• New users, mostly non-technical, have issues regarding the usability and navigation of Confluence.
• With many different companies paying consultants to create a designed interface which also increase the usability of Confluence, it would be much cheaper if there was a plugin that solved most of the common features being asked for. 

With those issues in our mind we started with a mission to give Confluence a more designed interface and make it more user-friendly. To reach our mission we started to look at the user interface of other systems in different business areas.  

Organize spaces into categories

Instead of listing a lot of spaces on the dashboard, you can organize your spaces into different categories. Our customers appreciate this feature, for example managements can have their own category with content and spaces underneath and Human Resources can have their own category. This makes it easier both for the departments to put up right content at the right place and for the user who easier knows where to look while finding different content. 

You can also choose to set a specific color to a category and then all content underneath that category will be displayed with that color. Using color codes like this improves the navigation of Confluence.

Customize your dashboard and space layout with wiki markup

You can customize both the dashboard and a category dashboard with wiki markup to show the features you want for your organization. You can also customize your space layout and embed different macros into your right column, footer, page meta data, page top and at the page bottom.  

With a lot of different companies using Confluence this is a great way to customize your needs within your Confluence instance.

Implementing other features along the way 

While working with customers we have learned that they ask for small features, like viewing attachments without leaving a page or having a new personal space layout, and those are functions that we also have implemented in our product. We focus on a customer driven development and always appreciate feedback.

At last we have noticed that with the above described features our customers and potential customers have become more interested to implement Confluence as an intranet or as a bigger part of an existing intranet. That is something that we think is well suited for such a great product as Confluence.  

Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we will release a new product for Confluence. Thanks for taking your time.

See for yourself

To discover the product for yourself, please check out RefinedWikis short demonstration video, explore the product at refinedwiki.com, or see it live at RefinedWikis demowiki.

"I could download trojan programs from the site which allowed me to control other people's computers. I did this just for fun but I also know that many other members could make a fortune by attacking other people's accounts," said a 23-year-old member of Black Hawk Safety Net in Nanjing of East China's Jiangsu province, who asked to remain anonymous.

They seized nine Web servers, five computers and one car, and shut down all the sites involved in the case, according to the provincial public security department.

• The hacks have compromised thousands of companies, not just 37 as previously reported.
• Most of the compromises are currently still active and law enforcement has been contacting companies to let them know they have been compromised.
• The exploit was an IE 6 security flaw that was first reported to Microsoft by an Israeli researcher in September 2009 but which remained unpatched for months. ("0-day")
• The attack profile include multiple-year-long occupation of companies' computer systems and typically involved hidden siphoning of large amounts of private data including email, documents, etc. This is in contrast to the smash and grab techniques more common in the past.
• Existing security software (like antivirus software) is not able to detect this attack profile or the malware used to initiate it.
• The full extent of data theft will never be known.
• The goal of the attacks appears to be coroporate and national espionage.
• The hackers have levelled up.
• The trail goes dead in Taiwan where the data was siphoned to and China where the spear phishing attacks were initiated from.
  

Next week we are running a Plugin of the Month webinar with Communardo on the Confluence Content Import Plugin.

Based out of Germany, Tino Winkler will walk us through how the Content Import Plugin faciliates imports of any type of content into Confluence. The import data must be provided in a transfer format, which is an XML notation of Confluence data. The format supports nearly all of the Confluence content types (pages, spaces, blog posts, comments, attachments) and the according meta data (creator, modifier, dates, labels). The plugin is an efficient tool to support the migration of content from any system, e.g. legacy wikis, blogs and message boards, without the need to know the Confluence API.

REGISTER NOW: Thu, Feb 18, 2010 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST

We're holding an Atlassian Doc Sprint on 22-24 February. You may have already heard about it. This is a quick reminder to the people who are coming and an invitation to join us if you haven't already.

What will happen in the doc sprint? We'll cloister ourselves in a room with some computers, some geeks and plenty of chocolate. After three days, we'll emerge with lots of shiny new tutorials plus the accompanying plugins and gadgets. And we'll be a lot wiser than when we went in. It's a bit like Big Brother but with open doors. The biggest loser will be the one who eats the least chocolate.

We already have a number of people coming and a plan for the tutorials we want to develop. Our schedule is shaping up nicely.

Want to join us? Come play with the Atlassian tech writers. Grab a chocolate middle name while there are still some left and sign up.

Have you ever bought something purely because of what’s written on the package?

Today I saw this small, medical-looking box in a store’s confectionery section:

It’s a bar of chocolate! It was expensive and I already had a couple of bars in my basket. Even so, I bought it. Why? Because I wanted to take the writing home with me. I was also a little curious about the chocolate inside the package. If the writing is so innovative, the product will probably be good too.

The chocolate is good, although I prefer milk to dark chocolate. But the point is that I bought it entirely because of the writing. That’s one up for us writers. Here’s what it says:

Confectioner only remedy
Keep out of reach of chocoholics

BOCHOX

active ingredient cocoa solids — 75%

For relief from the symptoms of wrinkles and crow’s feet.

Warning — May cause weight gain if used incorrectly.

Directions: Simply break off the desired dosage and consume. You should quickly be overcome by stress-relieving endorphins and no longer concerned in the slightest about your wrinkles.

Important: This packet is protected by a tamper-evident paper wrap. If seal has been broken suspect everyone. BOCHOX can be habit forming.

Store below 18° C.

NOT TO BE TAKEN seriously.

75% cocoa Swiss dark chocolate

It’s from Bloomsberry & Co, a New Zealand company that thinks chocolate. Their web site is a hoot too. Congratulations to Vanessa Kettelwell and all the Bloomsberrians for such awesome writing! And for the awful puns.

Last week I wrote about getting started as a blogger. Now I’d like to tell you how I go about writing a blog post, in the hope that this will give you some tips on getting those blog posts written.

While I was writing these two posts, the DMN guys published an article on “How we blog“. Scott and Aaron write killer blog posts, so their article must be well worth a read. I haven’t read it yet (!) because I wanted to post mine first and then see how much we have in common. Here goes.

Quick tips

Here are some quick pointers. Let me know what you think of them or if I’ve left anything out.

• Maintain a character in your blog, so that people can start seeing it as a friend. Blogging is a social activity. Be yourself! Otherwise it’s difficult to maintain a consistent persona and people will soon pick it up if you don’t sound real.
• Give plenty of factual information, preferably hard-won. That’s what people value.
• Feel free to intersperse bits of your personality. People like to know who you are.
• Link to other people’s blogs. If your idea is an expansion of something someone else has written, include a mention of where you got the idea. If you’ve seen someone’s post about a related topic, link to it. The other bloggers appreciate this and will start linking back to you in return.
• Be nice, positive and sincere. If you disagree with something, say so but be constructive. Some bloggers are successful by being horrid, but to make that work you have to be really good and have a curl on your forehead. I don’t like nastiness, manipulation or one-upmanship, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
• Add structure to the content. Yes, even in a blog post. Put headings in the post itself. Split the information into easily-readable chunks. I’ve even chosen to have a bold, italicised introductory paragraph at the top of each post, reminiscent of newspaper articles.
• Write each post around a story or a ‘hook’. This will give the post a theme, making it easier for you to write and easier for people to read.
• Make sure the title reflects the main story. This will attract readers and give you a good position in search results such as Google or Bing.

View every experience as fodder for your blog

Whenever something happens, think to yourself: “How does this fit into my blog?”

You can even write multiple blog posts as a result of a single experience or event. A while ago I wrote 4 posts resulting from one ‘Atlassian FedEx Day’, each with a different theme. Atlassian is the company I work for, and FedEx Day is a period of 24 hours when we all get silly and try to develop and deliver something within the space of 24 hours. The event itself was a lot of fun, and provided fodder for these posts:

• A blog post on ffeathers, for people who are not Atlassians. This post introduces the concept of FedEx Day, tells the story of technical writers taking part in what is essentially a developer-focused activity, and shows lots of pictures.
• My Atlassian FedEx delivery note, describing the purpose and results of my FedEx Day project. This is a more formal post. Everyone who takes part in FedEx is supposed to write one of these.
• Another post on ffeathers, describing the software that I evaluated as part of the FedEx project. This software, the SHO tool for guided help, is of interest to technical writers so it was useful to write it up separately.
• A post on the Atlassian company blog, describing the new SDK (software development kit) that I used. This post is aimed at developers, showing them that the SDK makes it easy for even a technical writer to develop a plugin. There’s a fair bit of technical detail in the article. It’s also promotional, as suited to a company blog.

I could write another post about how to write 5 blog posts from one experience.

What about actually writing the blog posts?

Here’s how it happens (mostly) for me.

How to write a blog post

Whenever an idea crosses my mind, I write myself a note.

I write the notes on paper, on the backs of envelopes, in emails, in an SMS message to myself, on a Post-it — you name it.

At some point the collection of notes reaches critical mass and I feel the urge to put it to bed in a blog post, before it explodes or I go mad.

So I sit down and start writing. My favourite time is on Saturdays after lunch, because that works for me and the family.

Sometimes the notes I have written are already fairly well crafted. Maybe I was on the bus and had time to write properly. Then I can just dump the words from the note directly into the post and tweak them a bit.

More often I end up with a disparate set of scribblings, in various forms and on various media. I read through them all just once. I want to bring them all to the top of my ever-bubbling pot of thoughts, but not to try to memorise exactly what I wrote.

Then I sit back and think, for a very short time (about 2 minutes), focusing on what I want to say in the post. That will be the main message, the theme and the story or hook.

Now I just start writing. For me, it’s better not to agonise too much about the actual words at this point, because that stunts the flow. I just write, as fast as I can, as if I were talking. If I can’t get the words out for a particular bit, then I write short half-sentences and a big row of “x”s, like this: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. I move on to the next thought, so that I don’t lose the flow. Later, it’s pleasantly easy to find those “x”s (they stick out, as you can see) and either add the right words or just delete the whole sentence or paragraph because it has become irrelevant.

When I’ve done the initial braindump, I go through the scribbled notes again to see if I’ve covered them all. I don’t usually refer to them while doing the first braindump, because that also interrupts the flow. With great glee, I tear up or delete the notes that are already in the post. Usually, I find that I have covered them all. If I’ve missed one or two out, they often don’t fit in anyway. Then I either turf them or put them aside for another potential post. Tearing up or deleting the notes gives me as much pleasure as ticking off an item in a to do list!

At some point before publishing the post, I go and have a cup of coffee or a chocolate then come back to read the post again a while later. I try to put myself in the place of a reader who is seeing the post for the first time. What impression will they get, and is it the impression I want to give? Have I actually achieved a logical flow from paragraph to paragraph, or does part of the logical flow exist in my brain only? I fix up any typos, add bits and pieces, add tags, then publish the post.

Another moment of glee: I tweet “New post” and link to the post.

Does blogging take up a lot of time?

Oh yes! In my experience it takes on average 3 to 4 hours to write a blog post. I also spend an hour or so each day, reading other people’s blogs and responding to comments. Bus rides into work, plus a good mobile device, are great for this part.

Any more tips?

Let me know what I’ve left out. Now I’m going to meander over and read some other people’s ideas about how to write a blog post:

• Scott and Aaron’s post on How they blog.
• Seth’s post way back in 2006, a bit sparse on the “how to” but eminently elegant as always: How to write a blog post.
• Seth’s post with more down-to-earth tips: Write like a blogger.
• Neil Patel’s tips on engaging your readers in your blog: How to Write a Blog Post. Start reading from the top, then see what he has to say in the section titled “Hook your Readers”. It’s awesome.

See you on the blog rolls!

Following up on my presentation: I only part-way answered the question about how I start writing a post. We talked about writing yourself notes, whenever you have an idea. Put them on paper, on the backs of matchboxes   or in emails, via SMS, whatever. 

But then, what do I do when I actually sit down and start writing? Well, sometimes the note(s) I have written are already fairly well crafted, e.g. if I was on the bus and had time to write properly. So then I can just dump them into the post and hone them. But more often I end up with a disparate set of scribblings. In that case, I read through them all just once. Then I sit back and think, for just a very short time (about 2 minutes), focusing on what I want to say in the post -- that's the main message, the theme and the story/hook. 

Then I just start writing. It's better not to agonise too much, because that stunts the flow. I just write, as fast as I can, as if I were talking. If I can't get the words out for a particular bit, then I write short half-sentences and a big row of "x"s, like this: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. And I just move on to the next thought, so that I don't lose the flow. Later, it's pleasantly easy to find those "x"s (they stick out) and either put in the words or just delete the whole thing because it has become irrelevant.

When I've done the initial braindump, I go through the scribbled notes to see if I've covered them all. I don't usually refer to them while doing the first braindump, because that also interrupts the flow. Usually, I find that I have covered them all. If I've missed one or two out, they often don't fit in anyway. Then I either turf them or put them aside for another potential post.

Then I go and have a cup of coffee (or, yes Andrew, a hot chocolate   ) and come back to read the post again a while later. At this reading, I try to put myself in the place of a reader who is seeing the post for the first time. What impression will they get, and is it the impression I want to give? Have I actually achieved a logical flow from paragraph to paragraph, or is part of the logical flow in my brain only? I fix up any typos, add bits and pieces, add tags, then publish the post. All in all, it takes 3 to 4 hours to produce a good post.

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Tarun Upadhyay after he got back from a business trip to India. Tarun is co-founder of hCentive and currently serves as the CTO. hCentive helps make health expenses easier to manage for end consumers. From the begining, hCentive chose JIRA Studio as the hosted software development suite of choice because it allowed them to develop in the USA and India.

hCentive at a glance

• Founded: 2009
• Headquarters: Virginia, USA
• Employees: 19
• Number of offices: 2 (USA and India)
• Number of customers: Product is under development, none yet
• Products used: JIRA Studio

The interview

Tell me a little about hCentive
hCentive is disrupting health care by letting people share their health care expenses in an anonymous way and, in the process, creating tools and information that can allow people to:

• reconcile their health care bills
• find an affordable health insurance plan
• search for high-quality and right-price doctors, medicines and procedures available to them
• decide their FSA/HSA limits and file claims for them automatically

When did you start using Atlassian tools?
We were using Atlassian products at my last company, so it was obvious and, almost natural, for us to continue using Atlassian products here. We were using the same tools that make up JIRA Studio now (JIRA, Confluence, Subversion, GreenHopper). We had also worked with Rally, Serena, and IBM software in the past. When we started hCentive, we evaluated all of these products again, but ultimately went with JIRA Studio.

Why did you pick JIRA Studio instead of the a la carte tools?
One big thing for us was having a hosted solution. We are a fully "clould-served" company — in the sense that we do not have any servers in our local offices (just folks with laptops), so we were looking for a solution that we didn't have to host internally.

An important aspect of cloud-hosted solutions is the price. We are a young compnay and we did not want to pay an upfront fee. We are more comfortable with long-term, smaller monthly fee models.

Also, our teams are distributed across multiple offices and we wanted a set of tools that work great together for an agile team that is working in a distributed environment.

JIRA Studio scored over the other products we evaluated. Serena came very close, but one big leg up which Atlassian has is the fantastic level of support you guys provide and how quickly you answered our questions and helped us set up right away.

Who uses JIRA Studio and what are they primarily using it for?
Everybody in the company uses JIRA Studio. Different people use it for different things. Everyone at least uses JIRA and Confluence. Confluence is used from our developers down to our finance person and our office managers. JIRA is used for everything from office management issues to core product development. Subversion, FishEye, and GreenHopper are used primarily by our development and QA teams. GreenHopper is actually used quite a lot.

Are people using it in ways you hadn't expected?
To start with, people were using JIRA Studio in the way we expected, but over time, we have seen a variety of different patterns which we didn't anticipate. For example, one challenge for us was how to do daily stand-ups since we are distributed between the US and India. GreenHopper was amazingly useful there; our head of engineering created some OpenSocial dashboards in JIRA and GreenHopper to figure out what people had done in the last 24hrs which makes running standups a breeze. Another interesting thing we have done is to use the OpenSocial gadgets to integrate our dashboards with Google's Gmail. A lot of people started accessing JIRA from inside Gmail which we found very interesting and we didn't anticipate.

Were there adoption challenges in terms of getting people into JIRA Studio?
We anticipated that people would have some trouble, but people got it very very quickly. No one in the engineering group had issues, but even people who are less technical also 'got it' pretty quickly which was pretty impressive.

What kind of feedback have you heard from your staff regarding JIRA Studio?
We have heard only good things, especially in terms of customization options.

Any follow-up comments?
Atlassian is a great company and the tools you develop are excellent for distributed teams. You guys really make it easy and you really get how distributed teams work. JIRA Studio perfectly fits our company which must have a hosted solution.

Thanks Tarun!

With so many Atlassian blogs, we like to regularly post a "blog roundup" (just like Balsamiq does). Here is a summary of just a few of the posts we wrote in the last couple weeks:

JIRA 4.0 Gadgets on the iPhone. You may recall a recent post in which one of our developers talked about his plugin for JIRA that provided a cleaner UI when accessed via iPhone. Andreas is at it again, this time tackling the problem of viewing JIRA 4.0 gadgets while on-the-go. Read more.

Social Media Monitoring in the Wiki. An incredibly useful macro that often goes unnoticed is the Widget Macro. In short, it allows you to embed multi-media content from other web sites into your Confluence page. Read more.

Get product training at Atlassian Summit 2010. At Atlassian Summit 2009, the training courses sold out due to very high demand. This year, at Summit 2010, we've added more courses to better meet demand. Read more.

Webinar Recording: Zendesk integration with JIRA. Last week, I was a guest on a special Zendesk integration webinar talking about integrating your Zendesk with Atlassian JIRA. Read more.

Video: JIRA Bridge for HP Quality Center. David Brown of Orasi presented on the JIRA Bridge for HP Quality Center. This is an enterprise-class integration solution that enables organizations to harness the full potential of JIRA and HP Quality Center software. Read more.

Want to follow all the stories as they happen? Read and subscribe to these blogs:

• JIRA blog RSS
• Confluence blog RSS
• Dev Tools blog RSS
• News blog RSS
• Developers blog RSS
• All blogs RSS

Prefer Twitter? You can follow us here.

This is a guest blog post from the Atlassian product training team leader, Stafford Vaughan. At Atlassian Summit 2009, the training courses sold out due to very high demand. This year, at Summit 2010, we've added more courses to better meet demand.

While our development teams have been busy adding features to our products, the training team has the task of ensuring our customers get the most out of the products. Did you know that since 2006, over 5000 participants from 350 companies have participated in Atlassian training courses? We've compiled a few simple reasons why we think you should get involved in a training course at the 2010 Summit.

• Training is cheap. Cheaper than usual, in fact. The usual rate per attendee is $750, but we're reducing that to just $249 for one course, or $400 for two courses.
  
• Training is more personal. At the Atlassian Summit you'll have the opportunity meet the trainers face-to-face.
  
• We're adding a track with Atlassian plugin development courses. This is a totally new set of courses that will be launched at the 2010 Summit.
  
• Something for everyone. Whether you're a first-time user or an experienced administrator, we're running a range of training courses to cater for all attendees.
  
• Learn from the experts. Each of our trainers has had years of experience in the field, and we're happy to talk about those experiences and best practices.
  
• Becoming a development pro. Improve your chances of winning Atlassian's 2010 Codegeist competition by getting development tips from some of our most experienced plugin developers.
  
• Four years in the making. We first delivered training in 2006, and the course materials are the result of constant improvement over that time.
  
• Learn about the latest features. We'll be delivering training on the latest product versions at the Summit, so if you want to know what has been updated recently, it's one of the best overviews available.
  

And if that isn't enough to convince you, check out our extensive range of customer testimonials about our training.

If you can't make it to the Summit, you can also contact our team at training@atlassian.com to get a training session delivered at a time that suits you.

We look forward to seeing you in a training course at the 2010 Summit!

Last month we sponsored the National Computer Science School's summer program. We are involved with the school in a number of ways - our staff go along to help out as industry mentors for their programming competition, we run a site tour to give them an insight into the working world of software development, and we donate software for them to help test their projects.

This year one of the tutors for the program, Erin Jamieson, agreed to tell us about her experience at NCSS and what the school does so that we could share it on our news blog.
Erin was a past student of NCSS and returned this year as a tutor and to write their newsletters. She is currently a student at Macquarie university studying a Bachelor of Biotechnology.

What is NCSS?

NCSS aims

Teamwork

Other activities

Projects

It’s a question often asked of us: “What does a technical writer do?”

We tell people how to do technically complex things, mostly by writing instructions but also by drawing pictures and making movies.

Want to know more? I’m impressed by the write-up in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition, from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Thank you Tom Johnson for tweeting the link to the handbook today!

I'll fess up, I'm a Twitter fanboi. When I'm not at work, I'm @mattnhodges and when I am, I'm the @ConfluenceGuru. There's a little gem that was shipped in Confluence 3.1 which makes monitoring your multiple Twitter accounts, and tweets about your company, a breeze.

An incredibly useful macro that often goes unnoticed is the Widget Macro. In short, it allows you to embed multi-media content from other web sites into your Confluence page. It supports a bunch of different web services, including Twitter.


Where can I find it?

1. Select 'Widget' from the 'Insert Menu' in the Rich Text Editor (requires Confluence 3.1+)


2. Select 'Widget Connector' from the 'Macro Browser' (requires Confluence 3.0+)


How can I use it?

1. View Multiple Twitter Accounts

I display the tweets from both of my twitter accounts on my personal space homepage. All you need to do is enter the URL for your Twitter handle into the URL field in the Macro Browser. For my @ConfluenceGuru account, the resulting wiki markup is:

{widget:url=http://twitter.com/ConfluenceGuru}




2. Monitor Twitter Mentions

There is a lot of talk about Atlassian and its tools on Twitter. Those of us in the Product Marketing team make a conscious effort to monitor mentions of the company and our respective products and contact customers who may need some help or who have some insightful feedback for us. With the Widget Macro that was shipped in 3.1 you can now display the results of a Twitter search on a Confluence page. I have a page setup which displays mentions of Atlassian and all of our tools. Again, all you need to enter is the URL of your Twitter search into the URL field in the Macro Broswer. In the case of searching for mentions of Atlassian, the resulting wiki markup would be:

{widget:url=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=atlassian}

Try it for yourself!

Jump into the Confluence sandbox and try it out. Be sure to follow @ConfluenceGuru if you'd like more hints and tips about using Confluence.

Last week, I was a guest on a special Zendesk integration webinar talking about integrating your Zendesk with Atlassian JIRA.

What did you miss?

The webinar recording is now up on AtlassianTV, and I have included a copy here:

JIRA Zendesk Plugin is free and open source

If you're not a developer, but still have some good ideas, you can submit any issues or suggestions for improvement to help improve the integration going forward.

You may recall a recent post in which one of our developers talked about his plugin for JIRA that provided a cleaner UI when accessed via iPhone.

Making JIRA More Mobile

From Andreas' blog post:

"With the JSP page, users can bookmark a URL on their phones such as http://localhost:2990/jira/gadgets.jsp?d=10000 (where 10000 is the dashboard id) which will then provide them with a list of all the gadgets on that dashboard."

Dig Deeper

If you are anything like Atlassian, your Customer Service and Sales teams probably use Salesforce.com. With the release of CustomWare's Salesforce.com to Confluence Connector 2.0, integration with your CRM and wiki just got a lot stronger.

What's New?

With enhanced integration and flexibility this release hosts numerous fixes and updates and, in conjunction with CustomWare's open source Reporting Plugin, now includes powerful reporting functionality of Salesforce.com data from within Confluence. Business users now have easy access to the information they need without having to navigate to another system.

2. Integration with Confluence plugins to provide intuitive display of information

Want to try it out?

Contact CustomWare to request a 30 day evaluation license. Click on the download link below for access to the connector and installation instructions.

A while ago I gave a lunch-time talk to some colleagues on blogging. I’ve brushed up and expanded on some of the ideas I put together for the talk, in case they’re useful to other people too: How do you start out as a blogger and how do you go about writing the blog posts?

I guess the first thing to say is that there are many different ways to start blogging and to write blog posts, and there’s probably a lot of  information on the web already. So this post won’t add anything new. On the other hand, sometimes an idea just “clicks” when you see the same information from another person’s point of view. I hope you get something out of these hints.

Decide what to blog about

What do you want to get out of blogging? Are you looking for a large number of hits (i.e. many people visiting your blog), or a devoted community of followers, or a randomly-orbiting group of people interested in the same subject area as you? If you want a huge number of hits, such as to raise advertising revenue, then I guess you’d blog frequently about everything under the sun. My blog is a place to vent my enthusiasm for technical writing, share what I discover day to day and garner knowledge from others. Here are my tips for the sort of blogging I enjoy:

Remember the chocolate! – No blogger succeeds without it. Ah no, wait, that’s a furphy.

Choose a niche – It’s a bit counter-intuitive to limit your blog posts to a certain subject area, but I think this works best if you’re looking to establish yourself as a blogger rather than an anonymous writer on an impersonal web site. You’ll attract a group of followers who know that you’re interested in the same sort of thing as they are, and that they’ll learn something from you and be able to bounce ideas off you.

Choose a subject area you are passionate and knowledgeable about – Otherwise you’ll quickly run out of ideas and enthusiasm. Blogging will become a chore and your posts will sound flat.

Stick to the subject area you’ve chosen – It can be tempting to write about unrelated things, and I think it’s fine to do that now and then. Heh heh, there are a few pages about chocolate and trees in my blog! But far and away the highest percentage of the content should be about the subject area you’ve chosen. That way, people will keep coming back for more. They’ll know what you’re about and where they can come with their own ideas. If you’re brimming with ideas on a totally different subject, start another blog. I have the Travelling Worm. Rhonda Bracey has both the CyberText Newsletter and the sandgroper at At Random.

Find the blogging platform that suits you

There are many places where you can create your blog. When I started out two years ago, I took my time and had a good look around before settling on WordPress. I looked at the style of the various blogging sites and the type of blogs already there. I wanted something that matches my own style and the subject area of my blog.

Try out a couple of sites, play around, and then get serious when you’ve found the spot that suits you. Once you’ve written a number of “real” posts you won’t want to move, because you may lose readers who have come to know you and have subscribed to your blog.

Here are a few options:

• WordPress.com. (That’s here, where ffeathers is.) This is a “hosted” site, which means that your blog is “in the cloud”, running on software and computers that are managed by other people and that are not on your premises. It’s simple to get started and you don’t need to worry about server administration.
• Your own installed version of WordPress. You can download the software from WordPress.org. This gives a great deal of flexibility in adding your own style and extensions to your blog. Tom Johnson runs his blog at I’d Rather Be Writing this way. He often blogs about useful tips and techniques for administering, styling and extending WordPress.
• Blogger. This is a hosted blog site provided by Google. This is where Anindita Basu blogs about Writing Technically and Alan J Porter has the 4J’s Group Blog.
• The Content Wrangler Ning. A number of technical writers have set up profiles here. There’s my page,  and Janet Swisher’s, for example. You can have a blog there too.
• Communal blogs like HubPages. From what I can see, this is a slightly different type of blogging, focused more on earning money from blogging rather than creating a community of readers around a particular subject. I’ve included it here because it’s interesting to see the different platforms available.
• A whole bunch of others!

Set up your blog

Choose a name for your blog. Some people like to use a totally practical name, that tells readers immediately what the blog is about. Other people choose something whimsical, that means something to them personally. I chose “ffeathers” because I’m fond of birds, especially parrots, and I like the old usage of double “f”.

Most blogging platforms allow you to choose a subtitle as well, such as “a technical writer’s blog”. You’ll also need a username, sort of like a nickname, that you will use as a byline for each post. It’s often useful if your username is the same as your blog name. For example, my blog title is “ffeathers” and so is my username. You may prefer to use your own name as a username, so that people know immediately who you are.

Go to the blogging platform that you have chosen and click the button to create your blog.

For example, if you like you could try it on WordPress.com right now:

1. Go to WordPress.com and click “Sign up now”.
2. Enter your chosen username. On WordPress.com, this will also be the name of your blog. For example, if you choose “myname” then your blog will be at “myname.wordpress.com”.
3. Enter your chosen password. Then enter the same password again to confirm it.
4. Enter your email address.
5. Read and agree to their “fascinating terms of service”.
6. Click “Next” and follow the prompts to confirm your new blog and log in.

WordPress will create your first “hello world” blog post automatically. You can leave it there, edit it to change its content, or remove it.

Play around with your profile and blog settings

Spend some time getting comfortable with the options that your blogging platform offers. Go to your profile page and upload a photograph or some other image. If you’re using WordPress, go to “My Dashboard” then click “Your Profile” in the “Users” section near bottom left of the screen. Your profile image is called your “Gravatar”.

Take a look at the themes that your blogging platform offers. A theme determines the colours and text styling of your blog. Themes often offer a different layout (such as one, two or three columns) and header images too. On WordPress, the theme selected by each blog is usually displayed in the page footer. My blog is currently using the “Journalist” theme. You can change the theme at any time, without affecting the content of your blog posts.

Write a couple of blog posts

Write a couple of posts right away and publish them for the whole wide world to see. At this point, the great thing is that no-one will know you’re there! For me, it was kind of liberating to know that I’m just a tiny speck on the intertubes.

Publish one or two good articles where you feel that you’ve managed to express yourself and your opinion well or you’ve told people something fresh and new.

Then, when you’re ready….

Make yourself known

At first it’s liberating to know that you can scribble away on your blog without feeling self-conscious. The great thing is that no-one will even know you’re there. But very soon it becomes less cool. The sad fact is that no-one will even know you’re there.

Hello world!

• Comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that cover the same subject area as yours. When you add the comments, make sure you are logged in to your own blog or that you enter your blog’s URL. Sometimes people say you should start commenting on other blogs before you have your own blog. But then you lose the opportunity to link to your own blog. You don’t have a presence or identity, and people probably won’t remember you from one comment to the next.
• Have multiple presences on sites like Twitter, your blog, Technorati, Writer River, Flickr, Ning, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more.  To get a “presence”, sign up for each service and create a user profile for yourself. Link from each one back to your blog. This raises your profile in search engines and rating sites like Technorati.

Why blog?

At the lunch-time talk, one of my colleagues asked why I blog. It’s a good question, and quite a few people at the session had some good input too. For me, there are a few reasons. One is that blogging gives me a different outlet for my writing. I can write about the topics I choose, rather than the topics necessary for the company. I can choose the style of my writing, add weird, long or funny-sounding words, and express my own character in the blog.

Another big reason is that I enjoy the give and take with readers and other bloggers. It’s awesome when someone drops a comment, expanding on what I’ve written or taking it in a new direction. It’s cool when somebody writes a blog post referring to one of mine. We learn a lot from each other. There’s a bottomless pit of ideas when you share yours with others.

The third reason is that people get to know you. This can lead to invitations to write a guest post on someone else’s blog or even to speak at a conference. That’s even more opportunity to meet other people and swap stories, uh, knowledge.

So, where are the hints on how to actually write a blog post?

That’ll be my next post.

At Atlassian, all developers end up doing a 2 week support rotation every now and then. It's a great opportunity to see first hand how all the buggy code I write as a developer ends up hurting customers and will hopefully provide an incentive to write less buggy code in the future ;). It is also a good time to come up with innovative little patches that help customers in the short-term, which can then be fed back into the product in the long run. This blog is about one such case.

During my last support stint one of our JIRA Studio support engineers brought a support case to my attention where customers where using the JIRA dashboard fairly heavily from iPhone and Android devices. Since their Studio instance got upgraded to JIRA 4.0, they could hardly use the dashboard anymore and apparently 2 gadgets were critical for their users in the field. The JIRA 4 dashboard includes a lot of javascript at the top of the page, and generates a lot of DOM elements dynamically with javascript. This generally isn't a problem on most modern browsers, but on a mobile device with limited CPU and memory it can make a website crawl.

Read on for a one file solution to this problem.

Thanks to some decent REST endpoints I was able to retrieve all gadgets for a particular dashboard very easily with Javascript. I then wrote a simple JSP page that can be deployed without restarting JIRA which allows users to display a list of links for all the gadgets on a particular dashboard page. When the user then clicks on a gadget's link, the gadget will open in a new window.

The page loads incredibly fast even on an iPhone since there's hardly any Javascript to load (just jQuery) and barely any DOM elements to generate. The gadget itself also loads quite quickly since only the gadget contents have to be rendered.

The JSP is simply this:

<%@ page import="com.atlassian.plugin.webresource.WebResourceManager" %>
<%@ page import="com.atlassian.jira.ComponentManager" %>
<%@ page import="com.atlassian.plugin.webresource.UrlMode" %>

<html>
<head>
     <%
        final WebResourceManager webResourceManager = ComponentManager.getInstance().getWebResourceManager();
        webResourceManager.requireResource("com.atlassian.auiplugin:jquery");
        webResourceManager.includeResources(out, UrlMode.AUTO);
    %>
    <meta name="decorator" content="none">
    <script type="text/javascript">
        var contextPath = '<%=request.getContextPath()%>';
        jQuery(function() {

            var getUrlVars = function() {
                var vars = [], hash;
                var hashes = window.location.href.slice(
                    window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&');
                for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++) {
                    hash = hashes[i].split('=');
                    vars.push(hash[0]);
                    vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
                }

                return vars;
            };
            var htmlDecode = function(input) {
                var e = document.createElement('div');
                e.innerHTML = input;
                return e.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
            };

            var urlVars = getUrlVars();
            var dashboardId = urlVars["d"];
            jQuery.ajax({
                url:contextPath + "/rest/gadget/1.0/currentUser",
                dataType: 'json',
                contentType:'application/json',
                type:'GET',
                success: function (data) {

                    jQuery("#loading").show();
                    jQuery.ajax({
                        url:contextPath + "/rest/dashboards/1.0/" + 
                                dashboardId + ".json",
                        dataType: 'json',
                        contentType:'application/json',
                        type:'GET',
                        success: function (data) {

                            jQuery("#dashboardTitle").text(data.title);
                            jQuery(data.gadgets).each(function() {
                                jQuery("#results").append(jQuery("<h3><a href=\"" + 
                                        htmlDecode(this.renderedGadgetUrl) +
                                        "\" target='_blank'>" + 
                                        this.title + "</a></h3>"));
                                jQuery("#loading").hide();
                            });
                        },
                        error: function(data) {
                            alert("Error retrieving dashboard with id '" + 
                                    dashboardId + "'");
                        }
                    });
                },
                error: function(data) {
                    jQuery("#login").show();
                    alert("Please login first before attempting to view dashboard!");                    
                }

            });
        });
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <a id="login" style="display:none;" href="<%=request.getContextPath()%>/login.jsp?os_destination=gadgets.jsp%3F<%=request.getQueryString()%>">Login</a></div>

    <div id="loading" style="display:none;">Loading gadgets...</div>
    <h1 id="dashboardTitle"></h1>
    <div id="results">
    </div>
</body>

</html>

The JSP, checks if the user is authenticated first (and if not displays an alert and a link to the login page) then tries to fetch all the gadgets for the dashboard with the id provided. It then displays the gadgets as a list of links that will open up in a new window.

Just in case anyone's wondering: The main reason why gadget URLs can't just be bookmarked in the first place is because a gadget's render URL contains a security token that expires (after 1 hour) after which the gadget wont render any longer.

With the JSP above, users can bookmark a URL on their phones such as http://localhost:2990/jira/gadgets.jsp?d=10000 (where 10000 is the dashboard id) which will then provide them with a list of all the gadgets on that dashboard:

It's not pretty, but if all you're after is performance than this little hack works great. It's certainly something I'll be looking at integrating into my 20% time project, the JIRA iPhone web-interface (along with some improvements; iGoogle have a very nice mobile version of their dashboard and gadgets).

Today we held the Voice of the Customer webinar for January with Fabian Lopez. Using the Atlassian suite of products and plugins, DSS Inc, with the help of Open Health Tools and CustomWare, developed a collaboration environment to support a Healthcare Open Source Community known as vxVistA. vxVistA is a modified and enhanced version of the System VistA used by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

This new collaboration environment has been created to foster and support the use of VistA and is intended to be the focal point around which a new open source community will form. DSS Inc integrated multiple plugins like Balsamiq, Gliffy, Adaptavist Community Bubbles, TaskDock, ad hoc workflows, etc. Watch the video now:

For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.
Also, don't forget about following us on

VersionOne recently published and distributed their State of Agile Development survey. Lots of very interesting data points worth reviewing. The most notable being the specific tools currently used by respondents of the survey:

JIRA was the leading development-specific tool -- used by 24% of respondents! Only the generic project management tools from Microsoft (Excel and Project) were more widely used.

I wonder..

This month's Plugin of the Month webinar with Orasi was fantastic! Orasi s an Atlanta-based software reseller and professional services company focused on enterprise software quality testing and management.

Today, David Brown of Orasi presented on the JIRA Bridge for HP Quality Center. This is an enterprise-class integration solution that enables organizations to harness the full potential of JIRA and HP Quality Center software because it synchronizes defect information between the two tools. This bridge enables your QA and development teams to collaborate efficiently by coordinating all issue information between the teams. This was among the most popular attended webinars I have run, complete with an excellent Q&A. Check out the video here:

For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.
Also, don't forget about following us on

Last week we announced Atlassian Summit 2010. This is our largest and most anticipated event of the year.

If you are currently working for a non-profit or open source project we'd like to offer you half off early bird and regular general admission.

Register before March 1st and receive 2 and 1/2 days of networking, learning and partying for just $324.50. If you didn't receive an email with the promo code just email summit@atlassian.com and we'll hook you up.

See you at the Summit!

To help people connect with each other, we did setup a chat room at last years Atlascamp. 3 month have gone by since the event, but the chat room has still a number of active users and the discussions are not only entertaining, but often interesting and useful.

We thought this was great way for people to exchange experiences and knowledge. Therefore we've decided to setup a public IRC channel for the Atlassian community. Hopefully it will help people to connect and get to know each other, so if you run into a problem in the future, you'll have a network of developers you can ask for advice. Of course your friendly Developer Relations members will be around as well, so don't be shy and say hi.

How to join?

If you decided on a client, you will need to following details to join the IRC channel:

Server: http://freenode.net
Channel: atlassiandev

We are looking forward to seeing you there.

PS: Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/atlassiandev

How JIRA Works With Pivotal

Integration Screenshots

Atlassian has supported hundreds of non-profits and open source projects with free community licenses. About a month ago, I was contacted by Fabian Lopez at DSS Inc, a company that has just launched their open source initiative using Atlassian's community licenses.

DSS has developed and launched vxVistA, a "free, open source EHR system." EHR stands for Electronics Healthcare Records, and the system they built will help streamline communication between healthcare providers. Competitive products are big, expensive, and costly solutions.

vxVistA is based on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system, which is used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to manage patient records. By open sourcing the software to community development, the new vxVistA can be modified by the community and even expanded for use beyond the traditional healthcare setting.

"We analyzed eight or ten different collaboration tools, but when we found the Atlassian suite, this was the obvious selection. Atlassian's JIRA and Confluence both offered a robust feature set that could be used for internal development as well as externally for the growing development community." - Fabian Lopez, PMP, project manager for vxVistA.org at DSS.

On the VxVistA.org site, you can read how they built the site using Atlassian tools, but here's a quick summary.

vxVistA.org uses the following components:

• JIRA and GreenHopper for bug tracking and agile project management.
  
• Confluence as a content management system and community site for the vxVistA community to share and connect
  
• Crowd for single sign-on between the applications
  
• And product plugins, including Balsamiq Mockups and Gliffy diagrams
  

Click the arrows on this sweet, simple interactive Flash demo to see how they're using the Atlassian tools.

UPDATE: VIDEO OF WEBINAR HERE

This is the second of two guest posts by Erik Eccles from TaskDock, a Confluence plugin that lets you assign, track, and complete actions within Confluence and email.

Our second post in this series focuses on stepping up the involvement of the people beyond Confluence's core constituents. Companies with non-technical adopters such as finance, HR, sales, and marketing consistently cited the ability to reach this audience as a challenge. Here are the approaches we took to solve the problem.

Make Confluence Inclusive

Similar to how we approached the issue of stale content as described in our last post, we looked to increase involvement by focusing on channeling content and conversation through Confluence. This required us to make Confluence inclusive to varying user types, skills, and systems.

Leverage Email

Our first step in making Confluence more inclusive was to embrace one major competitor to content systems, email, and work towards making it another way to interact with Confluence. This video shows how we extend Confluence functionality beyond its walls and into email to involve more people via a familiar environment.

YACS (Yet Another Corporate System)

Provide a Clear Call to Action

Focus on Completing Tasks vs. Managing Them

Tracking user actions gives us the added benefit of knowing when things are done.  As a user completes a task we can automatically "clean up" their task list by marking it complete as well as notifying the requester to keep the ball rolling. The clear purpose here is to focus users on actions versus the actual task management. This video will walk you through a few examples:

Put it all Together

Hopefully, through these posts, you've recognized some tricks to drive content and communication through Confluence to reignite your content, projects, and people.

Our approach would not have worked if our customers had not provided the wealth of feedback over the past year. If you wish to try some of these steps yourself, head to our Plugin Page or to taskdock.com/download to download TaskDock with a free included evaluation (no license needed to get started).

If you search Google for "maven dependency hell" you'll find many answers. It can be summarised to two types of root causes.

Transitive dependencies

The most usual one is a fact of transitive dependencies. Transitive dependencies are great but with them comes dependency resolution. Which in turns means that changing one declared dependency in your project can affect any part of your dependency tree. Most of the time this happens without the developers noticing at least until an issue comes up. This can be triggered by something as simple as changing a dependency's version.

Remote repositories

The other cause comes from a combination of inconsistent (remote) repositories and different build environments. If your different build environements, developement, continuous integration, release, talk to different repositories then you might get a different dependency tree. As a simple example, at work we have a repository where we deploy sources of libraries that don't provide them otherwise. This is great. However if someone deploys the source with a minimal POM depending on your build environment you might get the wrong POM. And this means a different dependency tree.

Continuous dependency management

I believe Continuous dependency management is the solution to this problem. Each time you build you have to know precisely what dependencies (all of them) are being used. This is why I developed the dependency tracker plugin. The existing dependency plugin offers a few goals – tree, analyze – to help with dependency management, but to me it fails short in two ways.

First it is difficult to assess what has changed from one tree to another. It is let up to the developers to do a mental diff. The dependency tracker plugin creates to this effect a text report that can and should be commited along side your project's source code. As it is a text report it is very easy to see changes between revisions using your VCS of choice or you IDE.

Second, it is a manual process. Developers have to actively use the plugin to understand and clean up their dependency tree. One idea of the dependency tracker is that it creates a text report that should commited alongside your source code. Then you can setup your project so that every build checks that its dependencies are the same as expected and fail if there is the slightest difference.

Using the plugin

The dependency tracker has three goals:

• report
• validate
• checksum

The two first goals work together. I'll come back to the 'checksum' goal later. First you want to create a report. One report will be created for each module of your project in a dependencies.txt file. Its format is the following:

dependency|dependency trail|artifact checksum|pom checksum

Where dependency denotes the dependency we are talking about, the dependency trail is the information about how the dependency is reachable in the dependency tree and the checksums speak for themselves.

Then you just have to configure the plugin in your pom.xml to validate the report on each build. But don't forget to commit the report first.

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.atlassian.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-dependency-tracker-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <goals><goal>validate</goal></goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

You're done. If any of your module's dependency changes unexpectidely, your build will fail.

The checksum is there to help calculate checksum of arbitrary files as done by the plugin in reports. Simply use that command:

mvn dependency-tracker:checksum -Dfile=/path/to/the/file

The plugin is available in Atlassian's public maven repository.

We are pleased to be running this month's Plugin of the Month webinar with Orasi. Orasi s an Atlanta-based software reseller and professional services company focused on enterprise software quality testing and management.

This Wednesday, David Brown of Orasi will present on the JIRA Bridge for HP Quality Center. This is an enterprise-class integration solution that enables organizations to harness the full potential of JIRA and HP Quality Center software because it synchronizes defect information between the two tools. This bridge enables your QA and development teams to collaborate efficiently by coordinating all issue information between the teams.

UPDATE: WEBINAR POSTED HERE

Can't keep up with all the great stories being published across our blogs? Overwhelmed by the velocity of our blogging fingers? Have no fear. Coming to your emotional rescue, here's a summary of several of our recent posts from around our product, developer and news blogs.

Announcing Atlassian Summit 2010. I am so excited to announce the second annual Atlassian Summit 2010! From June 9-11 at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco, hundreds of customers, speakers, partners and Atlassians will get together for the biggest Atlassian event ever! Read more.

Get Organized with Confluence Personal Labels. It's probably no surprise that Atlassian uses Confluence to everything. I estimate that at least 75% of the business content I interact with on a daily basis resides in our internal Confluence instance. How do I organise and manage it all? The simple answer: personal labels. Read more.

Protip: Open in Eclipse & IntelliJ Shortcuts. So if you haven't discovered it yet, you may be interested to learn that you can "one click" open stuff in your IDE from FishEye & Crucible. Read more.

NPR.org moves from Bugzilla to JIRA. A few months ago, Kim Bryant, NPR's Manager of Application Operations for Digital Media, posted on Inside NPR.org about their move from Bugzilla to JIRA in order to address challenges with "managing work requests, bug tracking and other operational processes." Read more.

Come join us in an Atlassian Doc Sprint. The first Atlassian Doc Sprint will take place from Monday 22 to Wednesday 24 February 2010. It's happening in Sydney, in San Francisco and online. You are invited! Read more.

Want to follow all the stories as they happen? Read and subscribe to these blogs:

• JIRA blog RSS
• Confluence blog RSS
• Dev Tools blog RSS
• News blog RSS
• Developers blog RSS
• All blogs RSS

Just a quick update, this time around to let you know that we're hosting our second customer-run Sydney Atlassian User Group in February. This event is completely free, so be sure to come and drop by the office and talk to other users.

We'll be kicking off with some food at 5.30, with sessions starting at 6.00 include a couple of talks and 'Birds of a Feather' discussion groups.

More details and registration.

Hope you all have a happy and safe Australia Day!

Maven 2's local repository has a tendency to grow, and never shrink. This morning mine was 2.2Go big.

There are not many things you can do to remve unused items from that local repository. You'd first have to know what's unused?
I tend to simply delete my local repository altogether from time to time. Only when I am ready to wait a little while during the next build though. I usually to that at work as there we have a local proxy that makes things pretty seemless.

There is also the growing number of SNAPSHOTs that are produced and dowloaded by maven builds. They are easier and safer to get rid of. Here is a simple unix command to clean up your local repository of SNAPSHOTs:

find ~/.m2 -name *SNAPSHOT -type d | xargs rm -rf

Happy X-mas, holidays, whatever you believe in!

The holiday season is awesome on the web. This is the one time of the year when I hear about all the services I signed-up for and never got back to. Man there are quite a few of them. At least with all their 'holiday' mails, I can easily unsubscribe, delete my account, one at the time.

This week a colleague, Tom, came up to me with a big grin and asked, “What’s the collective noun for a group of technical writers?”

He had another developer in tow, a new starter at that, and the grin made me wonder what mischief lay behind the question. But it’s a goody and it made me laugh. I came up with “a scribble of technical writers“. Later, it occurred to me that we could call a group of agile technical writers a “jot“.

Can you think of any good names for us and for what happens when we get together in a group?

It's probably no surprise that Atlassian uses Confluence to everything. I estimate that at least 75% of the business content I interact with on a daily basis resides in our internal Confluence instance. All the projects I'm working on...the blog posts I'm writing....the meeting notes I take...the goals my boss wants me to accomplish...the company's sales numbers. All of these reside inside of Confluence.

Why use Personal Lables?

So with this much important content residing Confluence, how do I organise and manage it all? The simple answer: personal labels.

Many times I can quickly find the Confluence content I need using Quick Navigation. But sometimes I forget the name someone else gave to a page. For example, I keep searching for a page called "Customer Prospects" but the page is really called "Pending Clients." Goodness knows why someone used that name but, with private labels, I can label the page however I'd like.

How Do Personal Labels Work?

Adding your personal label to a page or blog post is simple:

1. First go to the page that you want to label.
2. Click the 'Add Labels' link beside 'Labels'.
   This will open up a form with an input field and a list of 'suggested labels'.
3. An input field will open below the existing labels. If available, it will also show you a list of 'suggested labels'.
   
4. To add a new personal label, type it in using the format 'my:label'.
   (You can enter more than one label, separated by commas.)
5. Click 'Add' to add the label.

To go back and navigate your personal labels, just go to the dropdown menu under your name and select "personal labels." You'll then see all your personal labels displayed.

The deets:

• Register: Early bird registration price is $649 through April 15, 2010 - $200 dollars off the regular price... so don't wait! Optional training courses in JIRA, Confluence and plugin development are also available for an additional cost.
• My Summit: once you register, you'll be invited to the My Summit site, where you can build out your profile, meet and mingle with other attendees, and eventually build and manage your agenda at the event. It's a pretty sweet interactive event application, complete with a smartphone UI and iPhone app, and it will make scheduling and keeping track of people you meet a piece of cake!
• Become a Speaker: Call for speakers is open through March 1, 2010. If you've got a great story, send it our way. Speakers get a free pass to Summit.
• Become a Sponsor: There are still a few sponsorship opportunities available for Summit 2010. If you want to stand out with Atlassian customers, this is a great way, and we've added even more mingle time and a new "Launchpad" competition.

Meet the sponsors:

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All complex software inevitably has a swag of useful little features that whilst great aren't that discoverable. After recently seeing several different people switching to their IDE and manually opening a file to dive into a source file they were looking at in FishEye or Crucible, its clear that the open in IDE links fit firmly into the "non-obvious feature" category.

So if you haven't discovered it yet, you may be interested to learn that you can "one click" open stuff in your IDE from FishEye & Crucible. Easier to see it in action than to try and explain it:

To get these shortcuts to show up, all you have to do is have Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA running with the free Atlassian IDE Connector installed.

UPDATE: Its just been pointed out to me that IDE shortcuts are available in Bamboo now too!

In a typical SSL configuration for a Tomcat web server, Apache sits in front of Tomcat as a reverse proxy, and does the SSL. This was the configuration of some systems I work with. There are a number of reasons why this configuration is used, the primary one being that Apache's SSL implementation is much faster than Tomcat's. So it's not often that you would go from using this configuration to switching to a Tomcat only configuration, but that's exactly what I just did.

The reason for doing this is that we wanted to use Tomcat's NIO connector, in order to use Tomcat's comet capabilities. Setting up SSL with Tomcat is something that I had never done before, I had heard though that it was not easy. After trying to do it without really understanding what I was doing, I found that it really wasn't easy. The problem was that everything I looked at on the web talked about using the Java keytool to generate a key, so you could send a certificate signing request to your trusted authority to sign. The thing is, I already had a key, and a certificate, and the Java keytool utility that does all this key manipulation has no way of importing an existing key.

Eventually I found this utility, and was able to get things working. But, as often happens when solving these problems, I then read back over the Tomcat SSL HowTo, and now with more of an understanding of what I was doing I found a much simpler and easier way of getting Tomcat to use my existing certificate.

The trick is, rather than use a JKS repository, which is the native Java SSL certificate store, and what most of the documentation on the web talks about, is use a PKCS12 repository, which is an internet standard, and can be manipulated using standard tools such as openssl. This tool requires three files, which are easy to find from your Apache SSL configuration, one is the private key file, another is the certificate, and finally the certificate signer chain. The command to run is:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in mycert.crt -inkey mykey.key \
                        -out mycert.p12 -name tomcat -CAfile myCA.crt \
                        -caname root -chain

The name and caname arguments can be anything, they're just convenient aliases to allow later manipulation of the file. The command will prompt you for a password, this password gets set as the keystorePass in the Tomcat connector configuration. The keystoreType must be set to PKCS12. Here is my Tomcat configuration:

    <Connector port="8443" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
               maxThreads="150" enableLookups="false" acceptCount="100"
               connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true"
               protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
               SSLEnabled="true" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"
               keystoreFile="/path/to/mycert.p12"
               keystoreType="PKCS12" keystorePass="tomcat"/>

Next week, I'll be a guest on a webinar hosted by Zendesk, talking about the advantages of integrating JIRA with your Zendesk. In the session, we will cover the following:

• How JIRA is useful for bug tracking and project management
• What data gets passed between applications
• What a development project without bug tracking tools looks like
• How sharing information between departments can increase productivity

About Zendesk

Since we launched the Confluence SharePoint Connector just over a year ago, we've gotten tremendous uptake from our customers. Hundreds of customers have found SharePoint's more structured document-management capabilities to be a great complement to Confluence's free-form wiki collaboration capabilities. The SharePoint Connector creates a far more powerful SharePoint wiki by letting you:

• Embed SharePoint lists into your Confluence page through the {sp-list} macro
• Embed Confluence pages into your SharePoint site using the out-of-the-box Confluence web parts
• Perform secure, federated search between the two platforms
• Maintain single-sign-on and common user management between the two

So it's with great pleasure that we announce our latest release, the Confluence SharePoint Connector 1.1. This release has many performance and configuration improvements that will make your integration between Confluence and SharePoint even better. Altogether, we've resolved 30 outstanding issues across a number of areas. To see a complete list of improvements, see our Confluence SharePoint Connector 1.1 release notes. In the mean time, here's a summary of what we've improved:

Enhanced Federated Search

The previous implementation of search relied on SharePoint indexing Confluence's cached search index. The new implementation of federated search performs a live search against Confluence's content making federated search faster and more accurate for end users. Plus it's easier for administrators to set up in the first place making a better experience for everyone. 

Alternative SharePoint URL

In the previous version of the SharePoint Connector, Confluence accessed SharePoint through the same URL as every SharePoint user. In SPC 1.1, Confluence can connect to SharePoint through its own URL, such as a URL that is only available from behind a firewall or VPN. This can drastically improve performance and also resolves problems where the SharePoint installation uses an authentication protocol not supported by Confluence, such as NTLMv2 or Kerberos.

Curious to Learn More?

You can read more in our release notes, download the Confluence SharePoint Connector from our website and follow the installation guide.

To learn more about all the features available in the SharePoint Connector, check out our website at atlassian.com/sharepoint or watch the video below:

Swapping out chaos..

Kim's job is to figure out ways to work more efficiently, so it's not surprising that NPR selected JIRA. More specifically, JIRA was brought in to deal with the following:

• multiple types of requesters with different levels of expertise
• multiple paths for making requests
• multiple types of requests
• different teams working at different levels at the same time
• figuring out resource load

"When we looked at what we needed to succeed with our culture and evolving development process, Bugzilla was like Matthew Broderick, CGI-slick, prettied-up, simplified sci-fi. We needed old skool, hard core, eat-the-train-cars-and-stomp-on-the-citizenry sci-fi (which happens to be the preference of the Atlassian JIRA team, coincidentally.) JIRA delivers"

- Kim Bryant of NPR Digital Media

You Say Godzilla, NPR Says Gojira!

1. Awesome permission levels
2. Integration with other developer tools
3. A smorgasbord of custom configurations
4. The ability to track as much of our work as possible
5. Statistics to make an ops manager weep for joy

Have you outgrown your old bug tracker?

In addition to the built-in Bugzilla importer, JIRA includes migration tools for Mantis, FogBugz and other bug trackers (plus, there are third-party migration tools for Trac and others).

To check out your data in JIRA, just download a free trial of JIRA and import data from your old bug tracker.

The first Atlassian Doc Sprint will take place from Monday 22 to Wednesday 24 February 2010. It's happening in Sydney, in San Francisco and online. You are invited! If you can't join us in person, you can drop in on our daily webinar sessions, follow the buzz in our online chat room and subscribe to our email list.

What is a doc sprint?

It's an opportunity to develop some good tutorials quickly. A doc sprint is a short period of time when a group of people collaborate to write a specific set of documents. Our doc sprint will focus on plugin and gadget tutorials. We start with a good idea of what we want to achieve. Then we achieve it. If we think of more ideas during the sprint, we do them too. That's it.

What will we be doing?

Let's develop the plugin tutorials that we're missing. These will be awesomely valuable to your developer colleagues and immensely fun to develop. We'll also create some funky gadget tutorials. These will be even more mind-bogglingly, impossibly fun.

Learn while you write. We'll have some Atlassian developers on tap to help us over the sticky spots. Help us to make it easier for those who follow in your footsteps. Atlassian super-geeks are oft heard to exclaim:

Seriously, no-one ever reads the documentation!

And then they complain, usually in the very next breath:

I can't use this $@*$% API – their documentation sucks!

Funnily enough, it's only the technical writers who see the irony in the juxtaposition of these statements.

What else?

On top of all that awesomeness, we'll have some fun too. OK, maybe technical writers have a weird idea of fun. Really.

What will you get out of it?

• Eternal recognition as author. Your name will be displayed as author of the tutorial on the Atlassian documentation wiki.
• Kudos from the Atlassian tech writers. We'll write up our results on the Atlassian blog and we'll create a Doc Sprint Hall of Fame.
• Chocolate. Indubitably, there will be chocolate in there somewhere.

Join us

So come play with the Atlassian tech writers. We're the dudes that write the docs that rock. Help us get our documentation up to your own exacting standards. Take a look at the details, pick a chocolate middle name and sign up.

A few months ago I wrote about my first Atlassian FedEx day ever. Now I’ve survived another. Plenty of dust, sweat and tears, and plenty of laughs, later, I have a brand new Confluence gadget to boast about. Well, actually I have 3 halves of a Confluence gadget and lots of lessons learned.

My aim for this FedEx Day was to learn more about developing gadgets. I’ve created a gadget before, but it was a generic Google gadget and not specifically an Atlassian gadget. Of course, if I can get a useful gadget working too, that would be awesome.

I’m part way there.

My JIRA Tips Gadget

Just so you know: It’s nowhere near ready yet.

The user story: People want to see JIRA hints and tips on their JIRA dashboard, rather than having to find their way to our documentation. We want the hints and tips to be housed on our documentation wiki, so that we can update them easily. People also want to see Confluence hints and tips on their Confluence dashboard, and Crucible hints, and so on.

The solution: Develop a “Tips” gadget for each product, starting with the JIRA Tips Gadget.

• The gadget gets the tips, one at a time, from our documentation wiki, affectionately known as CAC.
• On CAC, we have a set of tailored tips for JIRA, another set of tips for Confluence, etc. These tips can be part of the documentation too, provided they keep the required (minimalist) format. We’ll store them as children of a particular page, so that the gadget knows where to get them.
• People can:
  • Add the JIRA Tips Gadget to their JIRA dashboard.
  • Add the Confluence Tips Gadget to their Confluence dashboard (by customising their Dashboard welcome message) or a wiki page.
  • Add any of the “Tips” gadgets to iGoogle, Gmail, etc.

Things I learned the hard way

FedEx tip 1: Don’t shut down your environment at the end of day 1. I made that mistake, and then spent two hours getting it back on Friday morning.

FedEx tip 2: Don’t install a Confluence plugin containing a gadget module that refers to a gadget spec residing on the same Confluence instance. I stored my gadget spec (XML file) as an attachment to a Confluence page. That seemed handy.  But the startup procedure found the gadget plugin and went looking for the gadget spec. It waited and waited and waited… Eventually I reinstalled Confluence and recreated all my configuration and data. Hence the two hours on Friday morning.

How far did I get?

The plan was to start with a very simple gadget and gradually make it more complex:

1. First a URL-type gadget that does a straight grab of content from a page.
2. Then an OpenSocial gadget (i.e. an HTML-type gadget), but still grabbing the HTML off the page.
3. Lastly a full-blown OpenSocial gadget using the Confluence REST API.

1. The URL-type gadget

This is a quick and dirty solution using:

• A gadget with content type=”url”.
• An {include-random} macro in Confluence.

On my JIRA dashboard, the gadget shows a random tip on each refresh:

The gadget XML is very very simple:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Module>

<ModulePrefs title="JIRA tips (URL gadget)"

height="400"

scrolling="true">

<Require feature="dynamic-height"/>

</ModulePrefs>

<Content type="url" href="http://my.Confluence.Server:8090/display/MYSPACE/MYPAGE" />

</Module>

In Confluence, we have:

• A parent page with the following content:
  {include-random:MYPAGE|nopanel}
• And a number of child pages, each one containing a single tip.

It’s not an OpenSocial gadget, but rather a gadget with a content type of “url”. The URL given is the address of the Confluence page that contains the {include-random} macro.

2. The HTML-type gadget grabbing HTML from a Confluence page

This is a quick and dirty solution using:

• A gadget with content type=”html”, i.e. an OpenSocial gadget, but without REST. Instead it just gets the HTML from a Confluence URL. Next stage would be to parse the HTML to isolate the content of the wiki page.
• An {include-random} macro in Confluence.

On my JIRA dashboard, the gadget currently shows the HTML for the full page and without special styling:

If it’s worth pursuing this type of gadget, I need to:

• Parse the HTML to get only the page content.
• Apply a style sheet.

3. The OpenSocial gadget using Confluence REST API

This is supposed to be the final, walking talking solution using:

• A full OpenSocial gadget.
• The Confluence REST API, rolling through all the child pages of a given parent page.
• Something to convert the wiki markup into HTML.

At the moment, it’s still a quick and dirty solution using:

• A full OpenSocial gadget.
• The Confluence REST API, returning a single page.
• HTML markup in the Confluence page content.

My REST gadget returns the page body as wiki markup. Here it is on my JIRA dashboard:

I don’t have time in FedEx to parse the wiki markup. So I cheated completely and put the HTML directly onto the Confluence page. So here’s what the gadget shows now in JIRA:

Of course, the Confluence page looks like nothing on earth:

I’d like to pursue the REST solution. I still need to:

• Retrieve the child pages of the given page.
• Render the wiki markup.

Bits and pieces

At the moment all three of my gadgets consist entirely of Javascript, XML and HTML. So the whole gadget is contained in the XML gadget spec. None of them (yet) requires a plugin. Gadget XML can be served from anywhere. I’ve stored mine as attachments to a Confluence page and serve them from there.

Phew

That’s Atlassian FedEx Day for you — quick and dirty and fun. Within the next few days, I’ll post a full report on our documentation wiki (CAC) that will probably include the gadget code (if I’m feeling brave enough to expose that to the world). I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about it and learned something along with me.

Update on 1 Feb 2010: I’ve posted the “Atlassian FedEx Delivery Note” for my project on our documentation wiki now too. It contains the gadget code: FedEx 13 Delivery – JIRA Tips Gadget

With the emergence of extremely interactive web sites and web apps, the JQuery library has become extremely popular for JavaScript event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions in rapid-development environments. The tight project timelines and rapid change for JQuery-based apps makes them great candidates for continuous integration.

I recently came across a discussion thread on continuous integration for Javascript with Bamboo which covers how how to set up continuous integration for your JQuery-based web apps in order to run unit tests written in QUnit, the unit testing framework included in the JQuery library.

The solution described in the discussion uses:

• Atlassian Bamboo for continuous integration


• QUnit for testing JQuery and any other client or server-side JavaScript


• JSTestDriver to launch the tests and convert the output into JUnit-compliant XML

This is a great example of how Bamboo is able to run CI builds for applications written in any programming language. As long as you can start a build from the command line, and format test output in the industry-standard JUnit XML format, Bamboo let's you easily set up continuous integration.

On top of running command-line based builds for any language, Bamboo supports builds with Ant, Maven, Maven2, make, nAnt, MSBuild and Devenv (Visual Studio) and Grails.

Any xUnit compliant testing tool can be used with your Bamboo builds, including JUnit, Selenium, PHPUnit, TestNG, NUnit, CppUnit, PyUnit, PMD.

Check out the discussion"Running JavaScript unit tests headlessly in a Continuous Integration build"

Originally, we had intended to write a two-part blog series on the performance improvements in JIRA 4. You may have already seen the first part, where George Barnett covered JIRA 4 performance compared to JIRA 3.13.

In the second part, Mark Lassau was going to talk about the benefits of automated performance tests and the improvements to the JIRA codebase made possible by the regular performance telemetry data. However, Andreas Knecht beat him to the punch when he wrote about the 20% performance improvements in JIRA 4.0.1 on the Developer Blog.

Aggressively improved caching

So, if you haven't read it yet, I encourage you to check out how we combined Bamboo, Confluence, jira.atlassian.com and JMeter to aggressively improve our caching:

This is the first of two guest posts by Erik Eccles from TaskDock, a Confluence plugin that lets you assign, track, and complete actions within Confluence and email.

Our goal with these posts is to help you reignite the content, projects, and people within your Confluence instance or at a minimum learn how we approached starting a business on a great platform such as Atlassian.

It started with a question

Stale content was the first answer. Content was still being produced, but not ending up in the right place. Where was it going? The second challenge was stepping up the involvement of an organization beyond the core constituents. That issue was more common with non-technical adopters such as finance, HR, sales, and marketing.

Fast-forward to today and we've tackled it head on. To fight stale content we dove deeper into the tools people used outside of Confluence to create and manage content. Predominantly, it was email. If not email it was task systems running outside of Confluence, instant messaging, shared drives, the dreaded spreadsheet or simply lots of coordination meetings.

Combining Tasks with Content

Managing Projects

See for yourself

Additionally, if you are already using the Tasklist Macro, we've built a simple importer that is a great way to get immediate utility by transferring Tasklist tasks into TaskDock.

Overview Video:

Importing Tasklist Video

We have two webinars coming up that should not be missed.

Plugin of the Month - JIRA Bridge for HP Quality Center from Orasi

Orasi is a leading provider of software testing services using the HP test management and automation technology. For over 15 years, Orasi has consistently helped customers successfully implement and integrate software testing environments to reduce the cost and risk of software failures.

JIRA Bridge for HP Quality Center is an enterprise-class integration solution that enables organizations to harness the full potential of JIRA and HP Quality Center software because it synchronizes defect information between the two tools. This bridge enables your QA and development teams to collaborate efficiently by coordinating all issue information between the teams. It provides both teams with the flexibility to use the tools that best fit their needs.

REGISTER NOW: Wed, Jan 27, 2010 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST

Voice of the Customer - Developing vxVistA.org with the Atlassian Suite

Using the Atlassian suite of products and plugins, DSS Inc, with the help of Open Health Tools and CustomWare, developed a collaboration environment to support a Healthcare Open Source Community based on the release of the Comprehensive Hospital Information System (HIS) / Electronic Patient Record (EHR) known as vxVistA. vxVistA is a modified and enhanced version of the System VistA used by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). This new Collaboration Environment has been created to foster and support the use of VistA and is intended to be the focal point around which a new open source community will form. DSS Inc integrated multiple plugins like Balsamiq, Gliffy, Adaptavist Community Bubbles, TaskDock, ad hoc workflows, etc.

This is an ideal webinar for Confluence customers or evaluators looking for new ideas or ways to extend their collaboration environments.

REGISTER NOW: Thu, Jan 28, 2010 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST

For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.
Also, don't forget about following us on

At the end of 2009 I published a post about creating a set of user macros useful for high-level project management. It dawned on me that there must be some really kick ass user macros that have been created by some of our 8,100 Confluence customers. So, I thought to myself, how can share these user macros? Use Confluence of course!


How can I start sharing?

We have a community space on our public instance of Confluence where you can connect with other users and share tips and ideas, and discuss all things Confluence. Now you can share your user macros too.

If you have one to share, just visit this page and click on the Add New User Macro link which will create a new page for you using a default template.

There are already two slick user macros out in the wild which you can read more about below.

Programmatic Class Diagrams

If you are using Confluence within a development team you are probably going to want to give this one a whirl. Justin Hickman wrote this nifty user macro that allows you to create class diagrams from embedded source code.

Related Content

I imagine this will be super useful for those using Confluence for documentation. Brad Rosenberg wrote this simple user macro to automatically generate related content based on the labels on the page. This macro wraps the {contentbylabel} macro, pulling the labels directly from the page. If no labels are specified, the macro simply doesn't render anything.

Get started

If you are not already using Confluence, get started with a free 30 day trial today. No strings strings attached.

We all know that sharing is caring, so start sharing your user macros today!

Michael Knighten, Director of Hosted Services at Atlassian, was recently interviewed by Phil Wainewright of eBizQ to discuss how development teams are increasingly adopting cloud computing solutions for software development and collaboration. Wainwright has been writing and consulting on software as a service for over a decade, and writes the influential ZDNet Software as a Service blog.

Knighten and Wainwright discuss the key changes that are happening within software development which have driven adoption of cloud-based development solutions, including increased team distribution, faster development cycles, and availability of low-cost on-demand infrastructure.

You can hear the 7-minute podcast or read the transcript at "How Cloud Collaboration Changes the Way Software Developers Work".

When I joined the marketing team at Atlassian, my first task was to create and run a successful Voice of the Customer and Plugin of the Month webinar series. Here we are, 17 months and over 32 webinars later, and I think we've done a pretty good job. Time flies when you are having fun!

These webinar series were created to empower prospective customers with adequate information on our products and their integrations, as well as enriching current customers with the knowledge to extend our products beyond the 'out of the box' uses. In a nut-shell, we want customers to know how other customers use our products, what hurdles they overcome with them, and what tools and plugins they used to do so. In the vein of being an open and transparent company, we thought these webinars would be the most efficient vehicle for achieving this goal.

The webinar series immediately gained traction and, in turn, popularity. We book webinars months in advance and are never short on great topics to cover. We track the viewership numbers, and are proud to say that, as of the time of this blog post, there have been over 17,349 views of the recordings! This averages out to about 542 views per webinar.

There has been some very meaty nuggets of information that has come out of the brave customers and partners who have participated in these webinars. Since it's fresh in my head, the most recent webinar with Zend Framework stands out as being especially compelling. In it, we learn why a PHP shop would want to use our, Java-based, software. Here's the recorded webinar:

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To shed some light on the vast number of webinars and topics we have covered in the past year and a half, I wanted to share the glorious list, in its entirety:

Voice of the Customer

Plugin of the Month

All webinars are posted to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.

GenoLogics has recently undertaken a HUGE migration from many of Atlassian's installed products to JIRA Studio, our hosted offering. We got the chance to catch up with Dylan Hansen from GenoLogics who speaks of this migration, how he learned about JIRA Studio, and his experience with the Atassian support team.

GenoLogics at-a-glance:

• Founded: 2001
• Headquarters: Victoria, Canada
• Employees: 70 (3/4 at headquarters)
• Number of offices: Canada headquarters, with field application specialists in Europe, California, and the East Coast
• Number of customers: 40-50 enterprise customers
• Products used: JIRA Studio

The interview

Tell me a little about GenoLogics
GenoLogics provides discovery and biomedical solutions that can be implemented across multiple labs and support translational medicine and systems biology initiatives. We want to help advance the early detection, prevention, and treatment of disease.

We installed versions of Confluence, JIRA, Crucible, and Bamboo before moving up to JIRA Studio. With JIRA Studio, everything comes in one nicely tied-up package. We had integrations of the installed products kind of working, but JIRA Studio brings it all together with the activity stream, so things are integrated even better. It's a nice, tight package.

When did you start using Atlassian tools?
We've been using JIRA and Confluence for roughly 4-5 years. Confluence was used in development and JIRA was used as our bug tracker. FishEye was installed pre-Cenqua acquisition. Bamboo was there before I started, and we are ramping up on it even more to automate build processes. We also used Crucible for code reviews. In short, we've been using Atlassian tools for 2-5 years, depending on which tool you are talking about. It all started with development, but went company wide.

How did you learn about JIRA Studio?
I heard about JIRA Studio about a year ago, and liked the idea of software-as-a-service (SaaS) instead of a product. I was not sure who it was for, small or large teams, so I attended Summit 2009 to understand JIRA Studio more and talk to Atlassian and Contegix staff to gain knowledge about the SaaS product. (Summit, by the way, I think was the best conference I have ever attended!) I wanted to meet the JIRA Studio team face-to-face and know what they were all about. I was won over and wanted to explore the possibility of moving to JIRA Studio.

What were you using before JIRA Studio?
We used Bugzilla in the past, then moved to JIRA and haven't looked back. I don't know about any wiki tools used before we had Confluence. There is a shift of people moving away from Office tools and warming up to Confluence for documentation—a push to collaborate online instead of on the desktop. Our development team used CruiseControl and then moved to Bamboo because they wanted to try something different. It was easy because we already had Confluence, JIRA, and FishEye—it made sense to try out Bamboo.

Who uses JIRA Studio and what are they primarily using it for?
Development used all of the installed tools first, and then Confluence began to be used company wide. Confluence gained traction around the company, but JIRA did not. Initially, JIRA was used by our Customer Solutions and Product departments. We are now exploring uses that reach farther than those groups, such as using JIRA to track IT support requests. However, now that we have moved to JIRA Studio, it's opened opportunities for people to work remotely without having to VPN into the office. Adoption is growing rapidly.

Are people using it in ways you hadn't expected?
It's starting to go that way. We have been on JIRA Studio for just over 1 month. I'm excited about JIRA 4 and more dashboard and gadget use; there is power there. I like that we can promote visibility into the company. Everything is bubbled up into a nice JIRA dashboard.

Were there adoption challenges in terms of getting people to use JIRA Studio?
We moved from tools that were onsite (LAN) with quick response times to having to ping the servers at Contegix. There were some hickups with response time. There was also a BIG migration effort to go from the installed products to JIRA Studio. We started the migration effort after Summit last year, and just wrapped up before Christmas. Moving to JIRA Studio, we wanted to allow access for remote employees, outside of our firewall. I expect over the next few months they will start to use the tools more and more. The adoption is starting to grow.

Are you doing agile?
YES! We are pretty much an agile shop, but not 100%. We use GreenHopper to track iterations. We also check burn-downs every day to make sure we hit our releases. GreenHopper is excellent for anyone wanting to gain visibility into a project's status. GreenHopper is a great tool. We used GreenHopper and JIRA before moving to JIRA Studio. We used to do cards on the wall, and with remote workers, GreenHopper in JIRA Studio is good to update the status of projects because you don't have to be in the office.

What kind of feedback have you heard from your staff regarding JIRA Studio?
Aside from little bugs there have been no huge issues. The migration had some performance hickups, but the Atlassian support team addressed them very fast. It appears that we've also recently solved our performance issue with Firefox and Windows. It was a configuration issue on our side. Chalk one up to the awesome Studio support team for leading us to the correct solution! For the most part, it's been a welcomed change (especially with the Products team). As use starts to grow, the other parts of the company are adopting it and see the power of using JIRA Studio.

Thanks Dylan!

During Dreamforce 2009, I had the pleasure of meeting Jason Ouellette, the Chief Architect at Appirio. Appirio is a well-known name when it comes to Force.com development, having been involved in some major Force.com projects such as Japan Post and the systems shown at the Dreamforce 2009 keynote (including Chatter stuff before it was even released!).

Jason has recently released a book dedicated to Force.com Development. It’s called Development with the Force.com Platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud and, aside from having the world’s longest title, is also the world’s first book on Force.com (that wasn’t written by Salesforce).

Jason’s Force.com Book

The book covers practically every topic relating to Force.com which is, as you probably know, an awful lot of information! As such, having only 400 pages, the book is more of an introductory tutorial than a reference book. Indeed, Jason fully admits that people will still need to refer to the standard PDFs to get detailed technical information.

So, who is the book good for? Definitely for anyone having to code Force.com who is relatively new to Salesforce and Force.com. It mentions all the technologies available in Force.com, so is vital for people wanting to come to grips with the platform.

If you’re a developer already using Force.com and you’ve used the Salesforce platform for 2+ years, then this book isn’t going to teach you anything new. However, it is rare that a developer has played with every feature in Force.com (eg I’ve never played with approvals, Salesforce-to-Salesforce, DML rollbacks, Visualforce JavaScript actions), so the book can even teach old dogs a trick or two.

For further insight into the book, see my review on Amazon.com.

Now for a real treat. While at Dreamforce, I managed to snag an interview with Jason, so here he is talking about his own book:

Thanks for the interview, Jason!

The Bottom Line

• Force.com now has its first book!
• It’s great for people new to Force.com, might not be so helpful to already-experienced Force.com developers
• Jason Ouellette’s a really nice guy!

The Powerhouse Museum, based in Sydney, Australia - also known as the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. The Powerhouse presents exhibitions and programs based on science and design, the ideas and technologies that have changed the world, and the stories of the people who inspire and create them. We spoke with Dan Collins, Powerhouse's IT Manager, about his experience with Atlassian tools, Confluence and JIRA.

Powerhouse at-a-glance:

The interview

How long have you been using Confluence?

We started using Atlassian products in early 2008. Before that we'd been using Drupal for content management.

Why change over from Drupal?

Time. Drupal did some of it, but we saw that we needed to get developers in to modify it. We looked at the range of plugins and the vibrant Atlassian community and we thought we could get a lot done in a small amount of time by paying a small amount of money. That Atlassian stuff is quite good value. It all started by looking at JIRA as a service desk replacement tool.

JIRA solved a lot of problems we were having. That's how we learned about Confluence. We came to realize that Confluence was easier to use for document management, and could solve a lot of content management issues.

What are some of the ways Confluence is being used?

Initially we were using Confluence within the IT department to manage documentation. Before long, Confluence resolved a whole lot of problems across the museum and is used in quite a few areas, but three in particular are:

1. It has taken over as our intranet. Different departments can contribute information easily. It's removed the bottleneck at web services. Now all the staff can be involved in content creation. (See the Powerhouse blog on implementing an intranet using Confluence)
   
2. Each of our 20 departments has its own space. We use that as our blog to talk internally about what we're working on. We also have a private space for each team to discuss matters which are departmental.
   
3. Exhibition projects. Each new exhibition gets a dedicated space in Confluence where team members contribute to the space when building the project. From Marketing to Workshop to Curators; it is used by all to build the content up for the exhibition.

You're also using JIRA. How is that used?

In IT we had a service desk tool that was rather inflexible. To make any customizations it was very expensive requiring external consultants to modify the system. It just wasn't scalable and we needed something we could quickly build out.

Subsequently, we've applied JIRA to many different parts of operations. Wherever forms needed to be filed in we can build a JIRA project to replace slow paper based processes.

One key feature in JIRA is the ability for people to use email to respond to issues rather than having to go into the system. That won a lot of people over. They didn't have to learn yet another tool.

As a result, it's become pretty popular and we now have 20 departments using it. It is used by staff to log issues across all aspects of Museum operations - from cleaning requests, security incidents, to exhibition proposals and risk management.

The biggest win has been using JIRA in the project managment of exhibitions. We were using MS Project, but were having a hard time involving all staff in the process. While MS Project is still used, we now import project information into JIRA and distribute it to staff, many of which are working on multiple exhibitions. It's all tracked on the JIRA Dashboard, and it saves project managers time because they aren't having to continually chase up task progress.

When it is agreed that an exhibition will go forward, we create a new JIRA project for it. We also create a Confluence space for the content creation. The systems are integrated so JIRA issues plug in to Confluence.

Are you using any other Atlassian products?

We also use Crowd for single sign-on (SSO) between the two systems.

You had been using Drupal, and I read on your blog that you had also considered going with MediaWiki. Why did you decide to use Confluence instead?

I'm not sure if it is different now with MediaWiki, but having Confluence user authentication linked into our existing directory structure makes the system much easier to maintain and support. If we were going to use to across the organisation, we needed the same groups and permissions in place to make staff comfortable, and to minimise the support required to keep it humming.

Also, given we don't have a large support team, we were more comfortable knowing we had quick access to support. In the early stages I used the live support to quickly clear up some initial questions....and subsequently found the other support offerings to be very good. I liked using JIRA for Atlassian product support which also gave me ideas for
using it in different ways at the Museum.

And lastly, we realised that some great plugins existed which saved us lots of time, and provided us plenty of options to use Confluence in ways beyond the standard wiki features.

Amid the Crunchies award ceremony that included a juggler and escape artist, a chorus that sang a song to lampoon Silicon Valley, and way too many corny jokes, something fairly inspiring happened. Atlassian got the "Runner's Up" position in the Best Enterprise award category. The overall winner was Google Docs.

Sure, it's pretty unusual to boast that you came in second place, except for the fact that Atlassian beat out some of the big boys, like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure. For a company that receives only a fraction of the PR as these giants, we felt pretty darn proud to have been there.

A big THANK YOU to everyone that voted for Atlassian, it really means a ton!

Atlassian Confluence was the "Best Social Learning Tool" winner as picked by the readers and editors of Elearning Magazine.

Elearning! Media Group hosts the only Readers' Choice Awards for the e-learning market. Learning executives selected 55 products across 16 categories for excellence. These honorees are recognized in the January '10 edition of Elearning! and Government Elearning! Magazine mailed December 28th , 2009.

As impressive was our competition. Confluence beat out Ning and Facebook to win the award. Hundreds of universities and state colleges use Confluence for classroom learning, sharing of instructor resources, and classroom and campus administration (Johns Hopkins case study).

Visit Elearning to read about Confluence and all the winners.

Oh, internet, you complete me: Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

In 2009, we hit a new high of 3,000 blog subscribers. And that was just for our News blog. The other blogs also saw record numbers of subscribers. There's no sign of a slow down. We wrote 10 blog posts since the last roundup, here are a few highlights:

Video: Zend Framework and Atlassian tools. Zend Framework is arguably the most popular PHP framework available, boasting millions of downloads and an active community. Watch this video to learn how Zend is using Atlassian's product suite. Watch now.

The big list of Atlassian gadgets. Want to display your Bamboo plan summary on your JIRA dashboard? Or your FishEye charts on a Confluence page? The big list tells you how. There are gadgets that show information from Confluence, JIRA, GreenHopper, Bamboo, FishEye, Crucible and Clover. Read more.

A tester's dream: JIRA & LogDigger. For anyone who has ever manually tested a web application, you know how much of a pain it can be to retrace your exact steps to reproduce a tricky bug. But that's no longer the case when combining LogDigger and JIRA to do your testing. Read more.

Bamboo 2.5 released - improved Maven support, easier build plan setup and more. Bamboo 2.5 includes better Maven 2 support, faster build plan creation, additional bulk build plan editing capabilities, and over 50 new features, improvements and bug fixes. Read more.

New Atlassian trademark guidelines. The new guidelines were written to guide partners, plugin developers, and the community at large how to use Atlassian product names. Read more.

Want to follow all the stories as they happen? Read and subscribe to these blogs:

• JIRA blog RSS
• Confluence blog RSS
• Dev Tools blog RSS
• News blog RSS
• Developers blog RSS
• All blogs RSS

If you're using the Grails framework and Git for distributed version control, adding continuous integration with Bamboo is easy and will increase development speed and reduce risks of project delays. Check out "Bamboo, Git and Grails for Continuous Integration" written by Kelly Robinson.

Atlassian tools for Git and Grails

Kelly's blog post is a great how-to summary which shares his experience using:

• Atlassian's Bamboo Continuous Integration server
• The Grails plugin for Bamboo
• The Git plugin for Bamboo

If your team is using Git or Grails, Atlassian has a bunch of other tools you might be interested in:

• Integrate Git with your JIRA bug tracker using the JIRA Git plugin
• The Crucible code review tool and FishEye source code browser support Git out of the box.
• Crowd single sign-on (SSO) can be added to your Grails apps using the Grails plugin for Crowd

Read the blog post "Bamboo, Grails and Git for Continuous Integration"

Social media marketing is the new black. Everyone is talking about it. Well, ok, it’s mostly consultants trying to get their pitch out. Most of the articles I’ve seen tend to focus on an SEO angle… produce more content, use more keywords, build more in-bound links… and cha-ching. But reducing social media to only a marketing strategy misses the point of social media: it’s a means of communication. You know, dialogue with real human beings.

Let’s say it’s 1889 and a businessman comes to you, the consultant, and says, “I hear about this thing called the telephone. I think it’s going to be big. How can I develop a telephone strategy?” Of course, the telephone isn’t the strategy, it’s a means to an end. It’s a way of having conversations with your audience.

Like the telephone, social media can be abused. Do Not Call lists have sprung up to prevent interruptions at dinner and the general annoyance that comes from script-reading telemarketers. Social media such as blogs and Twitter may be opt-in, but it can be equally annoying to stumble upon contrived sales pitches and SEO keyword stuffed articles. Disingenuous conversations are the ones people leave.

In other words, social media is, above all, about keeping it real.

A helpful co-worker pointed out that one of the links in my previous post that should have pointed at an old article instead pointed to Wikipedia, so I went to Google to track down the correct URL.

Two hours after I wrote it, my blog post is in the index and showing up in search results. That’s just a little uncanny. It’s not even as if I update my blog that often any more.

It is a staple of Science Fiction that once a computer (or computer network) becomes sufficiently complex, sentience is inevitable. And big sentient computers can be bad news.

As both the owner of what is almost certainly the world’s largest general purpose computing cluster, and our self-nominated bastion against evil, I really hope someone at Google is keeping an eye on this.