When we arrived at Defrag in Denver last month, we were pleasantly surprised to run into our buddies Puneet, Shinji and Hutch over at Connectbeam. We were even more delighted to see that they were demo-ing their integration between their Connectbeam Spotlight and our beloved Confluence wiki. And we were freaking ecstatic when Puneet later brought Yatman Lai at Cisco and Rich Hoeg at Honeywell (each with 10,000+ Confluence users) on stage and talked about how they use our products.

The concept behind Connectbeam is quite simple...they make it easy to tag all the "stuff" in your organization. Your company probably has content spread all over the place...in Confluence... Outlook... SharePoint... making it hard to find and organize. Connectbeam Spotlight provides a meta-tagging layer on top of all that content so you can create and view all your tags in one simple UI.

When talking to their customers, Connectbeam quickly learned that thousands of companies like Honeywell and Cisco are using Confluence to create tons of content and that any meta-tagging engine would have to play well with Confluence. Enter the Connectbeam Spotlight Connect for Confluence. Here's a little snippet of how it works:

• Labels and Tags - Labels in Confluence are automatically added as tags in Connectbeam;
• Activities - A user's activities inside Confluence (e.g. like creating a Confluence page or adding a label) show up as user activities in Connectbeam;
• Spaces - Confluence spaces are automatically mapped to Connectbeam groups.

And with Spotlight Connect for Confluence, Confluence users can take advantage of Connectbeam's browser toolbar and Outlook plugins to search within Confluence. ConnectBeam already highlights one customer that claims to have saved over $50,000 with this integration. You can learn more in their video below or by reading their white paper.

One reason I enjoy working at Atlassian is that our founders highly encourage us to contribute to our community. For example, every employee receives five paid days annually to volunteer at a charity of his/her choice.

Another cool thing Atlassian does is donate free community licenses to non-profits (I'm planning to deploy Confluence for the faculty at my son's pre-school). And we support the open-source community with free Open Source Project Licenses. Community contribution is a core value for us so one way we measure our success is by looking at the number of community and open source licenses we generate.

That's why we're proud to announce today that we've given away just over 3,600 open source and community licenses. That's over 2,000 community licenses and over 1,600 open-source licenses. And the open-source projects using our software are a veritable list of who's who in open source:

• Apache, Hibernate use JIRA for issue tracking and project management;


• Adobe Flex, Mulesource use Confluence for collaboration and content management;


• MySQL, JA-Sig use FishEye for source-code repository insight;


• Apache Struts, The Spring Framework use Bamboo for continuous integration;

Non profits using our software include:

• Goodwill Industries International


• National Audubon Society


• The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society


• American Cancer Society


• Amnesty International

So why do we give our products away? I remember a venture capitalist once asking a former employer..."if your product were free would people use it?" With 3,600+ customers using our products for free, Atlassian passes that test (not that we've ever taken a dime of VC funding). At the end of the day we think it just makes good business sense to keep the people who create, evangelize and use our products healthy and happy. And sometimes it just feels good to give a little something back to the community.

While we celebrate 3,600 today, we know there are still thousands more out there that can benefit from Atlassian's software. Help us get the word out. If you know anyone who could benefit, encourage them to sign up for a free license at:

• http://www.atlassian.com/opensource for an open source project


• http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/community-license-request.jsp for a community license.

Thomas Edison once said, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." At the Defrag conference this week, Professor William Duggan of the Columbia Business School focused on that very important one percent.

Where do creative ideas come? Duggan suggests that the great creative sparks in human achievement were the product of one individual who mashed together ideas and concepts from different disciplines. He cites some compelling historical examples, like how Henry Ford's moving assembly line was a mashup of the Oldsmobile assembly plant and the moving lines of Chicago's meat-packing plants.

This got me thinking about how teams can propagate and re-mash their own great ideas. One way we do this at Atlassian is through personal blogging. Atlassian is a blogging culture. We're a company of only ~200 employees but every day we have dozens of employee blog posts inside of Confluence along with hundreds of comments. When I have a great idea on how to improve our products or processes, I blog about it in Confluence. When I have something to contribute to someone's post, I add a comment sometimes even embedding a photo, video or slideshow. Then I watch the post to get email notifications whenever someone replies to my comment or makes another comment.

But why is blogging your idea better than simply sharing it with the person next to you or sending it out in an email blast? Here are some reason that I blog:

1) Blogs know no boundaries. We're a geographically dispersed company...many employees in San Francisco and many more in Sydney. My team doesn't sit within 10 feet of me or on the same floor for that matter.

2) Blogs are an opt-in mechanism. I'm not forcing my idea on anyone like I would be doing with email. People comment on my blog because they want to, not because they feel compelled to respond to an email.

3) Blog posts are discoverable by all. If my idea is trapped in an email, it's limited to reaching only the people I send it to. By blogging I can reach anyone in the company.

4) Blog posts are infinite. With a blog, my idea is forever searchable on our internal wiki. So even if my idea is ahead of it's time, someone still might pick it up and find it useful months or years from now.

I'm sure there are more reasons but these are the ones that readily occur to me. While not every idea can be a great spark in human achievement, every blog post in Confluence can be a tiny spark that contributes to your own team's achievement.

That might not seem like prudent advice given today's economic uncertainties, but it's what Peldi, the man behind Balsamiq, decided to do last year. Today he tells a great story on his blog about how the idea of mockups came to him and why it made sense for him to deliver Balsamiq as an Atlassian plugin.

Plugins make sense for a small vendor like me: it's an add-on sale, you don't have to convince buyers of the value of the platform (the platform vendors take care of this expensive task), all you do is add a feature, simple.

While we would like to take all the credit for Balsamiq's success, we have to acknowledge that maybe Peldi's vision, personal sacrifices and quality product also have something to do with it. And as for the economy? Maybe now is a good time to hunker down and spend a couple  hours coding up that project idea in your head. Remember that the last recession gave us Web 2.0.

Well you can stop all the crying, kicking and fist-clenching because we recorded it for you. In about 30 minutes we demo-ed all the Connector's high-level features and answered quite a few customer questions. Thanks to everyone who attended. And if you missed it, don't worry. We still love you:) As always you can find more information on our SharePoint Connector page. In the mean time check out the video...