Recent posts from Bill Arconati

We just announced the Confluence 3.1 beta on the Confluence Blog.

Confluence 3.1 is a major new release with many new features and improvements like support for embedding OpenSocial gadgets, Office 2007 support, and a number of significant improvements to the editing experience. You can find out more details on all Confluence 3.1 improvements in the blog post or from the 3.1 beta release notes.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

For anyone who's ever had to mockup a web page, Balsamiq is an amazing Confluence plugin that lets product managers, developers, web masters and business folks all collaborate on the UI right inside a wiki page. Just this week they added a major feature to their Confluence plugin that lets you link together between mockups in different Confluence pages. This is a really powerful feature because it now lets you not only show what your app will look like but also how it will BEHAVE for the end user.

Say, for example, you have a mockup of a login screen which has two actions: (i) a login button and (ii) a forgot password link. You might have three separate mockups for this...a login screen mockup, a forgot password screen and a logged in screen. Now you can show what happens when the user clicks on the login link or the forgotten password link inside the login page. You can link all these mockups together, even if they're on different Confluence pages (really slick). I'm not yet entirely sure if the links work when you export the space to HTML but my assumption is that it will.

Here's a video demo of the new feature:

Ted.com just posted the last month's TED talks and, to our surprise, Atlassian was hailed by Dan Pink (best-selling author and former Al Gore speechwriter) as a company that motivates its employees in radical and effective ways.

Specifically he mentions our FedEx days where we set aside 1 1/2 days for developers to work on whatever they want (with a skew towards our products) and then demonstrate it live to the entire company. He also mentions Atlassian's 20% time where Atlassian developers are encouraged to set aside one day every week to work on their own projects (again with a skew towards our products)

Dan's premise is that 20th century carrot-and-stick incentive systems do NOT work for 21st century knowledge work. In fact, such incentive systems actually make knowledge workers perform worse when tasks require cognitive skills.

He proposes a motivational system that taps into workers' intrinsic motivation, the desire to do things because they matter, because they're interesting because they are part of something important. His "operating system" is based on three pillars:

1. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives (like Atlassian's FedEx days or 20% time)
2. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters
3. Purpose: yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

You can watch Dan's full speech below or read about the deliveries from our recently completed FedEx XII here:

At least year's Web 2.0 Expo, Atlassian's one and only Jeffrey Walker delivered a highly-lauded presentation on on how to drive wiki wiki adoption in the enterprise. This year Jeffrey couldn't attend so we filled the void as best we could. So without further ado, here's the last Wiki Theater presentation from Web 2.0 Expo 2009...Five Patterns for Massive Wiki Adoption.

Next year we'll have Jeffrey back:)

Back in April we presented Wiki Theater live on the floor of Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. You may have seen some of our presentations in previous posts on this blog. Here's a little video of a presentation delivered by one of our finest sales engineers, Douglas Butler, on the value of connecting your SharePoint deployment to Confluence. You can see more posts about Wiki Theater here or learn more about the SharePoint Connector here.