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.

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

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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!