Woohoo!. It's 2006 all over again. Sort of.

Atlassian was once again named to the prestigious SDTimes 100 list, which recognizes those companies, organizations and individuals that most broadly 'set the agenda' in the software industry. Atlassian won in the Application Lifecycle Management category which recognized solutions that supported the spectrum of collaboration workflow from start to finish.

Congratulations go to our developers for bringing home another award!

A few days ago, we rolled out a significant update to our hosted development tool, JIRA Studio.

First, we've upgrade JIRA Studio to Confluence 2.8. Laura posted all the details about 2.8 earlier, but in brief, Confluence 2.8 features an updated user interface focused on making our Wiki easier to use (and look at), better searching, and more, for a total of over 90 improvements. Check out Laura's Post for more details on Confluence 2.8.

Speaking of search, this update to JIRA Studio includes Studio-wide searching. The search box found on every page now allows you to search across Issues, Wiki pages, Reviews, and Code. And you can filter the results based on Project. Have a look:

Performance was another focus of this update, and you'll see big improvements in the Source and Review tabs.

Finally, we now allow certain 3rd party plugins to be installed into your JIRA Studio Instance. Currently we support Gliffy and EditGrid for Confluence. EditGrid and Gliffy licenses are, as they say, sold separately. Check out the JIRA Studio Plugin Policy for complete details.

We're back with a fresh round of Atlassian User Groups, designed to help you meet customers, developers and discover more about our products and the Atlassian community!

The Lowdown:

User Groups, as the name implies, are all about you. Typically we have three to four short customer presentations on an interesting implementation or use case. That's followed by several separate round table discussions on topics of your choosing (aka Birds of a Feather), where you'll meet with fellow users and work through questions, issues and ideas you have stored up, complete with food and refreshments. User Groups are completely free to attend...and don't worry, you won't have to sit through a " short" sales presentation either. This is all about you! RSVP here.

The upcoming lineup:

Sydney, Australia — September 23
Toronto, Canada — October 14
New York, NY — October 16
Berlin, Germany — October 23
San Francisco, CA — November 12
Amsterdam, Netherlands — November 26
London, UK — December 4

Meet your maker:

Best of all, Atlassians will be on hand to be showered with love, pounded with questions or just shoot the breeze. We're looking forward to meeting you there!

Calling all nerds:

Have an interesting story to tell about our products? Share it at a user group! For more info, contact me at lkhalil [at] atlassian [dot] com

To sign up for any of our user groups, please visit this page.

We have updated the New York and Toronto User Group dates. Please see above for the revised dates.

Got JIRA? Got lots and lots of issues? Then you might be interested in learning about WANdisco's solution for clustering and replication. The solution, announced last November, helps organizations with complex and massive deployments of JIRA to ensure the application's availability and scalability.

To learn more, please join us for a webinar with WANdisco on August 5 at 11am US Pacific Time. Hope to see you there!

When we implemented an internal Staff Directory using MIT's Exhibit technology, we thought it would be fun to also track where staff were born. Now, whenever somebody joins the company, they also appear on an online map:

Our headquarters is in Sydney, Australia, so we have lots of people from Down Under. We have an office in the USA, so lots of folks herald from there, some of whom work in Sydney. You'll also notice a heavy European influence due to our project team in Gdansk and the very strong Computer Science skillset coming out of Eastern Europe. We're currently staffing up an office in Amsterdam, so expect more faces there soon! Finally, there's our Asian contingent providing support out of Kuala Lumpur.

Would you like to see your face up there? Remember, we're always hiring!