Emma Rush Blog from June, 2009

We left Heathrow on Saturday morning and spent 11 hours on the Tinker Belle, which flew us to San Francisco.

Here are two guys who I think are possibly reading the map before take off. Use a satnav fellas!

Here you can see Greenland. You can see Mountains and Ice, not clouds.

Arrived at hotel, knackered. Ate, fell asleep until 3am.

Sunday was the start of the conference and involved meeting attendees as they registered. An interesting aspect of this was meeting some of our cleints. I was able to give some theme builder demos and answer some questions for people who dropped by our table.

Visitors asked about pricing for our plug-ins, so it was fairly difficult to keep our big announcement in the bag.

Visitors reacted very favourably to the wiki t-shirt, especially the ladies who found him very "cute" and "adorable".

A further interesting aspect was meeting some of the Atlassian team and other Atlassian partners such as Roberto from Comala tech and various members of the Custom Ware team. We are positioned next to the AppFire team who have gone for the fire theme with the inclusion of super hot cinnamon American gobstoppers. I recommend never ever eating one of these, unless you like the sensation of burn and the extreme taste of red hot cinnamon.

Evening was capped off with the Appfire Firewater party. Due to feeling like Keith Richards warmed up because of jet lag, I wasn't able to stay around for long.

Atlassian Summit exists in my mind as a blur of information, spinning names and faces of people I'd previously encountered only virtually, and talks punctuated with fun, cakes and great wine. Two long, information-packed and full-on engaging days. It was a great experience from start to finish. If you use Atlassian software on a daily basis in your organisation, I suggest that you add this event to your calendar for next year. It's a must attend event.

The two conference days kicked off with a keynote where Mike Cannon-Brookes discussed Atlassian's history and the company's ethos and future directions. Mike also presented new releases and updates. Atlassian had clearly been working their trousers off; there was plenty of new stuff to introduce and much in the way of improvement and swishness.

Integration between Atlassian products is clearly a major drive. I don't use all of the Atlassian products, but I can see the benefits of linking all of the separate products together more closely for the benefit of usability, saving the end user time and for marketing purposes too.

Jira4, while still in beta looks pretty tasty. My own experience of using Jira and when watching others interacting with the it has not been marked by its ease of use. It tends to be a bit of a struggle with the often confusing interface. It was very pleasing to see that a great deal of work has gone into improving this. The interface has been updated and now looks far more like confluence. Ui elements have been improved and updated. Elements have been rearranged and for some of the retro icons have been removed. The interface looks more solid and chunkier, and the removal of the arrows gives it a more contemporary feel. Along with customisation, personalisation is now emphasised, again for ease of use, allowing the user to integrate other parts of other software into dashboards. Color coding of gadgets has been added and these gadgets can be easily moved around inside dashboards. A further improvement which our users will definitely approve of is the ability to quickly create jira issues. Personally the ability to create inline comments will be super useful.

Confluence 3 was released the day of the keynote and introduced into this release are microblogging and the ability to find out about your colleagues and friends by mousing over their user profile. Both features reflect trends in social software and suggest the ever software is growing ever more social. Confluence3 is now way faster, speeds of 50% I believe were mentioned.

Open social is a big feature that is now integrated into Atlassian products. More information about this can be found at http://www.atlassian.com/opensocial/ . Content from other sites or services can be easily added to Atlassian software and conversely content from Atlassian products can be easily accessed from other open social containers such as Gmail. Usefully you can view your confluence microblogging lists in Gmail, or whatever you chose to display in a gadget, for example a list of your issues from Jira. Applying this to my own set up, google calendars would be a useful addition to my jira dashboard.

Part of the keynote was given to John Wood, the founder of Room to read, the charity that received the proceeds from the drive to sell £5 license/5 User. John explained the reasons behind the setting up of the charity and outlined some of the stellar work they are doing in increasing child literacy globally. John Wood's inspiring story received a standing ovation from the crowd.

For me several highlights of the conference were:

• Adaptavist announcing that our two commercial plugins are now free.
• Our t-shirts looking really nice.
• Guy presenting with Peter Reiser, who spoke about the socialising of confluence.
• Watching presentations from KapIT about their new Confluence flex application.
• mini Confluence as an iPhone application.
• Picking up tips from the Charlie Talks.
• The sweetest donuts I've ever eaten.
• Meeting clients, partners and Atlassian team members
• The various parties : Atlassian Office and the Partner Party.

In sum, bloody brilliant.

Ed and I have been sent from our offices in the north west of England to attend the user conference. We spent the day we arrived taking in the sites of the Altstadt on the banks of the River Rhine. We sampled some of the fine beer produced by a brewery in the town, carefully managing to stop after a reasonable amount.

The majority of the presentations are in German and in many cases a little above my ability to understand them, so the details here are way more condensed than actual presentation content.

The conference kicked off with Arne, the CEO of Pix talking about JIRA and specifically the Green Hopper plugin which has recently been acquired by Atlassian. Arne discussed about how the software can help you organise your team and run projects.

Ivo then went up to describe a real world situation use of JIRA and how a bank used the software to solve a specific problem that they were experiencing.

Susan Plaumann discussed the way in which a wiki had been used to enable a training/apprenticeship.

Tim Romberg, Enterprise Social Software & Hans-Jörg Happel, FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik discussed Team Weaver, Wickila and Woogle. Woogle enhances wiki search facilities.

Todd and Soren from Atlassian

Todd outlined details of where Atlassian are going, where the offices are and where the Events are.

He spoke about the Atlassian Stimulus Package, and the room to read project where all of the proceeds from the Stimulus package went.

Tod went on to outline the releases and announcements that took place at Summit earlier this month.

• Confluence 3.
• Eclipse Connector.
• Beta announcements. (Jira, FIsh eye, Crucible, Crowd)
• jira stusio price reduction $25 per user per month
• green hopper,
• plugin exchange,
• open social
• Agile atlaissian.com/agile

Soren from Atlassian next up, and he provided an overview of progress in 10.3 and introduced the new functionality and features of 3.0 plus developments in other Atlassian software. Soren presented in German, which was really impressive. I liked his German as I could understand it. Plus he provided slides in English which made it easier to follow.

Tobias Anstett, K15t Software

Tobias is next up, presenting about K15t's Scroll Plugin. We are particularly excited to hear about this plugin.

Scroll Plugin

The scroll plugin is used for documentation purposes. The plugin facilitates the use of confluence for documentation. Scroll allows users to add themes to the pdf export easily. Users can also export to DocBook. Export can be made in many languages as the plugin is internationalised.

BitVoodoo

BitVoodoo, Thomas Wendell and Philipp Klauser are discussing a few useful plugins that they have created.

The First is the Panel plugin. This involves adding panels using and admin interface.

The second plugin is the tabs plugin. Allows users to add tabs for navigation. This involves adding a macro with specific parameters and tabs will be added for navigation to content and content such as attachments.

Java User Groups Düsseldorf and Essen

Heiko Sippel spoke about the Java user groups in the Düsseldorf area.