Recent posts from Jay Simons

There are more than 2 million businesses worldwide using Google Apps, and roughly 3,000 new ones sign-up for Google Apps each day. Atlassian is in the process of migrating from Zimbra to Google Apps, which many of us are eagerly awaiting, especially since most have been forwarding their mail from Zimbra to Google Mail anyway. Google Apps is a juggernaut, and it's no wonder Google is proud of the response it continues to receive.

The analog to Google Apps at Atlassian is JIRA Studio, our hosted software development suite. JIRA Studio (Studio for short) is our fastest growing product, which shouldn't be a surprise. In a single, hosted, just-turn-it-on-and-it-works product, Studio combines source control (Subversion), issue tracking (JIRA), agile planning (GreenHopper), enterprise wiki (Confluence), code browsing (FishEye), code reviews (Crucible) and continuous integration (Bamboo). All of that, beautifully integrated, and hosted as a single service. As a customer, you don't worry about managing or upgrading it - we take care of all that. Studio helps teams build great software, by giving them the tools they need to manage code and development projects, without the hassle of managing those tools.

So when Google decided to relaunch the Google Apps marketplace, it's no surprise they thought of Studio. For developers inside companies using Google Apps, Studio is the perfect complement. And now it's a perfectly integrated complement.

JIRA Studio for Google Apps
As of today, JIRA Studio is available from the Google Apps Marketplace. If you're a Google Apps customer, you can add Studio directly to your domain, straight from the marketplace. This means you'll logon to Studio using your Google username and password. If you're already logged in to Google Apps, JIRA Studio appears as a menu item at the top of any Google application, and you'll be signed in automatically to Studio when you select it.

But that's not all. We've also added some nifty features to Studio that integrate Google Apps and Studio together. The features are described in better detail here and include:

• attaching Google Docs to issue: any docs (spreadsheets, presentations, documents) you manage in Google Docs can be attached to JIRA issues in Studio. And a single click on the doc from Studio takes you back to Google Docs to edit them, automatically logged-on.
• embedding Google Docs and lists of documents in the wiki: the wiki's macro browser (a visual page editor for adding components) has a few new Google page components that let you embed individual documents, or whole lists of documents, inside a wiki page.


• JIRA Studio Activity Bar: we've added a single launch bar that spans the bottom of every page in Studio. The Activity Bar lets users see the important updates from the tools they use most across both systems (unread message from Gmail, meetings from Google Calendar, recent issue from JIRA, outstanding code reviews, etc.), and integrated chat from Google Talk, so you can IM directly with your teams from any page.


• gadgets in Gmail: Studio, like many of our products, supports OpenSocial, and OpenSocial gadgets from Studio can be added to Google applications, like Gmail, giving some users that live in email a quick snapshot of open issues or project activity in the tool they use most.

We're excited about the combination, and the opportunity this presents Studio. We hope that many of those companies "Going Google" will also "Go Studio." Learn more at http://www.atlassian.com/google, or if you want to dive right into what Studio offers, check out http://www.atlassian.com/studio.

Oh, and here's a little video we put together to explain the combination at a high level. Hope you enjoy it:

Black Friday, the Super Bowl, dinner with the in-laws - the holidays are always good for some competition. In keeping with that theme, the Atlassian San Francisco office decided to follow our annual Halloween pumpkin carving contest with an inaugural holiday gingerbread house building competition.

The rules: each team gets a bona fide gingerbread house kit, and $10 to buy supplies. Everything added to the house must be edible.

Before we get to the results, we thought we'd pass along a few tips from the experience:

• RTFM: those teams that thought making icing was a piece-of-cake (okay, strange pun) struggled. Add too much water and you run out of mortar; too little and the darn thing won't set.
• Gingerbread tastes really, really bad: a few of us got hungry during the build and tried to eat part of our houses. Trust us: it's not worth it.
• Don't wait until the last minute: the biggest underestimation most made was around how long these things take to build, especially when competing against people that are willing to pull out all the stops (see below for examples). If you want to win, start early. Nothing kills a good eggnog buzz like a caved in gingerbread roof.
• throw away the blueprint: following the box is going to yield you one very boring square gingerbread house, adorned with gumdrops and jelly beans. If you want to win this puppy, you have to go off-road. Just when everyone is expecting you to pull out the little ski chalet with marshmallow topping, you throw down the Taj Mahal with stained glass from melted Jolly Ranchers. Dream big.

So, without further adieu, the results of the inaugural Atlassian gingerbread house competition:

Admirable entries that didn't win:
Lots of great ideas here, and some very creative use of materials.

First up, the Polar Bear House. Surprised this team pulled this out, considering the Polar Bear ate up half of their $10 allowance.

A Gypsy caravan. Technically, the x-mas lights aren't edible, but we let it slide.

A bunch of us like to play board games during lunch, so the House of Cards house won some votes:

A tribute to our Amsterdam office, the Redlight District House, complete with a risque silhouette etched from a fruit roll-up and snow people embarrassing themselves:

The Golden Gate Bridge house, with two halves of lettuce representing the Marin Headlands and Presidio, and blueberries representing the rough waters of the bay.

This was a close runner-up, an almost exact replica of our office building at 375 Alabama Street in San Francisco. The bus in front was actually parked outside of the office that day.

And the winner:
The Beach Chalet house, with roof of bay leaves, a blue ocean of jello powder, and a beach of brown sugar.

Not sure what we'll do for Valentine's Day, but holidays around this office certainly aren't dull. Happy holidays from Atlassian.

This morning we had a little bit of a snafu. A customer, with the best of intentions, added the entire JIRA User Group to the Cc Group field - a custom field created for our JIRA instance - of their support issue on support.atlassian.com. They didn't realize that this group has more than 30,000 members. When they hit save they triggered a tsunami of email notifications that landed in the inboxes of thousands of other unsuspecting customers. Man, were we embarrassed.

We sent an apology out to the customers who received those emails - many among you - explaining what happened and assuring folks that we fixed the issue by removing the "Cc Group" field on support.atlassian.com. But we also wanted to explain a bit about how that field is used, why it wasn't disabled before, and other ways to achieve the same outcome now that this field is disabled.

What is the Cc Group field?
The "Cc Group" is a custom field that was created for our JIRA support instance, and used internally by Atlassian and by a select group of customers to update a group of JIRA users about a specific ticket. Once Cc'd on a ticket, the group will receive notifications regarding any status changes and/or updates. However, enabling this provided access to global groups such as jira-user, which contains all JIRA users. We hadn't removed it before because it was being used by customers, and because we simply didn't consider a customer adding all users of the system to the Cc field.

Hey, I was using that. What can I do now?
We have now removed the "Cc Group" field, so this can no longer happen. But there is a workaround. If you were using the "Cc Group" field, you can achieve the same result by creating an internal email alias containing each of the users previously in your JIRA group on support.atlassian.com. Instead of using the "Cc Group" field you can use the "Cc User" field with the new alias.

Again, we're sorry for the extra email so many of you received, and we've definitely fixed it. Back to your previously scheduled program.

Man, we had fun with this one. Our Cash for Clunkers program ran for only three short weeks, but we accepted 427 clunker trade-ins, and there were some doozies. So many in fact that we've decided to add a few extra awards, in addition to the $4,000 grand prize for the best trade-in. We're giving a special edition JIRA 4 t-shirt to the three additional award winners.

So, without further adieu, we bring you the Cash for Clunkers Awards Ceremony. Cue drum roll...

The Don't Try This @Home Award

This award recognizes superhuman resolve. This category saw some great submissions, from filing cabinets to Excel spreadsheets that took an hour to open. But the winner was an advertisement for the human condition.

Clunker: Pen and Paper
Description: It is useless, other than as a to-do list -- not tracking anything, not shareable, meaningless scribbles out of context. Plus, I can't put it in my pocket because of the spirals. Frankly, I'd be happy with an upgrade to a Moleskine.

The Most Creative Bug Tracker

Also a category with great submissions, but the judges here are all married (with husbands and wives), and this entry resonated with a few of us.

Clunker: the Wife
Description: She nags, nags, nags until I get things done. There's no prioritisation, no MIS to show her how much has been achieved just that constant whining about when I'll get the next job done.

The Best Rant

There were some pretty darn good rants, from some clearly frustrated trade-ins. But this one made us really feel for the submitter.

Clunker: Easyprojects.net
Description: The very definition of clunker oozes thoughts of slow and clumsy with a little bad design mixed in... which happen to be the 3 keystones of EasyProjects. I'll miss brewing coffee while waiting for pages to render, idiotic use of ajax and the all-too-often server errors. Maybe it will be the clicking on white-space to get pop-up menus that I'll miss.. after all, it took me a year to remember these tricky user interface tidbits. Well.. after making coffee and extolling the virtues of the beach ball of death, the ridiculously fast and refined Jira simply makes me mad... mad that I wasted two years trying to get back the investment I made, the compromises, the defending of its usage to my co-workers. Alas, Jira, thanks for showing me how good it can be.

And the Grand Prize Winner for Best Trade-in

Okay, so we did specify there was a 50-word limit, but even if we take only the first 50 words of this submission, or really any 50-word section, it still takes the cake. Plus, the kind folks at Softrek have offered to donate the $4,000 prize money to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, which we think is pretty cool. Enjoy the submission.

Clunker: HP Quality Center
Description: Many, many things frustrate us about our current clunker. Just as important as switching to JIRA though, if we win the $4,000 we will donate every penny to a local cancer research institute called Roswell Park. To describe why we're switching, we wrote a poem called 'Twas the night Before Beta' which is a parody of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas'. The names in the sixth stanza are the names of the software engineers on our team. We hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing it:

'Twas the night before beta, when all through the app
Not a bug had been fixed 'cause Quality Center is crap;
Our product was written and developed with care,
In hopes it would just work, that bugs would be rare.

The engineers toiled away while wishing for their beds,
While visions of missed deadlines danced in their heads;
With our boss lurking the halls, and us under the gun,
Our brains could not settle, our work was not done.

When into my Inbox there arrived such a letter,
I sprang over to Outlook to see if the news was any better;
Opening the message I clicked in a flash,
It was a note from Atlassian, we could send QC to the trash!

I opened the new email, stunned by the sight,
Ran to my co-worker, and shared my delight;
When, what to our wondering eyes should appear,
It was news of JIRA 4 Beta, and Final was near!

With brand new features, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment this product was slick;
More rapid than eagles, JIRA's benefits arrive,
It reports, it tracks... HP QC will never survive.

"Now Andre! Now, Tracy! Now, Faisal! Now Glenn!
On, Mark! On, John! Let the fixing begin!
JIRA can prioritize those issues that call!
Now code away! Code away! Code away all!"

As defects that before in wild Mercury got lost,
They become clear in JIRA for one-tenth of the cost.
So up to the top of the list JIRA flew,
Chock full of new features, and a few Aussies too.

And then, in one click, the download began,
Byte by byte, the solution was nearly at hand.
As I drew in my head, and was smiling with glee,
Down to the filesystem JIRA was delivered to me.

From the top to the bottom, it was designed to be agile,
It is nothing like QC, which is bloated and fragile;
A bundle of toys like dashboards and searching,
Custom workflows, and plugins, and real-time reporting.

My eyes - how they twinkled! I grinned from ear to ear!
JIRA will save the project! JIRA has no fear!
This droll little issue tracker delivered with a bow,
Hurry, back to work now before morning's glow!

The hour was late as we installed JIRA 4,
Weary eyed but encouraged onward we bore;
Rapidly now our path forward became clear,
We organized our issues and then let out a cheer.

JIRA was flexible and robust, what trackers should be,
We hung our heads in shame, for even considering QC!
But we came to our senses, and found what is right,
To help us produce, and stay organized in our plight.

We spoke not a word, we went straight to work,
JIRA reported out issues without a single quirk.
Productivity doubled, Management is happy indeed,
For finally we have a tool, that does what we need!

We sprang from our cubes, to Atlassian gratitude poured,
Thanks to JIRA 4, Beta got out the door.
We heard our boss exclaim, as he drove out of sight,
"Our application is finished, and JIRA saved the night!"

So now we wait for cash, and decide how to spend,
Surely the money can help a hurting soul mend.
Cancer is a beast that sends families spinning,
Roswell Park Cancer Institute will get all of our winnings!!

We had a great time with this, and we hope you did too. Congrats to all the submissions. Hope you enjoy JIRA 4!

This may be too American of an analogy, but Peanut Butter and Jelly is simply a great combo: two great tastes, that taste great together. Zendesk, the guys that put the Buddha in Customer Service, recently announced integration with JIRA that looks equally tasty.

Zendesk offers an on-demand customer service and support tool for companies of all shapes and sizes. It's designed to delight both the end users who create service requests and the help desk staff who support them. Zendesk is loaded with features and we love their slick sensibility. And they seem to be taking the world by storm, lining up a pretty sexy list of customers.

Often the really thorny requests a help desk deals with involve the engineers that wrote the code, and the systems used to manage issues, defects and features requests associated with that code. This is the peanut butter and jelly part: combing the two can create a pretty tasty support and customer service experience.

Zendesk announced recently the Zendesk Updater Plugin for JIRA , which is available at our freshly updated Atlassian Plugin Exchange. Put simply, the plugin links Zendesk tickets with JIRA issues, and helps a software developer using JIRA, and a customer service representative using Zendesk, work together on common ground simply. When an engineer or product manager updates the status, or comments on a JIRA issues, it's reflected automatically in the Zendesk ticket linked to that issue. And a customer service representative can create a JIRA issue, and assign it to the appropriate software developer, and automatically link it to the Zendesk ticket. Pretty slick. And Zendesk has open sourced the plugin, so you can grab the source if you want to tweak it.