On Thursday of this week, I attended the Atlassian User Group meeting in London. Here are my rough notes on the proceedings:
Atlassian now have over 11,000 customers. They will open their European office before the autumn. It will be in Amsterdam.
Josh Wold will move from London to Amsterdam. They have a new person in London: Michael Studman.
Turnover is now 35m USD and has been doubling each year.
Confluence 2.8 has been released. It has improvements to the user interface with some good new themes, page ordering and navigation drag & drop. The SharePoint connector will be released very soon. It provides for single sign on (SSO), search across both platforms and ability to embed content from each other.
Atlassian divide their Confluence efforts into three camps:
1. Writer - improving the editor (rumors of an edit-in-MS word function).
2. Discovery - better tools to find info
3. Engine room - back end tech. improvements
Generally, Atlassian are working hard to closely integrate all of their products. The CROWD product (SSO) has rel. 1.4 which offers great user profile management with nested groups and provides a User Self-Management console.
JIRA Studio, a hosted (software) development platform and a on-demand development suite has been launched.
Atlassian see their imminent major challenges as: integration and large (organization) customers.
Sonali Vitarana from StatPro outlined her company's use of Confluence to bolster their web based offerings (of financial stat. tools) to their external customers. SSO between Confluence and a number of other applications is accomplished by their utilization of Crowd the Atlassian authentication and user management product.
StartPro make use of an Adaptavist remote hosting contract to run their Confluence server. They utilize the Adaptavist Theme Builder product to brand and deliver an enhanced look & feel to their wiki. This gave them a greatly improved Dashboard with the ability to launch all of their other applications. They also utilize the Statistics plug-in from Adaptavist to give them greatly improved user/visitor stats.
A presentation on (JIRA) a highly configurable issue tracker from Atlassian mentioned new releases of the product, a plug-in called Green Hopper to allow the tool to be used for project management using SCRUM/Agile.
There are also a number of workflow/approval plug-ins available.
Adaptavist break-out session:
(Thanks to Dan Hardiker for the clarification post (see below))
Adaptavist stated that the Usage Tracking Plugin ( formally known as the Activity Plugin) can have a negative performance impact where the wiki is dealing with a large number of page hits. The plugin also doesn't work in a cluster environment.
There are similar alternatives such as the Reporting Plugin which is rather powerful, but can again have performance problems when scaling up to thousands of users generating millions of hits per day.
A very interesting video on demand site that runs entirely on Confluence: parleys
