The Confluence Dashboards plugin makes the perfect dashboard or landing page for your Confluence Wiki. It allows you to aggregate all of the key information on a personalised, customisable page. Whether it be RSS feeds, Wiki pages, macros or OpenSocial Gadgets, they can all be added to the page, which you can arrange however you want. Learn how to save yourself time and effort in finding and keeping up with the important information on your Wiki by joining us for a webinar about the Confluence Dashboards plugin.
REGISTER NOW: Wed, Oct 19, 2011 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT (California time)
]]>You can skip ahead to the sections you are most interested in using the times below:
Founded: 2000 HQ: Chico, CA Employees: 300 Products: JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo and Crowd |
I got the chance to talk with Justin Palmerlee, Director of Software Operations, regarding their use of our agile development tools.
Can you tell us about Build.com?
Build.com is the new face of online home improvement. We offer services online that you used to have to go to a brick-and-mortar for, like Lowe's or Home Depot. The direction of the market is all online - look at Amazon or Newegg. People used to go to physical stores for books or computer components, but are now shopping online. We have the same concept for online home improvement. We actually just surpassed Lowe's for the number two spot in the United States and hope to surpass Home Depot. The key to our success is our home built order management and store platform software.
How did you start using Atlassian tools?
When I joined the company two years ago, we had just started using JIRA and Confluence. It was my responsibility to make these software development tools popular within our company. I needed to get people using JIRA for task management, get our software lifecycle in JIRA, and get people to use the enterprise wiki to share documents and notes. I started by developing a support environment because support was the first team I felt needed to get integrated. I created email handlers so people could just email helpdesk@build.com and a support ticket would automatically be created; our support team could then investigate and handle the issue. That became really popular and JIRA advertised itself. Users were really impressed with how well-organized ticketing worked.
How did you learn about JIRA?
The only bug tracking software I used prior to JIRA was Mantis. I was given the Atlassian tools and was supposed to make them work. I dug right in, went to the Atlassian site, completed tutorials, and went with it. I was able to pick up the usage easily. There have been UI and usability improvements since, but even with our original version I was able to pick JIRA up and run with it. If you have the drive, you can do amazing things with JIRA.
How are you using JIRA?
We started with three projects: 1) order management console, 2) build store platform, and 3) helpdesk. Our main development projects for our leading products are the order management console and store platform. We started with those three, and in just two years we have expanded to 42 projects.
Our JIRA helpdesk supports external customers, but mostly our internal employees. We get feedback from customers and then create JIRA tickets if need be. This is how we identified a need for JIRA - before, we'd just have developers look at our bug-dump and go in and try to make fixes without reporting. No one knew what was going on. Our VP of Software Development, my supervisor, decided we needed something that worked better, had more transparency, and allowed more people to collaborate. He went with JIRA and tasked me with making it popular and work for the company.
Once our helpdesk was set up, people started asking me for custom workflow designs - it got very elaborate. We have everything integrated: from hiring requisitions to system downtime notifications to all of our data teams. We actually have integrations from our internal site right into JIRA so that ISRs can mine a data product problem. We also manage do-it-yourself video projects - we have JIRA set up so that our media team can go to an employee's house, install something and film it for our site. We track these types of projects in JIRA step-by-step. Everything you can imagine runs through JIRA and it all started from creating a helpdesk environment that people really liked.
Can you comment on how your projects are organized?
The current projects really span across every department within the company. Our IT team, help desk, all of our PM teams, and vendor relations teams who do the entire vendor acquisition process are all coordinating with the issue tracker. We have also facilitated company contests in JIRA. For example, HR wanted to make a new logo when we acquired the site "Build.com" because our original company name was "ImprovementDirect." We wanted Build.com to be our brand name going forward. We had people submit to contest@build.com which created a JIRA ticket and from there our HR team reviewed the tickets. We've really expanded the use of JIRA to everything. It's gotten so large we've even considered going to multiple instances of JIRA as we continue to expand.
Have you customized Atlassian's issue tracker?
One word that really rings a bell to me with JIRA is customizability. You can make JIRA cater to your needs however you want. Like I said, we have contests, software development lifecycle, HR hiring processes, vendor acquisitions, and so on that are all done in JIRA. This is all accomplished under one software platform, which is just not possible to do with most other tools without reprogramming them.
We use several plugins, my favorite is called Minyaa. The functionality we use flags worklogs that allow us to track how development, support, or QA time is spent. Another feature allows for the creation of global transitions, so rather than create an "undo" step for all of your workflows, you can just apply the same one to all. From what I understand, that's now native in the new version of JIRA (Global Transitions documentation). Minyaa allows for some powerful post functionality and conditional statements in our workflow that really make it more powerful for our complex software development process. Minyaa is the bread-and-butter plugin of our system.
What is PCI compliance, and how has JIRA helped you achieve it?
PCI compliance is essentially payment card industry standards. Hundreds of items need to be addressed to be compliant, and one piece of that is the software development lifecycle. JIRA needs to be set up in a way that our development team cannot change code and and push it out to customers without checks and balances. With our lifecycle, the system we created has as many as four checks before any changes might occur. A ticket will come in the "open" status, transition to "in progress," and we've set it up with post functions and transitions to flag who the developer is, peer reviewer, manager, and stakeholders are. We also had to develop a way to scan our system to catch credit card numbers so they didn't sit on our system.
We have auditors come in annually to make sure we are compliant. When we had our first assessment, we completely failed. We were given the task to make a PCI-compliant software development lifecycle. We had to sell it to our developers in a way that wasn't too strict, yet completely secure. The auditors also do a penetration test to see if they can hack our website. We had to create a very complex system and figure out how to make our website pass the tests. The auditors just loved it after we implemented JIRA. They could see who developed what, who reviewed it, who signed off, and when the action was deployed. For the lifecycle, the auditors now ask for every JIRA ticket in a set timeframe. It's quite amazing; you have to be amazed. We can't afford to deviate, the system has to be very precise.
Do you have advice for others considering JIRA?
I would definitely tell other companies to make their system scalable with workflows. There were several times when I was designing and would have to take a step back and make changes. I would actually advocate Atlassian training. I would also recommend learning best practices and getting a feel for the Atlassian product; learn what to do before you just jump into it and try to create a really advanced workflow. It'll pay dividends if you spend the time to research before jumping into it. Like the old adage, if I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I would spend the first six sharpening my axe.
How is Confluence used at Build.com?
We adopted Confluence because we needed technical writing. We are a part of a European company, Wolseley, which has a litany of security standards and procedures we need to follow. Some of them are very lengthy, so we need a good place to document them. Confluence seemed like a good place to record new company policies, information security procedures, and everything else that led us to attain PCI compliance. Confluence is a great way to collaborate and get multiple people to sign off on documents. Everyone in the company now uses it and it's how we distribute primary materials. Even our project specifications are done in Confluence. It grew innately from how amazing the product is.
We use Confluence for all of our documentation and all of our company procedures. Anything that people really need to know they know to find in the wiki. It's our primary resource for all of our employees to find useful documentation. We also use it as an area for employees to talk and share techniques. We use the Community Bubbles plugin and created our company user forums with it. We have a tips and tricks section in the forums where I posted an article about Chrome secrets to make your Chrome browser really powerful, especially for work. Every department is now using the collaboration software; every department has its own space.
How do new employees interact with Confluence?
Confluence has been really great for getting people up to speed. It's really used as a document repository, especially when it comes to HR and people getting accustomed to the business. People use the HR and training section to check our training schedule. For example, we have a lot of venting pipe training programs because it's actually very complicated to try and sell venting pipe to a customer. You can potentially sell the customer venting pipe that won't work for his needs and cause a fire in his house. Therefore, we certify our sales reps in how to sell venting pipes. It's tough to keep people up to speed, but we've integrated training into the wiki. New employees can also see all of our policies. When a user joins, he or she has to do all kinds of reading and Confluence saves our HR team the hassle of having to print out documentation. Users can review everything on one space area in the wiki.
What advice would you give someone considering Confluence?
Start by making it very collaborative. Users develop the wiki on their own, which I believe is one of the greatest aspects of the tool. Just be collaborative and open when you start. Allow everyone access to create new documents and see how far people take it. That will dictate how you should use it.
Are you able to quantify the results of using Atlassian products?
One thing I can tell you is that we have almost 400 JIRA tickets created daily and about the same amount resolved in a day. There's about 1.2 tasks per day, per employee created and resolved everyday. I mean, where would these tasks be managed without Atlassian software? I think these numbers speak for itself.
Thanks Justin!
For more Atlassian case studies, please go here.
]]>Join myself and Confluence Product Manager, Sherif Mansour, on Tuesday September 27th for a in-depth look into our latest release, Confluence 4.0
We'll have a panel of Confluence experts online throughout the webinar to answer your questions as we walk you through the following agenda:
REGISTER NOW: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM PDT >>
]]>Confluence 4.0 is here! After more than a year of development, and many more years of listening to your feedback, we're stoked to deliver you Confluence 4.0 - the fastest, richest, most intuitive collaboration experience ever.
The new editor in Confluence 4.0 is brilliantly simple, intuitive, and yet still packed with powerful features.
A new streamlined toolbar puts new users at ease with familiar editing operations exactly where they're expected. A single editor makes for a more reliable experience for your users and saved work that looks exactly like what was crafted in the editor. What you see is really what you get.
While new users will feel at home with the new editor, power users will thrive on innovative new features like Autoformatting. In the blink of an eye, Confluence converts wiki markup to rich text as you type; careful, you might miss it! They'll love the performance improvements we've made to Autocomplete, putting links, images, media, and hundreds of powerful macros a couple of keystrokes away. Not to mention all the new keyboard shortcuts we've added to give them a faster editing experience than ever before.
Confluence 4.0 takes team collaboration to the next level. Just like Twitter and Facebook, it's easy to bring others into the conversations taking place in Confluence with @mentions. Whether you're editing a page, replying to a comment or publishing a blog post, it's never been easier to foster team collaboration around your content in Confluence.
This post barely scratches the surface of Confluence 4.0. Take the tour and learn about all the new features today!
]]>San Francisco, CA (BusinessWire) September 19, 2011 - Atlassian today announced the release of Confluence 4, its premier team collaboration software, with hundreds of new features to help users within an organization to create rich content quickly and easily. Confluence is a content collaboration tool used by over 12,000 organizations, representing millions of users around the world, to help them collaboratively create, share and discuss projects, ideas, minutes, specs, mockups, diagrams, and files. Customers include Boeing, Citigroup, Facebook, Intuit, Netflix, Stanford University, Zynga and more.
"Confluence 4 offers an incredibly intuitive and powerful editing experience that changes the way teams create content and collaborate on projects online," said Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian CEO and Co-founder. "No one matches Confluence's ease of use and depth of features."
Innovative Collaboration Features
Confluence 4 includes hundreds of new features and improvements, including:
Easy Installation and Upgrades
A new guided install wizard has been implemented for Confluence 4 on both Windows and Linux operating systems, making upgrades and installations hassle-free. In addition, a "What's New" feature, added in a prior version of Confluence, will provide a guided tour to all users of the new features available in Confluence 4.
Both hosted and on-premise versions of Confluence are available for a free 30-day evaluation, and customers on active maintenance can upgrade free of charge. For more information, visit http://www.atlassian.com/c4.
About Confluence
Originally launched in 2004, Confluence has quickly become one of the most popular collaboration tools used in business, open source and non-for-profits.
About Atlassian
Atlassian provides software development and collaboration tools to help teams conceive, plan, build and launch great products. More than 26,000 organizations of all sizes use Atlassian's issue tracking, collaboration and software development tools to work and deliver quality results on time and more efficiently.
]]>We're just days away from releasing Confluence 4.0. To celebrate this monumental release we thought it was fitting to take you on a little journey that we like to call Communication Through the Ages...
Take a look, find the easter egg, and stay tuned for Confluence 4.0, the future of online content collaboration.
Founded: 1827 HQ: Toronto, CA Employees: 6,882 academic & admin staff Products: Confluence |
With such enthusiasm for our wiki software, there was no way we could let the opportunity slip by. I reached out and scheduled a chat as soon as I could.
In talking with Jim and researching the university, it was interesting to learn that 'U of T' was founded in 1827 as the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada. The university was originally controlled by the Church of England and is comprised of twelve separate colleges that differ in character, history, and maintain their own autonomy. Jim confides that there are not a whole lot of universities with their caliber of research including, but not limited to: music, arts, humanities, science, engineering, and law.
JIm has research funding as a Canada Research Chair in Education and Technology. He's expected to manage a larger number of projects and PhD students and is an international example of what the U of T does. Canada Research Chairs, or CRCs, is a program which Canada started 10 years ago. Canada put in $20B in the program, and JIm claims the program has really paid off. Jim's Chair is used to run a set of 6-8 research projects looking into technology. Amongst other things, he has looked at wikis in K12 education, and how to get a classroom full of kids to collaborative create meaningful content and how to use that content for learning.
How did you come across Confluence?
We first needed a wiki to help coordinate our research, back in 2002. This is when I first came across Confluence. I was at the University of California, Berkeley at the time, co-directing a research project that was concerned with education and technology. My team was developing a major new Java platform that would replace an older Web-based inquiry environment. This was going to involve a lot of Java coding, a lot of problem tracking, project management, and collaboration around the world. We knew right away that wikis, a new thing at the time, would be helpful for collecting and coordinating our ideas and designs.
We evaluated every wiki option that was available at the time: MediaWiki, TWiki,... it was so long ago, I don't remember all of them! We found Confluence as the best fit for us, and I have been using it as a satisfied customer for nine years now.
It has only been in the last three or four years that I have gained an understanding of what wikis can do in the classroom, as part of my research with Web 2.0 for learning and instruction. A new kind of learning is enabled through the collaborative editing and collaborative maintenance of knowledge that a wiki allows.
A Ruby on Rails web page, that includes a script (launched on "submit") that creates a Confluence page, with authoring permissions, and metadata set in this form. |
Why did you choose Confluence?
I think the grouping and permission of spaces, and Atlassian's support for open source were big reasons for us. Supporting open source is something we have always advocated strongly, so, this made it a bit of a philosophical fit. The functionality is also great. It was a chance to get Enterprise-level software for free, because we are an educational and open source project. Somehow it was just the right fit - both at Berkeley, and in Toronto. I should note that Berkeley is also still using the Confluence wiki, going on almost 10 years now.
How do you guys use our collaboration software?
There are several ways we use the wiki. Starting with my use as professor: I create the structures for building knowledge - could maybe think of it as an ontology. I will create a space, for example, that I'd want myself or my team to populate over time. I create the bins and boxes into which we place our ideas, where structure grows and content is factored and re-factored, improved, or possibly even replaced over time. For example, we are now building an open source smart classroom called SAIL Smart Space. It's a technology infrastructure that is a complicated software framework with numerous dimensions, both technological and pedagogical. It's got an XMPP network, an intelligent agent framework, and a whole bunch of different device and display paradigms. So, to help our group make progress in thinking about this overall project, I would create the master wiki page with different links to other pages that would capture the specs of SAIL Smart Space, as well as use cases, mock ups, etc. We use it in kind of a design mode, but also a knowledge-capture mode - keeping track of all relevant projects, resources, and even random ideas and open questions. My goal at the end of the day is to have that page (or space) be an evolving representation of the knowledge of the group, as well as my own personal knowledge as a researcher. In this way, the wiki is the knowledge-capture of my work, and a place where my group builds knowledge together.
If you had to do research or design work to get that knowledge, knowledge management software like Confluence serves to make sure it doesn't get lost and make sure it's visible for others to build on. My students will take that, and use the knowledge to do their own dissertations, place in their own talks, and put back into it. It's truly kind of a knowledge-building community. That's my role with the wiki; someone to build those pages and spaces and lay it out as a structural container.
I have also used Confluence to organize and coordinate a lot of workshops and events. In my line of work, you invariably end up organizing and running workshops and conferences, and Confluence is just fantastic for that. It's great, especially when you've got students who can help. We all need a common place to keep track of our details, participants, room arrangements, etc. I've probably run between 20 and 30 workshops of various sizes over the past 10 years, all using Confluence.
Are students using Confluence the same way?
Students often get involved in guiding a project like a smart classroom physics project. That involves working closely with the teacher and technologists, and really figuring out specifications, drawings, and other technologies. They'll use Google Docs and SketchUp, and they'll link to those things from a wiki page. Typically they'll use the wiki to make sure it hooks back in to the knowledge base of the lab and the collaboration software will sort of be the structural page. We call it 'messy space' and 'clean space.' The wiki tends to be the clean space, because if the wiki becomes too messy, people can't find anything. So, we are using Google Docs as the messy space, cleaning up the info before moving it into the wiki, and continuing to work on it in there as well. It's an evolving process! And new technologies are always coming and going. The students use Confluence as their active research design place and a way to keep track of all their resources.
Other students have used Confluence as their research technology environment, where they'll actually bring 100 tenth-graders in, and have them collaboratively populate a wiki on Ontario biodiversity, over a six week timespan. So, there will be a huge educational activity that itself was the topic of a great deal of design work. What are the templates of those pages? How do you do groupings on those pages? How do you do re-grouping? How do you build an in-group project that uses an index to the content of those pages? There have been several studies where Confluence is the medium of the educational research, but maybe two-thirds of the time, it's been the place where we designed the work that would occur in a more high-tech medium.
Have you opened the wiki up to other departments or faculty?
I have given spaces away on my Confluence instance. For example, I created a space for the Center for Innovation and Excellence in Nursing Education here at University of Toronto. I had some students in one of my courses that were studying nursing and I think they used it quite a bit. I also made a space for the Collaborative program in Global Health Research because I had some colleagues who were doing research in Global Health and I knew that a wiki could really help them. Another one is Ocean Sciences Education Research - I made a wiki space for a colleague of mine, and his students. This is one of the things that ENCORE (which is the name of my lab) is about.
So, with about 50 wiki spaces, we have about 10-15 that are actively used by other groups - but not to the same level that my group and I use it.
How would you say you and the students feel about using Confluence?
We would all be very reluctant to leave it. We have a Drupal site for our lab, which offers a public web page that we keep updated. But, for the ease of letting knowledge grow and letting people have access to it, and quickly creating pages and letting those pages fit and be factored and re-factored - everybody is comfortable with the wiki.
The wiki has a stable place in the overall 'pie chart' of our design and management technologies. This knowledge space is being seen by the group as something that is the product - an ongoing, active representation - of our collective work: representing the ideas and products of all the people that have come before and that we will leave behind for people that come after. There is the feeling that it's the "knowledge base" of the group, and that is part of the theoretical space that we work in - related to "knowledge communities."
With Confluence, it would be hard for us to let go of it. For example, I see that there have been thirty pages updated in the last two days, so... it's actively used.
How do you on-board new students to Confluence?
It's not a very common thing because I only take a few students a year, but new people do come into the lab. We've had 4 or 5 this year. The people that I work with are tech savvy people - I just send them to the wiki and have them crate an account. They love it. Or I should say: they are fine with it. It's easy. They can make pages right off the bat. It's part of the lab, so it's also how I run the group.
Are people using Confluence in ways you hadn't expected?
I was a little surprised when one of my students ended up with something like 3,500 pages in her personal space. That was interesting!
Are you able to quantify the results from using our enterprise wiki?
I can't imagine doing the work that I've done in the last 6 years without a wiki. It's hard to say I would have done better or worse with a different wiki product, but it would have been worse without a wiki. Confluence has been very reliable. For me, it's mostly about the functionality of being able to do group permissions, spaces and templates. The ease of getting new users in and into groups with permissions they need has been the most important thing for me over the years. It's about flexibility and agility of creating pages and organization and factoring and re-factoring. It's a building block paradigm that let's us do our work.
Do you have advice for other universities considering Confluence?
That is a tough one because for me, it's so intimate. My group has such a close connection between its own growth and this knowledge resource. I would say that if you were an administrator in charge of what tools to plant that could give birth to productive, digital activity and productivity - getting a very good wiki with low overhead of how to use it, manage user accounts, make templates and spaces, etc - Confluence is the best I've seen.
Thanks Jim!
For more Atlassian case studies, please go here.
]]>
Founded: 14 years ago HQ: Torrence, CA Employees: 130 Products: Confluence Hosted |
LiveOffice has about 280 Confluence users, working on 20 spaces and about 14,000 weekly hits to their archive resources hosted in the wiki. LiveOffice was founded to help organizations archive, discover and manage their email.
It's no surprise that LiveOffice opted for the hosted version of our wiki software which provides them with the same SaaS benefits which they find so important for their product offering.
Tell us about LiveOffice
We are the leading global provider of cloud-based archiving and search solutions. We archive emails, instant messages, BlackBerry SMS messages, SharePoint files, Chatter posts and social media, and are now expanding into file archiving. We archive pretty much anything you can transmit or archive. We help companies with their compliance needs for SEC and FINRA regulations, as well as for e-discovery purposes. We make sure that companies can quickly and easily set up retention policies and they can find stuff for when users lose it or need to quickly call upon it for investigations. LiveOffice has been around for more than 13 years, but we got into the email archiving space about 10 years ago; archiving has been our core service.
How did you choose Confluence as your enterprise wiki?
We came up with a matrix for our top requirements, and they basically boiled down to the ability for us to share content with specific groups, easily define users and groups, and also to conditionally share content within a page. That was really tricky for most of the wiki players. That alone eliminated most of the hosted wikis. Most CMS solutions were knocked off the list because we wanted something that was easy to set up, manage, and maintain. We even looked at SharePoint, for example, and at the time, they didn't really have the ability to manage and create content and expose it to specific audiences.
So, we looked at SharePoint, open source options, SocialText, and others. The other bonus that really won us over was Confluence's flexibility of options for deployment. The ability to allow us to either host it ourselves or host it with another vendor was very attractive. We could have as much control as we wanted to, and we could also pay someone else to monitor and maintain it. We have an operations team, but they are 100% focused on the business and that's a cost structure that we'd have to incur if they had to focus their resources on a non-revenue generating application. We chose Confluence Hosted for our collaboration software.
What is Confluence's main use-case at LiveOffice?
We didn't really have a knowledge base, so that was primarily the original use-case; build a knowledge base that was conditional and very permissions driven. We had a big need to share with folks, both internally and externally, some amount of our technical data, documentation, partner information, and so forth. We had a huge need to really control who sees what.
Confluence has since grown to tracking meeting notes, tracking product roadmaps, and we are trying to get a forum together for people to post FAQs and make it much more interactive. Also, all of our product documentation flows through Confluence, which is available to the public. I did an extensive study at the time of both wiki players and advanced CMS solutions and you guys really came out on top. We've had a good experience with your documentation software over the years. When it comes to all things documentation, Confluence is our hub that we go to. It is our go-to location to figure out how something works.
Have you customized Confluence?
We have been able to do the necessary tweaks on our end within the admin console of Confluence. There haven't been that many things we needed that weren't available out-of-the-box, and what is offered is a huge improvement to what SharePoint, our old tool, offers. In terms of ease of use, setup, and the ability to get what we need out of it, I still don't know of any other wiki software today that we could go to other than Confluence. I just don't see anything else offered out there that fits our requirements.
Why choose a hosted enterprise wiki versus installing it yourselves?
It came down to the operational aspect - we didn't want to manage yet another server. The other aspect is we had to get up and running fast. We couldn't have another service to manage it. There also was no experience with Java based code - we are all Windows-based, so it was a little bit out of our expertise.
What are some of the biggest benefits for your team using our collaboration software?
It's information sharing and the power of being able to be selective with how you share it. Not having to have multiple data storage spaces is a huge time-save. That's the biggest high-level benefit for us. Another thing is the ease of which we can order documents in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and we can easily publish them inside Confluence. It becomes a very straightforward way for people to share content which has saved us a lot of time versus sharing via email.
How are new wiki users on-boarded?
Every user has to have a login. Then, each department has their own Confluence admin, so each department takes care of their own guys. That's how we manage the spaces and it keeps a lower level of content that shouldn't be there. We have a few 'champions' in each group - they know how to use the enterprise wiki and can answer any questions about how to use it. This model has also helped us to ensure wiki adoption across the organization.
Do you have advice for others considering using Confluence?
Do your homework like I did mine, and I'm pretty sure you will come back to Confluence. Ease of deployment, end-user ease is there in terms of adoption, take a close look at how easy it is to convert documents to wiki-format so users don't get frustrated with formatting problems. Confluence is also good if you are looking for easy and flexible ways to create different types of content and different ways to federate that content; ex: we use the 'news' (blog) feature a lot. Some products will have a great feature set around the basics like the WYSIWYG interface, but then they don't really scale outwards. When you have a need to scale this to multiple audiences, and to share adoption, the answer is you are always going to have to come back to Confluence.
Thanks Steve!
For more Atlassian case studies, please go here.
]]>Millions of users around the world use Atlassian Confluence, an enterprise wiki and collaboration tool, to do everything from building project plans and creating requirements documents, to developing technical documentation and constructing sales and marketing reports. With the Team Calendars add-on, Confluence customers have an additional tool in their arsenal for collaboration on team projects and events.
"For many of our customers, Atlassian Confluence has become the de facto repository for building business and product plans and managing projects from concept to launch," said Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian CEO and Co-founder. "Team Calendars helps those teams to keep track of all the pieces - the people, the projects and the content -- going into the overall project plan."
Share and discover
With Team Calendars, users can share calendars with their team and embed calendars in pages to keep everyone up-to-date. Users can use the search feature to find and subscribe to calendars that are relevant to their work. Some other key features include:
Collaborative calendars for project teams
Team Calendars allows users to create three types of calendars: JIRA, Events, and People. Team Calendars is also integrated with Atlassian JIRA, the issue and task tracking tool used by 17,000 organizations around the world. JIRA Calendars show when projects are shipping and when issues are due; People Calendars display how a team's availability impacts their product release cycle; Event Calendars display time-based information - company milestones, team events, training sessions, and public holidays.
Team Calendars is available today. Atlassian Confluence customers can visit http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence-team-calendars/ to start a free 30-day evaluation.
About Atlassian
Atlassian provides software development and collaboration tools to help teams conceive, plan, build and launch great products. More than 24,000 organisations of all sizes use Atlassian's issue tracking, collaboration and software development tools to work and deliver quality results on time and more efficiency. Learn more at http://atlassian.com.
Today, we hosted a webinar with Appfire about their Upgrade Assistant for JIRA and Confluence.
Randall Ward, co-founder of Appfire, walked us through how the Upgrade Assistant plugins for Confluence & JIRA transform the challenging process of Atlassian upgrades into an easy wizard anyone can use. The Upgrade Assistant for Confluence (UAC) and JIRA (UAJ) guide you through an easy step-by-step process to quickly upgrade your Atlassian deployment to a newer version.
The wizard-based process helps you to select a recommended new Atlassian release, follow a clear set of activities and then automate your upgrade. Just restart, test, and your done!
For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.
Randall Ward, co-founder of Appfire, will walk us through how the Upgrade Assistant plugins for Confluence & JIRA transform the challenging process of Atlassian upgrades into an easy wizard anyone can use. The Upgrade Assistant for Confluence (UAC) and JIRA (UAJ) guide you through an easy step-by-step process to quickly upgrade your Atlassian deployment to a newer version.
The wizard-based process helps you to select a recommended new Atlassian release, follow a clear set of activities and then automate your upgrade. Just restart, test, and your done!
Randall Ward, co-founder of Appfire, will walk us through how the Upgrade Assistant plugins for Confluence & JIRA transform the challenging process of Atlassian upgrades into an easy wizard anyone can use. The Upgrade Assistant for Confluence (UAC) and JIRA (UAJ) guide you through an easy step-by-step process to quickly upgrade your Atlassian deployment to a newer version.
The wizard-based process helps you to select a recommended new Atlassian release, follow a clear set of activities and then automate your upgrade. Just restart, test, and your done!
No, that's not a typo. Codegeist 2011 is well underway with $45,000 in cash and prizes up for grabs, including a $15,000 cash prize for the best Speakeasy extension.
Ever wanted to be able to personalize Confluence, perhaps to remove a click or two with AJAX to speed up a common task? Enter Speakeasy.
Speakeasy is a new way to build on top of Confluence. With Speakeasy anyone with frontend development skills--Javascript, CSS, HTML, etc--can build a personalization or extension to Confluence. As we all know, frontend development is insanely fast, avoiding compiling, complex interfaces, and difficult development environments. Building a Speakeasy extension can take just a few minutes, and can save you and your team tons of time. Do note, though, that we don't have a 1.0 version of Speakeasy just yet.
Check out the video below and thank Speakeasy for making this possible.
We're in the last week of Codegeist 2011. You've got nothing to lose, so give Speakeasy a go and submit what you built for a chance to win $15,000!]]>
Call us Willy Wonka because we've got your Golden Ticket. That's right, this isn't your normal chocolate bar. Tickets for Google I/O sold out within minutes and the only ones left are a bah-gillion dollars on eBay. This ticket to the two-day event happening next week in San Francisco is yours for the mere cost of 140 characters or some Facebook love. Unfortunately, the Virgin Galactic was booked: this is for 1 ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel. Join thousands of developers as you focus on building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies. Did we mention that the event-provided swag is the hottest Android gadget? Our guess is a tablet. Go ahead...'I've got a golden ticket, I've got a golden ticket!'.
Congrats Jan Willems! You'll never take another blurry photo with the powerful 14.2 megapixel Nikon D3100 with 18-55mm Nikkor Zoom Lens.
Like so many others, Jan loves Confluence Autocomplete. It's kind of hard not to.
Want to rock one of these bad boys? Just follow @atlassian on Twitter and we'll pick 5 lucky winners at the end of the day.
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