Collaborate around OpenSocial gadget content using Atlassian Confluence

Hello Readers, Mark Halvorson from Atlassian posting. A while back Atlassian announced its commitment to bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise, since that time we've been working hard to get OpenSocial working in all of our products. In October we released JIRA 4.0, Atlassian's award-winning issue tracker. With JIRA 4.0's new Shindig-based dashboards, JIRA acts as both an OpenSocial gadget producer and consumer. Now we're happy to announce that Confluence 3.1 is now generally available for download from atlassian.com - and it too can now both produce and consume OpenSocial gadgets!

As many of you know OpenSocial gadgets make it easier to integrate with other applications on the web and behind the firewall. Along with many other new features it is now possible to embed OpenSocial gadgets on any Confluence wiki page. This will let groups of people collaborate around gadget content from virtually any application seamlessly.



* Embedding OpenSocial Gadgets is Easy - Confluence 3.1 lets you embed Gadgets from other Atlassian tools like JIRA, Bamboo and FishEye directly into Confluence pages. You can add and configure gadgets in just a couple clicks using the Macro Browser, a visual editor available from any page.And because OpenSocial is an open standard, you can use Gadgets to integrate with 3rd party applications behind the firewall and thousands of applications on the web.

* Add Confluence to other applications - Confluence also provides its own Gadgets that you can embed into other OpenSocial containers like JIRA or even Gmail. Confluence comes with three out-of-the-box gadgets: Activity Stream, QuickNav and Confluence News.

Source:http://blog.opensocial.org/2009/12/collaborate-around-opensocial-gadget.html

Congratulations to Atlassian on reaching $100 million

These are tough times and when you read of someone who is doing well you want to cheer. Atlassian is a software company which just hit $100 million in revenues - which they posted on their blog. They also talk about the transition from a startup to a medium sized company. Below is a little excrept from their blog:

This growth has accelerated the shift from generalist to specialist. To name a few, we've added front-end developers to craft clean and cross-browser CSS and Javascript. The Design team creates mock-ups, UI components and does usability testing. Technical writers handle the documentation. We now have more development managers who don't code. We have a QA team. Performance engineering has created baseline tests for load and stress. Programme management serves as air traffic control around complex dependencies of product integration. We also ramped up other departments: Product managers consolidate product requirements; as the Support Diva describes, support engineers have become skilled at solving problems that once passed through to developers.

Sometime when you make the transition from a startup a company can loose the things that make it special. Atlassian talks about what it is doing to prevent that:

Although we sometimes refused to admit it, we had crossed the line to become a medium-sized software organisation. Soon we had seven products, and we were integrating them into a new product, JIRA Studio. We desperately needed to take the plunge. Yet the transition was full of risks. Early on, I created a "don't change" list of the good stuff we didn't want to break, around innovation, open communication and practices found in the values. Also since software developers are a sceptical bunch, each new specialist would need to win over a tough crowd.

Source: Atlassian Blog

Atlassian Jira and Confluence - Stimulus Package - $5 only

Many of our customers and readers of our blogs are small business which could benefit from a Wiki Collaboration tool. Confluence which is a well regarded tool is offering a special 5 day offer for $5 per year license renewable for 3 years for a total of 5 users. This is a 5 day special and the proceed goes to a charity. For project manage purposes you can use Jira which also has the same offer.

If you want to know more about Atlassian Confluence / Jira:

- Atlassian Website
- Project Management with Jira

Source: Webworkerdaily