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.
