It’s barely been six months since we released Team Calendars 1.0 for Confluence and we’ve been thrilled by its uptake. 2,635 teams around the world – including Facebook, Skype, and Sony – now have a single source of truth for managing team leave, tracking projects, and planning events.

8 Releases in 6 Months

A new Team Calendars release, 30 days or less…guaranteed. You wouldn’t think that the Team Calendars development team and pizza delivery have much in common, but with such a reliable delivery schedule, we’re putting new features in your hands almost as quickly as pizza. We’re stoked that we’ve been able to continually give you more more value by delivering the features you’ve been asking for.

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With the start of a new year almost here, I thought it was fitting to countdown down the top 11 features we added to Team Calendars in twenty eleven.

# 11 – Prevent and Recover Accidental Deletions

You track important events in your Team Calendars so we want to make sure they’re safe. So in Team Calendars 1.1 we added delete confirmations.

What about when some idiot deletes an entire calendar by accident? Yes, we’ve all done that before (smile) Whenever you delete an entire calendar, Confluence emails a backup file to anyone subscribed to that calendar. You can later use this file to restore the calendar if necessary.

# 10 – Notifications for Calendars You Care About

Just like Confluence Pages and Blogs, we made it possible to Watch the People and Event calendars that are most important to you – like your team’s leave calendar, and support roster.

Team Calendars will send email notifications whenever a new event is created or an existing event is edited in the calendars you are watching. If you’re tracking your team’s leave with People calendars, you’ll always know why a colleague is not in the office.

# 9 – Connect with People

Next time a new face pops up in one of your People Calendars you’ll it find easier to learn more about and connect with them.

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# 8 – New User? No Sweat.

We want to make sure new users get the most of of using Team Calendars, so when a new calendar is created we let users know about all the cool things they can do.

# 7 – Team Calendars Goes Global

Have you or your users changed the default language in Confluence to German or French? No problem, Team Calendars can handle that!

# 6 – Dates That Make Sense, No Matter Where You Live

In Team Calendars 1.1 we added support for additional languages. In Team Calendars 1.2 we made some changes to take advantage of user’s language settings.

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# 5 – Smarter Email Notifications

In addition to making it easier to watch calendars, we also made the email notifications themselves more useful.

When watching a page with an embedded calendar, you’ll receive notifications on changes to the embedded calendar.

Email notifications for new and changed events also make it clear why you are receiving the notification.

# 4 – Keep Calendars Secret with View Restrictions

Just like to Page Restrictions in Confluence, we let you define view restrictions for Team Calendars for Confluence groups and individual users.

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Perfect for planning that awesome holiday party, and keeping it a secret (smile)

# 3 – Get Complete Control with Edit Restrictions

You loved the added security of managing the view restrictions in Team Calendars 1.3, so in 1.4 we let you manage a calendar’s edit restrictions giving you complete control over who can and can’t see your calendar, and exactly who can edit and contribute to your calendar too.

# 2 – Improve Visibility of Projects

Since more than half of our Jira customers also use Confluence, the Team Calendars development team worked hard to tighten the integration between the two. Thanks to Team Calendars 1.7, if you have custom date fields for your Jira Projects – ‘QA Due Date’, ‘Scheduled Deployment Date’, etc – you can now map them on a Jira Calendar inside of Confluence.

When you combine your Jira Calendars with your People Calendars in a single consolidated view, you’ve got a great solution for communicating when changes are going to happen and identify if you’ve got any resourcing constraints that might impact your ability to make scheduled changes.

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# 1 – Better Manage Team Leave

Creating a People Calendar helps you to plan and track your team rosters, leave, and travel plans. In Team Calendars 1.7 we took planning leave one step further by enabling you to add multiple people to a single People Calendar event.

If you always have multiple people traveling to an event, such as a conference, this improvement should make your life easier and take the hassle out of tracking the leave of your teammates around the holidays.

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More to Come in 2012

Don’t worry, we won’t slow down in 2012. Team Calendars 1.8 is in the works with better support for private calendar URL’s and one-click Google Calendar integration. Stay tuned!

Thanks for your support and constant feedback about how we can make Team Calendars for Confluence a better solution for you and your teams. Happy New Year from everyone involved with Team Calendars at Atlassian!

Countdown of the Top 11 Team Calendars Features in 2011