December Newsletter

While we've been recovering from the Christmas festivities and preparing for the New Year festivities, we had time to reflect on the 7 months since Adaptavist was formed back in May 2005 and also look to see what the future may hold...

Adapt, Adapt, Adapt...

When we formed the company, it was obvious that we'd have to be highly adaptive to survive in today's highly competitive environment. As our company name suggests, that's exactly what we've been doing for the past 7 months.

After 3 months spent deciding what our first product would be, we locked ourselves in dark rooms and a month later the first version of Builder appeared. A highly polished theme for the industry-leading Confluence software along with extremely competitive hosting and licensing marked the entrance of both our first product, service and reselling agreement.

We've had to adapt to a wide range of clients including personal websites, company intranets, conference sites, open source websites and music festivals - each having different needs forcing us to stretch our horizons.

World Domination, of course...

If someone had told us 7 months ago that we'd have a worldwide client base by Christmas, we'd have thought they were insane. When our first sale came in from Canada, we were surprised to say the least. Quickly followed by sales from America, Australia, Denmark and Belgium, we could hardly believe what was happening.

Suddenly, timezones and currencies became important aspects of our business and we hastily overhauled our payment processing system to use PayPal and created a graphical world clock on our website so our staff and our clients could see where the sun was shining. We also had to offset our business day by a few hours to ensure that we'd be available for clients outside the UK.

A Unique Deal...

Already an authorised Atlassian reseller, Adaptavist became the first organisation anywhere to be able to offer the "Small Team" 5-user commercial Confluence license. You can only get this type of Confluence license from Adaptavist!

Highly competitive, Adaptavist continue to offer discounts on new licenses, renewals and upgrades for both Confluence and JIRA.

Bach in Montreal...

Our first major project was the Bach Academie de Montreal website, sponsored and supported by some very well known organisations and politicians in Canada. As well as the first site to use the Builder theme (which still hadn't been officially released at the time), the site had to be available in both English and French.

The event was a massive success featuring world renowned conductors, musicians and singers some of whom appear in the picture gallery.

Java, Spring and Beer

Early in December, Adaptavist headed over to Antwerp in Belgium for the 2005 JavaPolis conference - the largest Java conference in Europe and second largest in the world. Leading thinkers from the Java community, including representatives from Sun Microsystems, Oracle and even the European Space Agency and Brazilian Formula 1 team all took part in a truly spectacular event which also introduced us to Belgian beer!

We had some ulterior motives though, and eagerly awaited the second Conference Keynote where the first ever SpringOne conference in Europe was announced - you can guess who's doing the website and hosting... We also had confirmation that the Builder theme will be used for the official JavaPolis 2006 website.

Plugins Galore...

2005 has been an amazing year for Confluence plugins. David Peterson, who's site is hosted by Adaptavist, led the way with some truly spectacular plugins ranging from tabbed dialogs to advanced templates.

Adaptavist also entered the plugin arena with three freely available plugins:

• HTML Tag Macro - a safer way to add HTML to your web pages
• Content Formatting Plugin - a plethora of macros to aid content production including the infamous lozenge button that's used all over our website.
• Rate Plugin - a highly polished and configurable macro that allows readers to rate various aspects of your content

You can find the ever growing list of plugins and Confluence add-ons on Atlassian's website.

User Guides...

Earlier in the year, Adaptavist embarked on a massive project to provide a more comprehensive user guide for Confluence including Wiki Notation and Macros.

Based on our continued efforts to document Confluence and it's extensions as well as our regular posts in the community mailing lists and forums, we are proud to announce that we've been given editorial access to Atlassian's own online documentation and Confluence information.

Confluence 2...

Atlassian have released the much awaited Confluence 2 which contains some amazing new features such as Flickr style content labels and a user friendly "WYSIWYG" editor. Adaptavist are putting the final touches on an updated Builder Theme for this new version of Confluence which we hope to release in January.

The Future...

In January 2006, Adaptavist hope to launch Builder 1.4 - not only will the theme be compatible with Confluence 2.0, but it will also be available for sites hosted externally for the first time.

Our Confluence Farm Manager, the first version of which should be released early in 2006, will automate many aspects of managing Confluence installations in a hosted environment allowing us to respond even more quickly to sales and support requests as well as allowing clients to take more control over their server.

2006 will also see us start production of "Builder 2.0" - a "next generation" Builder Theme incorporating many of the feature requests we've had from clients as well as a few extras that we've already been working on.

Within the first quarter of the year, we intend to start actively marketing our products and services - all sales so far have been via word of mouth.

We'll be attending the SpringOne and JavaPolis conferences in Belgium (where we might sample the occasional beer) and work will resume on the Builder User Guide.

Throughout the year, Adaptavist intend to release more macros, plugins and also contribute large quantities of an ActionScript framework we've been developing to the open source community. We'll also be reorganising our corporate website to make new information available and existing information easier to access.

Our customers will benefit from a new server architecture where they each have their own dedicated application container resulting in increased service management capabilities.

Above all, we'll be pushing the boundaries of Confluence by adapting it to more and more of your demanding business needs. You can learn more about Wiki's in Jane Klobas' forthcoming book from Chados Publishing.

Well, that's all for now... See you in 2006 and have a happy New Year!