Welcome to the October Newsletter! This
month... a write-up about last
month's user group event, JIRA's new feature tour, why wikis should remain as open as possible, the Confluence team
in action, and much more. Happy reading!
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 The first Atlassian User Group (AUG) meeting in
Virginia was a tremendous success. Wil Anderson and I flew in
from San Francisco on Monday night, and Scott arrived that night from Sydney (by way of Kuala Lumpur and
then London).
We had three brief talks: Christian
LaPointe demo'd his brand new acceptance testing tool, GreenPepper. I spent some time talking about JIRA and Confluence plugins and the
developer network, and Scott finished up by talking about the
road to JIRA 4 and Confluence 3, as well as discussing our upcoming products Bamboo and Crowd.
We collected incredibly valuable feedback about the direction of JIRA and Confluence
as well as our new efforts. The attendees
got to see some new tools, hear about our plans, and ask questions. We also were lucky to meet a few of our
partners from the area, including the folks from our
sponsor, IntelliObjects.
Continue reading...
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 Our feature tour for JIRA had not been up to
par for a long time. But, happily, we're able to announce
that the revised JIRA
Feature Tour is live and ready for browsing.
This updated tour — with over a dozen sections and many times that number of feature descriptions
in each section — should give you more of an idea why JIRA is one of the
most popular issue trackers around. We've spiced up the
presentation on JIRA's
features using AJAX, including many usage examples, testimonials, screenshots, charts,
and lots more. Go ahead and check it out. Then let us
know what you think. |
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One of the great ironies involved in developing Confluence is the fact that we've
put a lot of effort into giving our wiki software the flexible, but easy to use permissions model
that an enterprise would demand, but I seem to spend just as much time trying to convince people not to
use it.
Ward Cunningham's original
wiki, and many of the sites that followed it, have no security at all. The whole premise of 'wiki'
is that anyone can edit everything, because the value
of serendipitous contributions from well-meaning passers-by outweighs the cost of vandalism. This level
of openness is unlikely to appeal to an enterprise looking for
a wiki to deploy internally, but it's important to keep the principle in mind: wikis are
successful because they remove barriers, not because they erect
them.
Continue
reading... |
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 We last mentioned the Universal Wiki Converter back in an August post, and I'm here to check-in with a report from the field. The Universal
Wiki Converter was, as we hoped, extremely popular.
We've seen a lot of interest since we published it. We started with three conversion formats (TWiki,
PMWIki and DokuWiki) and we just added a very popular fourth
this week: MediaWiki. We also have three other converters in development right now that we hope to have
ready fairly soon.
Continue reading...
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I had to update our license library to add new license types when I came across an
interesting problem.
Running in development mode against the
source of atlassian-extras (which contains our license logic), everything worked just fine. Time to run
the tests again, tag and create the jar. Unfortunately when
testing the license creation on the website, it failed with a NullpointerException. Apart from the fact
that the nullpointer should be caught, we realised that the
license creation failed due to a mismatch of the public and private keys.
What happened?
Our library atlassian-extras ships with a public key file to
verify the digital signature. We found that reading this key introduced a corruption caused by two
factors.
- A bug in Maven 1.0 where the property
maven.jar.compressed is not acknowledged
- A change in the stream implementation for compressed jars in Java Mustang build 14
Continue reading...
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We receive emails now and again from new customers who ask us to recommend strategies for
rolling out Confluence to their users. User adoption can be a
problem with just about any new technology, even if it's one as simple as a wiki. You know wikis can improve collaboration, productivity and
communication, but how do you get your team to see the light? I
read several articles today from different authors that help identify some of the problems and suggest some
strategies for introducing social software into the
organisation.
Continue reading...
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 First things first, click
here (or on the image).
If you're not too familiar with wikis, you'd probably assume you just viewed a typical ol' website.
If you are familiar with wikis, you might have an inkling that
this is one. The truth is that this website is, indeed, a wonderful example of Confluence (our wiki) re-skinned.
Continue reading...
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 Inspired
by Tom Coates' "clean your flat in sixty
seconds..." I've decided that surely a lot of people would love to take a peek into the day to
day life of the Confluence developers here at Atlassian.
It's amazing what we can get done in 74 seconds. (Click here or on the image to watch.)
How does a day at your company look like?
PS: Me being a big fan, the Hoff
is naturally included as well. :)
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 Here are a few blogs and sites that we've been sharing around the office:
- Talk about a fix-all tool -- ever dreampt up this?! >>
- Have a question on Java
or Python that isn't frequently answered? Find them in Peter Norvig's infrequently answered
questions on Python
and JAVA.
- Constantly evolving, SearchMash is offering another new way to search the
web.
- Looking for an Ajax Tutorial? How about a list of 126 Ajax tutorials?
- We came across this Software Engineering Practices Survey from The
University of Queensland. By participating you can help them direct
further research into the development of a software maintenance methodology.
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 At Atlassian, we don't have
a 'sales'
team. The most efficient way to order our products
is
online. When you order, instead of checking a box from a pre-existing list or adding to a cart, you select
the appropriate product from a drop-down menu on our order
form. Separately, there's a simple yet complete
pricing table of all the options on the appropriate licensing & pricing page for JIRA
and Confluence.
Yesterday I came across a discussion spotlighting Atlassian's
pricing and order forms. Mike spoke about
transparency and pricing on the ScobleShow CEO Talk and that got people chatting. To our knowledge, the order form has
worked well for a long time now. Tell us, what do you think?
Comment on this entry or join the existing discussion. |
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Thanks for reading the October issue!
Was there something in the newsletter that sparked an idea? Anything
particularly interesting? Don't be shy, go ahead and forward along the newsletter to a co-worker. Let them know that they
can subscribe here. :) The more the merrier!
If
there's something you'd like covered in a future issue, just let us know. We always like hearing
from you.
Until next month,
Your mates at
Atlassian
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