Welcome to the November Newsletter! This month... a sneak peek into
JIRA 3.7, a new Confluence theme with 'comments'
tab, Atlassian tops the BRW 100 list again, Confluence is on Rails, and much more. Happy reading!
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 If you're
an admin or project lead at a large organisation, you can uncross those fingers—project roles have
made their way into JIRA 3.7! This
means developers, testers, admins, and other various users can be grouped together according to their role.
Project leads even get to edit their own
‘roles’ in the JIRA Enterprise
Version.
As with user groups,
project roles receive the same permissioning
and notification
schemes. The big difference is easy precision—roles make it
easy to send updates to and set permissions for the appropriate people. Roles can be specified on a
per-project basis whereas user groups can’t.
Continue
reading this entry...
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 We've
been having a mild religious war about comments since the early days of Confluence 1.0. About half of us
like having comments visible at the bottom of the page
content—it keeps the discussion thread at the forefront, and makes sure that good content doesn't
get lost. However, the other half of us like having a
separate page for discussion. It lets us spread out, stretch our legs, and doesn't distract anyone from
the "official" content of the page.
Confluence has, from the beginning, opted for the first option, partly out of our belief that the
distinction between "official" content and discussion was
somewhat artificial. One main purpose of the wiki was actually for the process of collaboration rather
than the end product of an official document. But we certainly
admit that there's no obviously right answer. It's just one of those things where we were forced
to choose one way and go with it.
And that's why
I'm happy to point out Laura's new 'Comments'
Tab theme.
Install this theme in your Confluence instance, and all of your comments will get their very own tab to
live on, away from the main content. It should make about half
of our customers very happy. And the other half can just ignore it. |
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 We hope to see you
at one of three upcoming European user groups in December:
Visit the Atlassian User
Group site to learn more, let us know what topics you want us to
discuss, and register. Keep checking back, too, for news of upcoming user group events.
Several of our engineers will be attending the upcoming Javapolis
conference in December. If you're planning to go and want to
discuss JIRA or Confluence or
learn about our other new products, please register here
and we'll arrange an informal meet up at the
show.
Check out news and
presentations from our last users group in
Virginia. |
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Matt Zukowski of Encore just
posted a new Rails plugin
that simplifies using Confluence's XML-RPC interface.
Having used Rails myself for some fun programming, I can attest at how easy it is to get an app up and
running. It's a perfect medium for creating lightweight
software to meet the needs of agile teams.
And now, thanks to this plugin, your Rails app can interact with Confluence. I find this really exciting,
and
I'm thrilled to have another excuse to write some Rails code during the day. If there are other
Rails programmers out there, I'm sure Matt and company would
love to have more collaborators.
APIs seldom have sexy screenshots, so I'll have to leave you with a simple example: page = Confluence::Page.find_by_title("My Page", "My Space")
page.content += "Some added
content"
page.title = "My Page With a New Title!"
page.save
Now that is hot! Thanks, Matt.
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After
posting a blog on patterns of wiki adoption, I
received a comment from
someone with the question where do I start? Rather than post the comment, I thought I would restate
the question as its own blog because I think it's an
issue that lots of people will have.
First, there was the question of what does one mean by start—encourage
users to adopt the wiki, or how to organise
the wiki? The response came back as follows:
I mean how do I start to organize the wiki using Confluence. I have set up 2 wiki's but not
in
Confluence and my company just bought Confluence
software. I feel like
I've read so much that I don't know where to begin. I want it to look professional and have a
nice look and feel for users. The company has already told users
that they will be going to this site for certain information.
So, there are a couple of points to hit on here. First there's the question of
design. There are several levels of customisations one can make to Confluence. At the most basic level,
you can change the wiki's
look and feel at a global or space level. More technical
users can create all new themes with
custom layouts.
Continue
reading this entry...
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Confluence as an interactive extranet?! Now we have a case study focused on it thanks to
Red
Ant, a website design and development firm. In this new case study see how Red Ant uses our wiki as an
extranet that visually communicates complex design ideas to their clients.
Here’s an excerpt:
Do your clients know they're
using a wiki?
I think the term "wiki" is still a bit unknown to most of our
customers, but in the end it doesn't matter too
much—they're just interested in getting quick updates and information. When we first set up a
client, we send them a welcome letter with access details and
passwords, as well as an outline of how we work, where to look for updates, etc…
Continue reading the Red Ant case study. Want to check out all our
Confluence case studies? Just click here. |
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A
while ago I hinted
at something big that would be happening on the blog
entitled Using Wikis
in Education. Just recently blogger Stewart Mader
announced his book of the same name, Using Wikis in
Education. The book
contains 10 case studies written by teachers that describe how they're using wikis to transform courses
and engage today's students in a range of environments
including high school, small college, major research university, online/distance learning and research lab.
Full disclosure: last May Stewart blogged about
Confluence. I thought his blog was interesting and blogged about
that. He emailed me a few days later and that turned into a conversation
that continues to this day.
Now available, the book itself is interesting because it's published using a wiki, which just so
happens to be our wiki,
Confluence
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For the second year in a row, Atlassian has been selected for the BRW Fast 100. The BRW
Fast 100 is a list of Australia's fastest-growing small and medium-sized businesses, ranking
companies with up to 200 staff according to their
average annual turnover growth over three years. Atlassian achieved 197% growth in the last year, making
it the fastest overall software company in Australia and in
10th place overall among the Fast 100.
Read the full press release on Business
Wire. |
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 Here are a few blogs
and sites that we've been sharing around the office:
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Our U.S. office, including the Support team, will be closed Thursday, November 23rd and
Friday, November 24th in
celebration of Thanksgiving. Thanks, in advance, for
your patience. And, thanks for reading our newsletter!
Cheers!
Your mates at Atlassian
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