Our three favorite things are HipChat, HipChat t-shirts, and you guys – our users. We love hearing your feedback on HipChat, but we decided it’s time that you had a chance to have some say about more than just the product.

That’s right, we’re talking about t-shirts. Starting June 17th, we will be accepting entries for our first HipChat t-shirt design contest, and we will print the winning designs. We’re also giving away prizes. Seriously cool prizes.

The details

The contest is free and easy to enter. We provide the basic graphic assets (logo + text style), but the design and caption are up to you.

Need some inspiration?

Here are some of our captions used on our existing t-shirts:

• Pirate: “Yar, HipChat!”
• Crocodile Dundee: “G’day, HipChat”
• Japanese: “ヒップチャット!”
• Sombrero: “el HipChat”
• Sherlock Holmes: “HipChat. Indeed.”

Important dates

• June 17: Submissions open
• July 14: Submissions close
• July 15: Voting begins
• July 21: Voting ends

Prizes

Judges will award prizes in the following categories:

• Grand prize - 15″ 2.4 GHz Macbook Pro with Retina display + their own HipChat t-shirt
• People’s choice - Adobe Creative Cloud Complete Individual Year Subscription + their own HipChat t-shirt
• Funniest design - Adobe Creative Cloud Complete Individual Year Subscription + their own HipChat t-shirt
• Most creative design - Adobe Creative Cloud Complete Individual Year Subscription + their own HipChat t-shirt
• Best of the week  – 1 year subscription to WIRED magazine + Wacom tablet

All winners will also receive their choice of a an existing HipChat shirt. Winning designs will be announced on the HipChat blog, and winners will be credited on the t-shirt, if printed. For full details, see hipchat.com/contest.

Get started

Head over to the contest page for more details and to submit your entries. Good luck!

Get started

Last month, we launched the DevOps Dojo – a website sharing our thoughts on the cultural and technical aspects of adopting the DevOps way of developing software. We’re far from having it all figured out. And in many cases, we know what we should be doing, but are only starting to actually do it. (Probably sounds familiar, no?) But since transparency is both a big part of our company culture and a big part of DevOps, we don’t mind opening the kimono a bit.

On Thursday we kicked off a new community event series called the Open Dojo where we gathered four Atlassians in various roles into a Google Hangout and talked about the particular challenges facing distributed teams who decide to embrace DevOps principles. Using the Hangouts OnAir option, we were able to broadcast live and take questions from viewers. What resulted was a lively conversation covering culture, tools, technologies and logistics.

If you missed the live event, we posted the video on the DevOps Dojo. Check it out!

Enter the Dojo

Less toolbar, more action

As someone with a touch of ADD, I’m easily distracted by formatting options while editing, and most of the time I just want a larger canvas to work on. Thanks to the new distraction-free editing mode I can hide the Confluence header, page title, and editor toolbar while I work and stay focus on the content I’m creating.

Power user? Press Ctrl+Shift+F to enter distraction-free mode without touching your mouse.

With distraction-free editing you can put your headphones on, and get into the zone while working in Confluence. When you want to return the editor toolbar all you have to do is hit the ‘ESC’ key.

No toolbar? No problem.

Worried about editing without the toolbar? Fear not, you can still use all your formatting options and insert content with keyboard shortcuts. Access all your shortcuts from the ‘Help’ icon in the toolbar. Whether you’re are a power user or novice, we promise Confluence will provide you the fastest, and easiest editing experience out there.

See for yourself

Check out this video to see how you can leverage keyboard shortcuts to access all the speed and power of the Confluence editor while in distraction-free mode.

The Tip of the Month, brought to you by Atlassian University, is a monthly series to help master Atlassian tools. Products are more fun to use when you know all the tricks.

When was the last time you used the “Quick Search” box in the top right corner of every screen in JIRA? If you’re anything like me, you probably use it almost daily. The Quick Search box is commonly used to navigate directly to an issue or perform a free text search across all of JIRA.

But the Quick Search box is much more powerful than it appears, and today I want to share a few of its secrets with all you JIRA pro’s out there. See it in action:

Smart Search Operators

Keep this list handy and you’ll be a Quick Search whiz in no time!

People

• “my” takes you issues assigned to you
• “r:kolofsen” returns all issues where Ken Olofsen is the reporter

Versions

• “v:4.2″ searches for all issues with an affects version of 4.2
• “ff:2.1″ searches for all issues with a fix version of 2.1
• version number wildcard – “v:3.2*” finds any issue whose version number is, for example:
  • 3.2
  • 3.2-beta
  • 3.2.1
  • 3.2.x

Dates: created, updated, overdue

• “updated:-1w” — finds issues updated in the last week.
•  ”due:-1d,1w” — finds issues due from yesterday to next week.

Issue Attributes

• issue status: typing “open” or “resolved” pulls all issues with that current status
• issue type: “task” or “bug” pulls all issues of that type
• issue key: type the exact issue key to navigate directly to any issue: “TST-1″
• project name or key: typing “JIRA Development” or “JRA” returns all issues in that project.

These are most helpful when used in combinations – check out the examples:

Combinations

• “my open bugs r:kolofsen” – all issues assigned to me that are open and reported by Ken Olofsen
• “my unresolved ghs settings” – all issues assigned to me that are unresolved, in the “GreenHopper Support” project, and contain the text “settings” in the summary, description and/or comments
• “overdue blocker c:security” – all issues with a due date before today, priority of blocker, and component of security

Give Quick Search Smart Searches a try today!

If you found this helpful, please visit Atlassian University – interactive tutorials and videos with tons of tips just like this one.

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.

If the newbies on your team don’t know the how to add a gadget to a dashboard or save a search filter, we recommend Atlassian University.  With interactive tutorials and videos, you’ll stay up to date on all the new JIRA features.

Learn about University

The problem

Atlassian sends a lot of email to its 25,000+ customers. In fact, in the last 12 months we’ve sent about six million emails ranging in content from our monthly newsletter, JIRA tips, Confluence tips, product announcements, event emails, evaluation tips, offers and promotions, and beyond.

Our email program is very complex with API triggered sends, daily batch sends, dynamic content, and numerous automated programs. We use ExactTarget, but regardless of which email service provider you use, every one has the same challenge. Namely, it’s hard to coordinate, manage, and produce emails in a collaborative manner. When you get to Atlassian’s size – and send the volume of emails we do – there needs to be a solid workflow that includes content drafts, design elements, collaboration, approvals, edits, tests, tracking, archives, and so on.

Atlassian email team – Kevin, Morgan and Mike

Using our own products for this task was a no-brainer, but the standard issue type in our internal JIRA marketing project wasn’t fine-grained enough. The workflow didn’t have the level of detail we required to track every piece of the process, and the lack of custom fields meant we weren’t capturing all the necessary requirements when an email ticket was opened. Because our teams are distributed across multiple offices in multiple time zones, capturing the specific requirements for each send is essential.

The solution

JIRA is used extensively across our entire company. So, we created a more suitable workflow and added custom fields that required users to include more detailed requirements. For example, to send an email about a product update, we require the sender to describe their ‘Hypothesis for testing’ such as “this announcement will get new users to register to use our products.” By knowing this, the email team can tailor the emails to test the hypothesis. We also added additional statuses to the workflow to help us track the email better through every stage of development. The workflow now lives as an issue type within the marketing project of our internal JIRA instance.

The JIRA workflow for our email program has been instrumental in helping us wrangle all the disparate parts and lifecycle of email production. Email on this scale needs a strong workflow engine, otherwise so much detail gets lost. See the workflow and required custom fields below:

Simplified Email Workflow

Create Issue Screen

So far, it’s been working great for us, and we figured we’d share the love! Head on over to the Atlassian Marketplace, and start using the exact workflow that our email team uses internally everyday to send Atlassian’s outgoing email communications. Go here for documentation on ‘Importing from Atlassian Marketplace.’

Outgoing Email Workflow

The email team also uses our agile project management software, GreenHopper, to easily manage the massive volume of email tickets in the queue, but we’ll save that for a later blog post.

Win a shirt

Let us know how your company currently manages your email workflow in the comments below. If you share your story, we’ll pull someone at random to win a shirt from Atlassian Swag.

Recently we’ve given more flexibility and granularity in the way that your code is exposed: 2.0 introduced the ability to protect certain branches with branch permissions, and 2.4 allowed you to expose individual repositories outside of your core development team with repository permissions. Today, we are pleased to announce Stash 2.5, the final piece of the puzzle: public access to projects and repositories.

Try Stash 2.5 Now

Public access to projects and repositories

Public access provides users with read-only access to select projects and repositories without having to log in or have an account in Stash. Opening up access to Stash allows you to:

• Broadcast your code to a wider audience who generally don’t have access to your source.
• Simplify setup of build servers and automated systems without requiring a log in.
• Link from other systems like JIRA or Confluence, to give users access to code without requiring authentication.
• Create open-source projects or repositories.

In Stash, public access increases cross-project, cross-team, and cross-tool collaboration and visibility. Administrators can easily open up access to single repositories or entire projects, allowing anonymous users to browse code via the web UI, or clone it using any Git client. Internal or external anonymous users (or tools) will have read-only access to public assets in Stash. This lowers the barrier to discovering, collaborating on, and contributing code in Stash – for everyone.

Broadcast your code to a wider audience

These days, enterprises are constantly trying to encourage developers to collaborate, and suggest enhancements or fixes. Most core development teams can already view everything in their project in Stash; this is about opening up access to a larger group of developers. This allows external users to get visibility into your project’s source code, while still ensuring that only core team members have write access to the repository.

Simplify access from build servers and automated systems

By turning public access on, you can simplify the configuration of your IT infrastructure. Build systems such as Bamboo or Jenkins need to clone Stash repositories. Git submodules reference other repositories in Stash. Scripts update Git repositories on several servers at a time to get the latest code just before a test run. All these scenarios can now access Stash without requiring a login.

Link from other systems 

Linking to code assets from other internal systems is common – wikis, issue trackers, project management tools, documents, and more. Stash 2.5 allows you to link to your code assets from any system, without requiring non-developers to have an account on Stash. Nowadays, code bases contain documentation, images, human-readable configuration files, and BDD specifications. It’s great to be able to point your product managers, designers, quality assurance staff, testers, and documentation teams to those assets without requiring them to know Git, or have an account on your Stash instances.

For JIRA issue tracker users, Stash commits appear in the source tab of JIRA issues, regardless of who the user is or whether or not they’re logged in. Now, if a repository or project has public access enabled, when you click on the “view full commit” button, you can see the full source behind those commits in Stash.

Go open source, but keep the code on your own infrastructure

Many businesses ship source code to the public as part of their releases. APIs, connectors, client libraries, and integration code examples can all make up part of the deliverables provided to your customers – so why host them on an external service that you don’t control? Public Stash projects and repositories allow you to deliver code straight from your servers, using the same infrastructure you use for hosting your internal source.

Refined collaboration with pull request improvements

On the Stash team, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve the experience of existing features. In Stash 2.5 our development team found ways to refine pull requests and keep teams in the flow of development during code reviews.

Edit an active pull request’s destination branch

When creating a pull request in Stash, you define the destination (or target) branch you want to merge your code changes into. It’s easy to accidentally create a pull request with the wrong target branch, and then you have no choice but to decline and recreate it. This is not ideal. In Stash 2.5, you can change the target branch for an active pull request. This can be useful after a cut of a release branch, or if a mistake was made when the pull request was first opened.

Get more context in diffs

Context is king. We know instinctively that bug fixes are 90 percent about fact finding, context, and discovery, and only 10 percent about actual code changes.

Seeing more relevant content when you need it is highly beneficial, so we’ve added a seamless way for you to expand the lines of code you see around the diff in a pull request or commit. This allows you to see up to the whole file, if you want. The goal is to simplify the code review aspect of pull requests.

Mailmap support

Over time, Git repositories evolve, committers change, their emails change; everything is in constant flux. Starting today, Stash understands the directives in the .mailmap configuration file (see Mapping Authors for the format). With this, Stash can properly track users – even when they commit from multiple email addresses, or with different names (provided they record the changes in the .mailmap file).

Go public with Stash 2.5

Foster external participation and enjoy even more streamlined code collaboration with Stash 2.5. Start a free trial and get up and running in a matter of minutes.

Try Stash 2.5 Now

Already using Stash? Your upgrade to 2.5 is just a click away. Check out our full release notes to get started.

JIRA 6 brings you a whole new mobile interface. With JIRA mobile you can stay connected and update issues while on the go, so you’re never blocking your team. We focused on the core user stories that empower your teams to use JIRA wherever, whenever.

With the enhanced issue navigator optimized for the PC and a new mobile interface, you can maximize your productivity, no matter the device.

When logging into JIRA from a mobile web browser on an iPhone or Android device, JIRA automatically directs the user to the mobile experience–no separate download or installation is required.

The default screen shows the issues assigned to you. To explore an issue, click on the issue’s summary. It couldn’t be easier! We’ve brought the most important attributes of an issue to the center of the screen so it’s easy to review, and take action on an issue remotely.

Email integration

When you’re away from the office, JIRA mobile helps you stay connected. JIRA’s powerful notification system sends email notifications when your team takes action on issues. When accessing an issue from your mobile email client, JIRA loads the mobile optimized version so it’s easier to follow the conversation.

Taking Action on Issues

When life takes you away from the office, sometimes you still need to provide feedback so the team can keep working. JIRA mobile enables you to perform three key actions on the go: assign, comment on, and watch issues. With JIRA 6′s mobile interface, you can engage with issues via the actions drop down and comments.

Just like in the desktop version, assignment and comments drive action on issues. When you’re away from your team, changing the assignee lets someone else pick the issue up so it doesn’t stall out. You can lend your teammates relevant context by using @mentions and a short comment.

Follow with filters

Filters in JIRA are like saved searches; they make it easy to follow a set of issues. JIRA mobile brings your filters along with you so never have to lose touch with your team.

When we built JIRA mobile, we focused on providing two sets of filters: out of the box filters to help you get started, and favorite filters. Use them to help you quickly find the issues most relevant for you and your team. The pre-configured filters show you the issues closest to you: assigned issues, reported issues, and issues viewed recently. Favorite filters are searches you can save in the desktop version of JIRA and then access on your phone. You can create filters from the issue navigator using the simple search or using JQL.

Ready to get more out of JIRA on the go? Evaluate JIRA today with a 30 day OnDemand trial!

Try JIRA 6

1. Keep track of Pages with Favorites

I quickly realized that there are a few Confluence spaces and pages I visit often, like the Marketing space and my team’s page. There are other pages that I need to reference occasionally like our GoToMarket Plan, but I don’t want to have to search for them every time I need them. I added these pages to my Favorites so I can easily reference them later. To Favorite a page, click on the “Tools” button in the top right of any page and select “Favorite” from the drop down menu.

You can access your Favorites by clicking on your personal icon in the top right of your screen. Click on “Favorites” from the drop down to bring up your list of Favorite pages and spaces.

2. Use keyboard shortcuts to navigate faster

In my first few weeks with Confluence, I used Search A LOT to find the pages and spaces I needed. I love working fast, so I quickly learned I could make searching even more efficient with the keyboard shortcut “/”:

type “/” at any time to search

and start typing what you’re looking for in the search field

I also started creating a lot of content – my introductory blog post, pages for upcoming launches, etc. To save time, I started to use the keyboard shortcut for Create, “c,” to get to the create screen faster than clicking!

type “c” to open the create dialog

then select what type of Confluence Page you want to create

Want to learn more keyboard shortcuts? Find the whole list in the Help drop down, located in the global header, or check out Matt Hodges’ post, Five Keyboard Shortcuts I Can’t Live Without.

3. @mention other users to get their input

One of my first projects was planning an infographic campaign. I had to coordinate with product marketers, designers, and data scientists. I created a page with all the requirements for everyone to reference, and then “@” mentioned each person on the page so they would see it and could comment on the plan. You can “@” mention other users on pages, posts and comments – any time you want to bring someone’s attention to something.

Type “@” followed by the person’s name anywhere on Confluence to mention someone – a list of suggested users will populate as you type.

Once you publish the page or comment, the person will receive a notification in their WorkBox, directing them to the page on which they have been mentioned.

4. Reply and Like straight from WorkBox

Everyone at Atlassian writes an introductory blog post in their first week. I included a bit about the merits of different kinds of Southern barbeque here in the U.S., which led to spirited debate in the comments. Each time someone commented, Liked my post, or “@” mentioned me, I got a notification in my WorkBox. I was able to quickly reply to the confused Australians to explain what “barbeque” means in America or “Like” welcoming comments others had left, straight from the WorkBox.

Click the WorkBox icon in the upper right to see your notifications, and click on one to expand it. You can Reply or Like the comment right there, or Open it to see it on the page or post.

5. Save drafts for later

While writing my introductory blog post, I wanted to make sure it had the right combination of fascinating information and witty remarks, so I went through a few rounds of edits. Confluence automatically saves what you are working on as a draft, so I could work on it for a bit, and then close it and come back to it later.

You can see when the Draft was last saved in the bottom right, below the “Preview” and “Save” buttons.

Access your drafts by clicking on “Drafts” in the drop down below your profile icon. When you’re ready to publish your page, click “Save” in the bottom right corner.

Learning these features helped me get up to speed quickly. Any other beginner favorites I missed? Help out other new Confluence users by sharing your tips in the comments.

Want to learn even more helpful Confluence features? Sign up for the Confluence Insiders Email to find out the latest tips.

Sign up here