Here's a quick round-up of the key announcements from this year's Atlassain Summit 2010 keynote...

Universal Plugin Mgr - Plugin Exchange	Keynote presentation	All seats filled :)
Universal Plugin Mgr - Audit Log	Greenhopper 5	JIRA Wallboards

Universal Plugin Manager

Several years ago Adaptavist wrote a little plugin that revolutionised how plugins were managed in Confluence - the Plugin Repository. It won first prize at Atlassian's first ever Codegeist contest and subsequently became a standard feature of Confluence.

At Summit 2009, Atlassian announced the Plugin Exchange - the next evolutionary step of the Plugin Repository which provided a website where customers could find, download and review plugins.

This year, the next step in the evolution was announced - the Universal Plugin Manager, which will appear in all Atlassian products. So what's so great about that?

First, there's a complete UI overhaul that makes it easier for system admins to get stuff done - fast!

Second, and perhaps more important, there's a full audit trail - now you can see who installed/upgraded/disabled a plugin, etc., and when.

This is incredibly useful when it comes to supporting the application because if something suddenly breaks you can now quickly refer to the audit trail to determine whether it's plugin related.

Auto-suggest in Rich Text editor

If you're familiar with wiki markup, you can now start typing it in to the Rich Text Editor and get auto-suggest completion of things like macro tags, etc.

Why would you want this...?

Wiki Markup to be replaced by XHTML

Yes, you read correctly. Confluence's wiki markup will be replaced with XHTML in Confluence 4.0 which is due in about 6 months.

XHTML allows much more control over content formatting - such as cell merging in tables, which is one of the most widely requested features. It will effectively turn Confluecne in to a state of the art CMS, as well as being a wiki.

Warning: We're expecting lots of plugins and macros will need refactoring so don't expect to upgrade as soon as Confluence 4 is released. Test everything heavily in a development environment first!

Atlassian User Task Force

The User Task Force is an opt-in initiative allowing customers and end-users to provide much more direct feedback to Atlassian. For more information see the Atlassian Task Force opt-in form.

JIRA Wallboards

JIRA will be getting a feature called 'Wallboards' - these are essentially dashboards that have different styling that's ideal for display on a wall mounted information screen.

For more information see the JIRA Wallboard Plugin.

JIRA productivity enhancements

JIRA is also getting an overhaul that will greatly boost productivity. For example, there are some tasks that would usually require you to wade through 12 screens - that task can now be done from 1 screen. For heavy users of JIRA this will save vast amounts of time.

Greenhopper UI overhaul

Greenhopper 5 (released today) will also be getting a UI overhaul.

More info in the Greenhopper 5 release notes.

There are now over 10,000 customers (compared to just 900 last year).

Launch Pad

Immediately after the Keynote the Launch Pad started and Adaptavist were first to present, announcing the Visual VM (real-time Confluence health monitor) plugin....

You can find out about the other Launch Pad presentations here.

Got questions on how these changes will affect you? Contact Us