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Confluence
Case Study – Near Infinity Corporation
- Headquarters
- Reston, Virginia, USA
- Industry
- Software development, consulting, and integration services
- # of employees
- 20
- # of Confluence users
- 20 internally, thousands at customer sites
- Key customisations
- Security for the intelligence community
A conversation with Chris D'Agostino, CEO of Near Infinity Corporation
Chris D'Agostino is the founder and CEO of Near Infinity Corporation, a provider of software development and consulting services for commercial, defense, and intelligence community customers. As his company's tagline "small company. big ideas" suggests, Chris believes in working smart and lean. To that end, he is committed to leveraging technology to help run an efficient, fun, and friendly company.
How does Near Infinity use Confluence?
We use it in two ways. As an Atlassian partner, we use it to provide a highly secure wiki for our customers. As an Atlassian customer, we use it to basically run our entire business!
To run the whole business? Would you tell us more about that?
We're a virtual company. Most people are deployed to a customer site during the day, so we use it to work together and as the backbone for all our communications. We use it to generate all our business proposals, which involves running a little script we wrote to automatically format and brand them for us. Our developers use it with Atlassian's issue tracking software JIRA to collaborate on projects and maintain consistent documentation on feature use cases across iterations. HR posts the employee handbook and information about benefits. We plan all of our meetings, set the agendas for those meetings, and manage the resulting task lists. You name it, we do it with Confluence.
- "Installing one instance of Confluence on a single server can allow thousands of people to collaborate much more easily than they could any other way." Chris D'Agostino, CEO
Why did you decide to adopt a wiki and why Confluence?
A wiki brings information out from the depths of individual home directories and network share drives and moves it up to the enterprise level where people can review and comment on it, but not necessarily edit it. This is a huge advantage, particularly in large government agencies where stove-piped organizations have traditionally buried the content they produce in proprietary or local workgroup databases and systems.
We chose Confluence for several reasons. The feature set was far better than other wikis. We liked the open nature and the ability to extend it. We liked the active plug-in and macro development community. We liked the incredible search capability. And we liked how easy it is to create robust, professional-looking documents without a lot of hard work on the end user's part.
Tell us more about how your defense and intelligence community customers typically use Confluence?
They use it as a knowledge base and to drive the creation of their product, which is finished intelligence. They can collaborate securely within agencies, manage revisions, maintain audit trails, and then create production-ready documents. Many use it in combination with JIRA to manage their own software development efforts. One particular government customer also uses it as their "face" to other agencies.
How does Confluence factor into the solutions you develop for your customers?
Confluence provides the right core technology to solve a real and universal business need, which is allowing people to collaborate on content more frequently and to disseminate information to a wider audience. In the intelligence community, where our customers include government agencies as well as companies that contract with the government, there's the added need to do this in a highly secure fashion. We customize Confluence to meet that need.
What would you say is the best thing about Confluence?
Installing one instance of Confluence on a single server can allow thousands of people to collaborate much more easily than they could any other way. That's really cool.
What type of customisation are you doing to enhance security? Is it easy to do?
One of the things we want to be able to do for our customers is to ensure that content is accessed over two-way mutually authenticated SSL. So, on top of the built-in space- and page-level security, we have extended Confluence to enable auto-generation of user names based on the end user's x.509 certificate. Since the product comes with access to the source code, it's pretty straightforward to make the necessary modifications on our customers' networks and get the certificates set up for single sign-on.
Do you see the need for high security beyond the government sector?
Absolutely. These days, most companies are concerned with information security and access control because of regulations like HIPAA in the healthcare industry and Sarbanes-Oxley in financial services. They need to be able to see who accessed what information, when they accessed it, and what content or comments they contributed. We're working on integrating Confluence with our IntelliPrints auditing solution, which will allow customers to automatically "record" Web sessions and play them back later. Because Confluence is a Java/J2EE application, it sits right in there with IntelliPrints without any changes to the source code at all.
How does it change the way people work? Do you see it being used in ways you hadn't thought of?
I knew from the beginning that Confluence would make it really simple for people to exchange knowledge and ideas, which is a big change in and of itself. What I didn't fully expect is how much it minimizes?or outright eliminates--the need for three other forms of communication that are expensive and inefficient: face-to-face meetings, mass distribution e-mails, and "track changes" in Word documents. It also makes document management, which I think is the most painful and time-consuming process there is, so much easier.
You have contributed a couple of Confluence macros to the Atlassian developer community. What are they?
One is a space access macro, which lists the profile of each person who has access to the space. We wrote this one because, even though we're a small and very open company, there's some company-sensitive and employee-sensitive data that we don't want everyone to be able to see. With this macro, we can easily limit access when we need to, which is critical for a lot of our customers as well.
The other one is a voting macro that allows organisations to conduct polls within Confluence spaces. Internally, we use this a lot for both business-critical issues, like 'Is this document ready to be published?' and more simple things, like getting employee feedback on what event they would prefer for a corporate function. Since we're software developers and engineers, we're a little bit grammar challenged, so we have a director of communications who gives us grammar quizzes, too.
What are your thoughts on Partnering with Atlassian?
I have an immense amount of respect for Atlassian's software development and distribution model and for the products themselves. We're a software development shop focused on writing code to make things as secure as they need to be, and we're happy to be applying our expertise to the best wiki out there. I'm expecting absolutely great things from the partnership.