rebelutionary / 2.0

A long overdue bushel of Atlassian news / 2006 Jun 01

(I say bushel because I think the word bushel isn't used enough. If you don't like it, try 'grab bag' or 'random sample' - although I still prefer bushel.)

It's been a long time since I've posted any company news here, so here's a healthy serving. Enjoy.

Confluence

Confluence 2.2 has been released and one of the neater features is full localisation. Seeing your software running around the world is a huge buzz, and to aid us in attaining that sugar-free high Imahima, our partner in Japan, has translated Confluence into Japanese.

If you're from the land of the rising sun, read more in Jon's entry on our blog or look at a live demo in Japanese.

Confluence also won Network Computing's Editors Choice award for the best wiki a month ago, but since then they just keep mentioning it in other reviews. Here's my favourite in a review of a competitor's product:

The product lets small groups host shared files, maintain documentation and distribute information. It's not the most feature-rich wiki collaboration platform--that honor still goes to Atlassian Software Systems' Confluence.

Still the best.

I remember when we first mentioned to a few customers that we were going to release an "enterprise wiki" - the reaction was almost unanimously "huh?". 1200 enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of users later, times are changin'!

JIRA

On the JIRA side, work powers ahead full steam. Our new dedicated pairing rooms, larger office and ever-larger support team seem to be having an impact. We now have JIRA customers in over 60 countries around the world. Only another 140 to go!

For those who missed it, 3.6 was released a little while ago and the team are working away on 3.7 as we speak. The charting plugin has been winning a lot of fans, and just Hamish put up the first release of our calendar plugin which enables you to view JIRA data in a variety of calendary ways! (portlet, project tab panel, ical file in your calendar app, etc)

Plugins

For those interested in customising our apps, take a browse through the approximately 200 plugins available. Can you believe it? I love our community.

See the Confluence and JIRA extensions spaces for a full listing, screenshots etc.

In other plugin news, our inaugural Codegeist plugin competition was a roaring success. With almost $USD 25,000 in cash and prizes, Adaptivist took out the first prize with their "Confluence Repository Client" over Aron's "Conflickr" plugin and Andy's "Metadata" plugin. You can see the full results as well as download any or all of the entries to use in your own JIRA or Confluence installations!

Internal Blogging

As a small growing company, communicating what's going on, what people are up to and sharing knowledge is incredibly important - and not an easy thing to do.

So how is this information communicated within our company? Wikis and blogs of course. Internally, everyone has a personal spaces in Confluence, which comes with an attached blog.

People blog about their roles - from their interactions with customers, to our latest Google campaign, from their development problems and discoveries, to details about the next company function - and all these blogs are all mashed by Confluence into a single "internal blog" (using the Feed Builder).

End result - 5-10 posts a day from the distributed minds of the company, straight into everyone's RSS aggregator of choice - brilliant!

Customer Dialogues

To me, the most important thing a company does is talk to it's customers. Anything else is secondary.

One of the most satisfying initiatives we've started recently is our customer advocate team. In a nutshell their job is to talk to our customers and make sure they're happy and to communicate the customers thoughts, wishes, angst and love to the developers. This was becoming a task too difficult to do directly anymore as we have almost 4000 customers!

The internal blog works brilliantly, but we're a very open company and a lot of this information isn't for 'internal eyes only'. As such, we've started a Dialogues section on our company blog.

By the way if you don't subscribe to our Company and Developer blogs, you're missing out - they're the best way to keep up with the Atlassian-happenings in real time)

The idea is to find a way for the advocate's discussions with customers to reach other customers. The internal blog helps developers find out what customers feel and need, where the external "Dialogue" blog allows customers and prospective customers to find out what other customers think.

Examples? Find out how JIRA was used to schedule Bell Jet Ranger helicopter for Ultimate Water Gun Photo Shoot and how Confluence was used to help enable corporate trivia in Norway,

As always, you can read them all in the Dialogues section.

Atlassian Company News

For those interested in the company broadly, we've recently taken another floor in our building in Sydney, and the San Francisco office is maturing nicely. We have about 50 people altogether now across both locations.

As always, we need developers. If you're a smart Java developer, and anything you've read above says "I want to work there", please let me know. See the job ad here for details about what we're looking for - and come join the best, damn team of engineers in Australia.

(If you are applying for a job with us, please be sure to read my Java Job Application Howto first to save yourself any embarassment)

Beyond hiring, we have a few exciting news announcements in the pipeline - but I'll save those for another time. I've taken up far too much of your precious day already. If you're still reading I thank you, I hope you learned something useful and please keep reading until the next long entry in 2009 ;)

(PS Isn't it funny how these blog posts always start out as a 10 minute, few line post and an hour later you're still writing.)