We’ll be talking about…

Confluence Blueprints: Best practices made easy

Matt Hodges and I will be on hand to show you how you can put Confluence Blueprints to work for your organization. With Blueprints, you don’t have to start from scratch every time you want to plan a meeting, share files, or create a product requirements document – the framework is already there for you:

• Meeting Notes: make meetings more productive with an agenda, attendees and action items
• Product Requirements: define and track product requirements as they evolve
• File Lists: Keep track of your important files in one spot – searchable and available for preview

If you can’t make it, watch our recent webinar on Blueprints, which includes an sneak peek at our upcoming Decisions Blueprint:

HipChat: Group chat and IM built for teams

Atlassian’s resident HipChat guru, Jeff Park, will be demoing our new native Mac client and soon to be released new iOS app. See how HipChat works seamlessly across desktop, web, and mobile to help your team stay productive no matter where they are. Curious about how HipChat works with Confluence and JIRA? We can show you that, too.

We’ll also be giving away some of the infamous HipChat t-shirts:

Matt, Jeff and I look forward to chatting with you in Boston. Come visit us at Demo Pod #7 at the E2 Conference, June 17-19.

• Make it simple for customers to understand our product list at-a-glance.
• Make it easy for customers to distinguish stand-alone products from Atlassian add-ons.

What exactly is changing?

The following product names and logos are being updated:

The products you know and love remain the same, only the names are changing. We are standardizing how add-ons like GreenHopper and Team Calendars are branded by including the parent brand in the logo. In addition to clearly identifying add-ons, it will also be easy to tell which add-ons are made by Atlassian when customers browse the Atlassian Marketplace.

Why the changes?

Back in 2004, Atlassian had only two brands: JIRA and Confluence. For a word-of-mouth business model like ours, we wanted our products to have a strong brand identity.

Fast forward to today and there are closer to twenty: a mix of products like JIRA and Confluence and add-ons like GreenHopper, Bonfire, and Team Calendars. It’s confusing. Stand-alone product brands have the same weight as their add-ons, and some add-ons have functional names (like Team Calendars) but others don’t (like Bonfire). Between inconsistent naming, and the sheer number of brands, it was time to make some changes.

That’s why we’re launching the new names. Parent products will have unique, strong brand names. Add-ons will be named in a way that explains what they do. For example, JIRA Agile adds the Agile tab to JIRA.

Simple, right?

When is this happening?

Over the next few months, customers will start to see the new brands reflected on our website, in their products, on our blogs, in their invoices and statements, etc. We will be emailing customers who own these products and add-ons to let them know about the changes. More details coming soon.

Watch the recording, share it with your team

If you’re interested in learning how to drive a collaborative culture in your company, then this webinar key to helping you get started.

• 01:15 – Rob Koplowitz: Vice President, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research
• 20:20 – Matt Hodges: Manager, Product Marketing at Atlassian
• 32:40 – Christopher O’Donnell, Director, Product Development at Hubspot

Join an online demonstration of Confluence

Confluence, our content and team collaboration platform, is critical in building and maintaing the collaborative cultures at Atlassian and Hubspot. If you’re interested in learning more about Confluence and how it can help your team and organization work better together, join us for one of our online demonstrations.

Register Now

Ready to try?

Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free 30-day Confluence OnDemand trial.

See, I love working with nerds. Especially software nerds. I love helping make their 9-5 more productive and less painful. If that describes you too, then read on–we need you.

So what does a Technical Product Marketer do all day? We research, which might mean reading up on new developments in the industry or getting involved with our internal dev teams or tinkering with code or all of the above. Then we write. Landing pages, blogs, tutorials, sometimes ad copy, then more blogs. We engage with other people in the software field and exchange ideas via Twitter,  forums, meet-ups, and speaking at conferences.

It’s a helluva lot of fun, especially at a place like Atlassian where we have tremendous creative freedom. Not every company would let my say “pee” publicly, for instance. And because Atlassian doesn’t use the traditional sales model, we don’t have to hold useful product information hostage in exchange for people’s email addresses. But it goes beyond lexical latitude. We largely get to dream up our own projects. And when we’re given direction, it comes in the form of an interface, if you will. We get to design the implementing class.

Even this blog is an example of that. Nobody asked me to write this. A few of us Advocate/Evangelist-flavored folks got to talking at a recent EclipseCon conference about how rewarding the work is, so I decided to advertise that a bit since we’re expanding our team.

If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and help other developers be more awesome, check out this opening. If you don’t see your perfect fit listed, apply anyway and tell us about the role you’re looking for. Come play on our team.

ps: Yes, the rumors of plentiful office beer are true. And ping-pong.

This:

A couple of weeks ago we ran our second ever European AtlasCamp in the lovely city of Amsterdam. Atlassians and ecosystem members took two days out of their schedules to hang out, listen to some inspiring talks and hack on add-ons together under the huge Koepelkerk.

We mixed things up a bit this year with a ShipIt competition that ran the length of the conference. The competition kicked off with a day of workshops and hacking in Atlassian’s Amsterdam office and culminated in an afternoon of awesome project demos on the last day of camp. We’ll be publishing the dramatic presentation videos soon – stay tuned for in-browser asteroids, country music, explosions and most importantly fantastic add-ons!

The track sessions were a mix of new ecosystem-targeted technology and inspirational talks on all things software. The hot topic was Atlassian’s shiny new add-on paradigm Atlassian Connect. In a nutshell, Atlassian Connect allows you to build an external application that injects new functionality and data into an existing Atlassian application. Unlike the existing plugin system, Connect will allow add-on developers to easily target Atlassian OnDemand and “bring their own stack”. That is, build solutions using whatever combination of language and platform takes their fancy.

Some other session highlights included:

• Confluence’s new Blueprints API, a new feature that allows developers to create powerful out-of-the-box solutions to common business problems
• new plugin points (and upgrade considerations for existing ones) in JIRA 6, which was coincidentally released on the first day of camp
• an investigation of techniques employed by the highest grossing vendors on the Atlassian Marketplace
• an exposé of the comprehensive APIs and plugin points available in Atlassian’s new Git-hosting product: Stash
• best practices and tips for designing great add-ons, including the indispensible Atlassian Design Guidelines

.. and much more! All track sessions were recorded, including some spectacular live coding demos on building an Atlassian Connect add-on using Play or Node.js. We’ll be publishing them on GoAtlassian soon.

A beautiful moment of serendipity occurred during the Stash workshop. One of the topics for discussion was the perennial “How do I think of a good idea for an add-on?”. At one point I pulled up Atlassian’s public JIRA instance to demonstrate the plugin_opportunity label as a good place to hunt for ideas. It turned out that one of the workshop participants had actually reported STASH-3055, one of the issues in the list. He jumped on it immediately and raised a pull request a short while later, effectively resolving his own feature request during the ShipIt competition

The traditional AtlasCamp party took place at the dramatic SkyLounge bar. The majority of buildings in Amsterdam are low rise three-to-four storey dwellings, so the view from the eleventh floor is fairly overweldigend:

It was with heavy hearts (and hearty hangovers) that we left our new found friends and the beautiful city of Amsterdam behind us. I’d like to extend a huge Thank You! to all of our attendees who travelled from over thirty countries to make AtlasCamp the special conference that it is. The ecosystem is one of the great things that makes Atlassian unique. As any of our developers can tell you, it’s a life-affirming experience to come to camp and see the amazing tools and add-ons that are being built upon our platform by our talented community.

I can’t wait to see you all again next year!

To get a bit of a feel for what attending AtlasCamp 2013 was like you can check out the storified version or @tigertechtalk‘s amazingly detailed blow-by-blow account of AtlasCamp 2013.

Our design team has been working for the last couple of months on precision and beauty for altogether new patterns and updates to existing ones. The results will give you a beautiful, consistent experience across the Atlassian suite and the add-on system. As an add-on developer, you can dive into the deep end with the guidelines to guide you along the way.

What’s in the release

New tables

Tables can now be sorted, and inline actions got the consistency treatment.

Feature discovery dialog

We’ve been using inline dialogs in our products for new feature discovery for some time, now there’s a standard way to implement that pattern.

Comments

Atlassian uses ‘threaded’ and ‘flat’ designs for comments. We’ve accommodated for both styles and formalised some rules around how to interact with them.

Icon font updates

The icon font is becoming the standard iconography delivery mechanism for most of our products so this library will grow with every release. We now have 50 icons in the font that are easily reusable by add-on developers. ProTip: Hover the icon for a tooltip with the AUI class and unicode values.

Everything else

There was so much in this release that we could only list some of the highlights here. Full details are available in the changelog.

• Log in pattern
• Badges
• Typography updates
• Footer updates
• Color palette updates
• Pagination
• Application header updates
• Writing style and formats guidelines updates
• Reveal text pattern
• …and a heap of bug fixes!

We’ll be releasing every 6-8 weeks going forward so expect new patterns real soon!

Check it Out

Watch Now

In this webinar, guest speaker Forrester Research VP and Principal Analyst Rob Koplowitz explained the meaning and business value of “social content,” which lies at the center of any collaborative culture. Atlassian’s Matt Hodges shared the importance of company values in building a collaborative culture and the tools Atlassian uses to foster their famously collaborative culture. Lastly, HubSpot’s Christopher O’Donnell shared proven best practices that helped his company keep their core values of transparency and innovation while rapidly growing from 10 employees to over 400.

In sixty short minutes we covered:

• Defining business value of social content – what is it, what’s the point?
• The tools that drive a collaborative culture at HubSpot and Atlassian
• Practical examples that you could implement in your own workplace

Guest Speakers

We have three awesome guest speakers that know a lot about building and sustraining highly productive and highly collaborative cultures.

The recording is available. Check it now.

Watch Now

Modern. Fast. Mobile. Simple.

JIRA 6 is a completely new JIRA. The redesigned look and feel brings a whole new user experience to JIRA. It is modern and simple, clearing away the clutter so that you can get your work done faster. It’s also mobile so you can work with your project on the go. Check it out:

Play

 Enjoy the preview? Register for the What’s New in JIRA 6 webinar today.

Sign up for the JIRA 6 webinar

Modern

JIRA 6 introduces a modern experience that follows the new Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG). This new user experience doesn’t just look great, it also helps you get your work done faster. Information is easier to find and common tasks are simpler. The new JIRA look and feel is consistent with other Atlassian applications, so users are more productive using JIRA alongside Confluence, Bitbucket, Stash, and other Atlassian products.

Fresh new look

We’ve made a big investment in the look and feel of JIRA. In addition to a more consistent experience across other applications using the ADG, like Confluence and Stash, we’ve modernized JIRA’s look. Updated buttons, icons, menus, and typography bring JIRA into the now. All of these changes make for a smoother experience inside of JIRA.

Navigate with ease

Your most frequently visited pages and recent activity are just a click away from anywhere in JIRA. The new common header gives your team an easy way to work with other applications, including Confluence, Stash or another JIRA instance. You can link any Atlassian or third-party application.

Fast

Detail View: optimize the way you work with issues

JIRA 6 brings about an awesome new way to work in JIRA. With detail view you can now easily see all your issues both at a glance and in detail on the same screen. We’re on a mission to make teams faster. With JIRA 6′s detail view, it’s much easier to work with sets of issues because you never lose focus. Detail view gives you the full power of JIRA: inline edits for single field changes, @mentions to pull others into the conversation, and keyboard shortcuts to speed up navigation and make editing and triaging issues a breeze. We think these new features will cut the time you’ll spend working with lists of issues by 50 percent.

Compact mode

Nothing aids productivity like screen real estate. Compact mode in JIRA 6 adds up to 20 percent more screen space to help you focus on what matters most: your issues. In list view, compact mode allows you to add more columns to the screen. In detail view, you can see even more issue specifics without scrolling.

Power User? Press ‘[‘ to collapse or expand the sidebar without touching your mouse.

Mobile

Access JIRA anywhere! We’ve introduced a new mobile view for JIRA, focused on the activities and information you need when you’re not gazing deeply into your monitor’s pixels.

We’ve optimized how teams work by enabling you to stay connected even when you’re out of the office. Comment on issues and @mention others to bring them into the conversation on your train ride home. If you’re stuck in a meeting, assign an issue that needs attention straight from your phone. Check out your favorite filters to see the updated status of your stories. Watch hot issues so you stay on top of any updates.

After all, where are you usually checking email and seeing JIRA notifications? Your phone! Just click any link in a JIRA notification from your smartphone, and you’ll wind up in the new JIRA mobile interface.

Simple

Get started easily

In JIRA 6 we’ve made getting started easier than ever. We’ve taken the types of projects you create most often in JIRA and collapsed the setup for those projects into two clicks. Creating new projects couldn’t be simpler!

Workflow

Thousands of teams choose JIRA for the awesome power of the workflow, but you don’t have to start from scratch. Discover, explore, and import workflows in the Atlassian Marketplace.

• Bring known best practices into your organization from the Atlassian Marketplace.
• Configure and test workflows (including screens and fields) in your staging instance. Import them to your production instance to minimize configuration churn.
• Find workflows for all kinds of business processes in the Marketplace. Explore new possibilities and find creative ways to take advantage of JIRA.

JIRA 6 has even more!

JIRA 6 is filled with all kinds of good stuff. You can check out the release notes for more details, but here’s a few more key feature of JIRA 6.

1. Editable usernames — The second most requested feature, as determined by customer votes, is here! JIRA Administrators can now edit any username in the JIRA internal directory.
2. Bulk watch — With over 220 votes, we’ve brought this feature into JIRA 6. Now you can watch issues en mass to stay in touch with key issues in your project.
3. Global workflow schemes — Now you can edit an active workflow scheme on a set of projects. If you have many projects that share one workflow, this feature is for you.
4. Translate custom fields — Running JIRA in multiple locales? Customers whose users operate in different languages can now translate the names and descriptions of custom fields.
5. JIRA to JIRA issue copy (Marketplace plugin) — For customers with more than one JIRA server, you can copy an issue from one project to another, even if the projects aren’t on the same JIRA instance.

Ready to explore the best JIRA ever?

JIRA 6 is not just a fresh coat of paint. We’ve made the core experiences at the heart of JIRA better. JIRA 6: Modern, Fast, Mobile, Simple. JIRA 6 makes both individuals and teams more effective in achieving their goals. It’s time to try JIRA 6 and see how it makes your team run faster, together.

Register for the What’s New in JIRA 6 webinar today.

Sign up for the JIRA 6 webinar

New to JIRA?

Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free 30-day JIRA OnDemand trial.

Ready to upgrade?

Check out the full release notes and start seeing real results with JIRA 6 today.

OnDemand Customers: Congrats! You’ve have been auto-upgraded to JIRA 6!

Check back to http://blogs.atlassian.com/jira/ over the next few weeks. We will be highlighting key features and use cases using the new JIRA on the blog.

So what’s our secret?

Start small and think long-term.

We reached this milestone in increments of just $10 through our unique ‘starter licensing program‘ or Causium model (the mash-up of freemium with a ’cause’) where teams of ten users or less can purchase our software for $10/month and then the revenue is donated to charity. Since 2009, the program has more than doubled, generating more than $2.5 million in charitable donations. Our Causium program is part of our larger philanthropic endeavors known as the Atlassian Foundation, through which we donate one percent of profits, employee time and equity to charity.

Focused on giving youth of the world access to a world-class education to break the poverty cycle, the Atlassian Foundation was founded in 2008 and has now donated more than 1,500 hours of employee volunteer time and $3 million in donations to various charities around the world. The $2.5 million in donations to Room to Read have empowered the non-profit to positively impact the lives of nearly 90,000 children, mostly in Cambodia, by giving them access to education. The funds, which support literacy and gender equality, have built more than 150 libraries and six schools, sponsored 1,500 girls to attend school, published 10 new local language books, and enabled much-needed renovations. Atlassian is the original donor of the Reading and Writing pilot in Cambodia.

“This is a huge milestone for the Atlassian Foundation and a wonderful example of how powerful our Causium model can be,” said Jeremy Largman, who helps lead the Atlassian Foundation. “By making donations of just $10 at a time, we’ve made a huge impact on an important issue at a global level. By making small changes and thinking long-term, there’s no reason why every business can’t give back and support its community on important causes.”

Room to Read is just one of nine education-focused charities that the Atlassian Foundation supports, including four near both our US and Sydney offices. Several months ago, we awarded four SF-based charities with grants of up to $10,000 in order to increase our impact on our local community. We’ve also donated more than $350,000 to the Sydney-based Social Ventures Australia, which currently supports AIME, CareerTrackers & Beacon. As Atlassian continues to grow, we’ll continue to uphold our pledge to give back to our community and look for more ways to expand the impact of our philanthropic efforts.

Come celebrate and learn more about this growing trend at our “Causium in Action” event

We’re celebrating this milestone by hosting a joint event with Room to Read on Tuesday, May 14 at our San Francisco office. The event will feature a panel discussion with Room to Read Founder John Wood, Atlassian’s vice president of corporate development Jose Morales and knowledge management program manager Jeremy Largman talking about the success of Atlassian’s unique model. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join!

RSVP now!

Check out our article on Fast Company!

]]> http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/its-official-atlassians-causium-model-has-produced-more-than-2-5-million-in-donations-to-room-to-read/feed/ 0 http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/first-look-recap-and-confluence-blueprints-live-webinar/ http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/first-look-recap-and-confluence-blueprints-live-webinar/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 13:00:37 +0000 Ryan Anderson http://blogs.atlassian.com/?p=25258 On Wednesday, March 27, Atlassian invited 250 customers, friends, fans, and partners from around the Bay Area to attend First Look. Atlassian Co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes took the stage and unveiled Confluence Blueprints – ready-made solutions to common business problems faced by teams of all shapes and sizes.

Mike stressed that in today’s age, software development goes way beyond development teams. This was echoed by Jim O’Neill, CIO of HubSpot, who shared how his company used Confluence to scale from 10 to 500 employees while preserving a culture of innovation and togetherness.

Chris Kohlhardt of Gliffy spoke about his company’s beginnings and the growth of the Atlassian ecosystem, as well as the potential that Blueprints provides for both customers and third-party developers.

See what went down at First Look

Watch a recording of a live demonstration of Confluence Blueprints

We held a comprehensive, live demonstration of Confluence Blueprints for nearly 750 Confluence administrators, users, and evaluators. We covered everything from how to:

In 60 short minutes we” show you and your team how to:

- Hold effective meetings using the Meeting Notes Blueprint
- Share files and documents in one place using the File Lists Blueprint
- Define product requirements documents using the Product Requirements Blueprint
- Make and record decisions using the new Decisions Blueprint
- Customize Blueprints for your own business processes

Check out the recording now.

Watch Now