The first Atlassian User Group (AUG) meeting in Virginia this week was a tremendous success. Wil Anderson and I flew in from San Francisco on Monday night, and Scott arrived that night from Sydney (by way of Kuala Lumpur and then London).

The meeting was held Tuesday evening at a lovely hotel in Falls Church VA. About 50 users attended, from all around the D.C. area. We also were lucky to meet a few of our partners from the area, including the folks from our sponsor, IntelliObjects.

We had three brief talks: Christian LaPointe demo'd his brand new acceptance testing tool GreenPepper. I spent some time talking about JIRA and Confluence plugins and the developer network, and Scott finished up by talking about the road to JIRA 4 and Confluence 3, as well as discussing our upcoming products Bamboo and Crowd.

We collected incredibly valuable feedback about the direction of JIRA and Confluence as well as our new efforts. The attendees got to see some new tools, hear about our plans, and ask questions. We did our best to answer everything, but if you have more questions for us, feel free to comment here or on the event page.

I'm sorry we weren't able to arrange a recording of the event, but we've put that on our "things to remember" list. Hopefully we'll get that sorted for next time. We have uploaded some pictures and the presentation materials to the AUG space on Confluence so you can check it out. You can also read another summary of the night from Tom McQueeney on his blog.

The highlight for me was chatting with users from all sorts of backgrounds. There were a wide variety of companies represented, and it's always fun to hear how and where our software is actually being used. Thanks to all the attendees for taking the time to talk with us before and after the event.

Many thanks go to Ernie and Ginnie, and the entire team at IntelliObjects. They did most of the backend work and had everything in order - even while they are moving offices! They're a talented group of folks and if you have a chance to say hi, they'll appreciate it.

We were thrilled with the outcome and we'll definitely be doing this again soon. Thanks to everyone who made it a success. Stay tuned for more information about the next meetup.

Zoli Erdos posted a brief mention about Atlassian Taking On the World:

I've recently had a chance to meet Mike and Jonathan in Atlassian's San Francisco offices, and frankly was blown away by their enthusiasm, the company's growth, but most importantly by a demo of Confluence, the market-leading enterprise wiki.

We had an interesting and wide-ranging conversation when he was here. Zoli has been writing excellent material for a while and had deep insights about our industry. I look forward to more great posts.

We have a very generous community of people around JIRA &Confluence who have been willing to share their development efforts with the rest of us. So we wanted to stop and highlight some the great work that our Developer Network is doing to extend and enhance the products during the last few weeks.

Confluence

• Chart Plugin: David Petersen contributed a great new plugin that allows you to create simple charts from data on your Confluence pages. If you've ever wanted an easy way to insert pretty charts into your Confluence pages without resorting to Excel, you're going to love this. And with this plugin, your data stays live and editable instead of frozen into a graphic or an attachment. (Bonus: since I started writing this post, Bob Swift has already jumped in and added even more capabilities to the Chart plugin! That's the Developer Network in action.)
  
• Wiki Importer (with Twiki Support): We've released an enhanced version of our Wiki Import tool. Thanks to the contribution of one of our users, the importer now supports TWiki as well as JSPWiki. And it has been refactored to be easy to add support for other wiki formats in the future. There will be more to come, I'm sure. (I'd show you a screenshot of this also, but it's awfully hard to find an interesting screenshot of a command-line program.)

JIRA

• Agile Tracking Plugin: Jon Pither released a set of reports that make it easier to track agile development with JIRA.
  
  
• JIRA Dashboard for Eclipse: Brock Janiczak contributed a new, free Eclipse plugin that allows you to manipulate JIRA issues without ever leaving Eclipse. (We also have a similar plugin for IDEA as well.)
• Multi-issue Searcher: And we also added a new field to the JIRA Toolkit. It allows you to specify an arbitrary list of issues for an issue filter and manage that list. You can now define totally custom filters containing any set of issues you want, just by entering the issue keys.
  
  
• Issue Participants Plugin: We're also shipping a new custom field in the JIRA Toolkit called "participants" which will show you the names of everyone who has reported, commented on, worked on, or transitioned an issue during its lifetime. It makes it easy to know whom to ask when you have a question.
  
  
  
  

Thanks to the efforts of these talented developers, Confluence and JIRA can do more than you ever knew! There are tons of other great plugins out there, so be sure to check out the JIRA Plugin Library and the Confluence Plugin Library.

Should you have the need, it's easy to develop new plugins. The Developer Network homepage has all the resources you'll need to get started.

If you have an idea for a plugin you'd like to see, but aren't able to develop it yourself, you can post suggestions on the Plugin Wishlist.

And If you have already developed a plugin of you own, why not share it with the community? Harness the power of the Developer Network to move your project forward faster! If you have questions, or would like to find out about hosting your plugin project with us, contact developer-support@atlassian.com

We're pleased to announce the launch of The Atlassian Developer Network.

At Atlassian, we've put a lot of energy into making sure that there are easy and powerful ways to extend JIRA & Confluence. We know that our users are building incredibly cool stuff on top of our products. There is already a community of JIRA & Confluence developers out there who have been very generous with their time, expertise and code.

We want to connect those developers with each other, with the developers at Atlassian and with the broader user community. We want to make sure that you have the information and support you need to create brilliant solutions. And we want to share those solutions as widely as possible, for the benefit of everyone.

There are four goals that will guide us as we grow the Developer Network:

1. Communicate openly - We believe in open and honest communication. We strive to make our products and our processes as transparent as possible so that you can make better decisions.


2. Encourage participation - We believe in the power of the community. And we believe that collaboration on an equal footing will create the greatest value for everyone.


3. Listen to the community - We believe in listening closely to our developers. Your feedback and participation will guide how the Developer Network evolves.


4. Iterate rapidly - We believe in delivering value to our customers quickly and frequently. We plan to expand and improve the Developer Network on a frequent and ongoing basis.

Find all the details at the Atlassian Developer Blog