Atlassian Confluence blogs atWikiConsulting.com

This is the fourth in a series on wiki adoption, based on my visits with organizations in the midst of wiki adoption. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. One of the things I consistently hear when I visit customers: reducing email is a key business case for the wiki. Email is one of the biggest time consumers in a typical workday, and usually extends far beyond the normal reaches of the workday, which is why you see so many people walking into traffic while looking down at their Blackberrys. I'm starting to think this is going to be a major public health problem if people don't start to look up! (pun intended )

Fortunately, wiki can have a real impact on communication and reduce that email overload. Here's how: Let's say you email the weekly meeting agenda to your team. Seems harmless, right? Well, it isn't, because if someone in the group needs to edit the agenda, they'll be emailing you to ask for changes. There's one more email in your box that needs a reply! However, if you put that meeting agenda on a wiki page, and emailed just the URL to the agenda page, that group member who needs to edit the agenda can do so directly on the wiki, without having to send you an extra email. Now multiply that by all the agendas and other documents that could be put on the wiki for team members to directly revise.

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Pop some popcorn, pour yourself a drink, and sit back for Atlassian user group presentations. We've compiled video from the Boston and Palo Alto events.

Scott Farquhar opened both user groups with a presentation about Atlassian, describing the company's history and the products we've developed. In Cambridge, his presentation was followed by Carter Snowdon at MIT (discussing the use of Confluence on campus) and Francois Beauregard at Pyxis Technology (Francois' video is forthcoming due to some encoding issues). There's also Frank Price, Accurev, who gave a talk about the uses of JIRA at Accurev and how JIRA is integrated with their SCM products, and Stewart Mader, Atlassian's intrepid wiki evangelist, on adoption patterns of wikis in organisations.

In Palo Alto, at Stanford University, Jeffrey Walker, president at Atlassian, opened the user group, followed by Scott, and then a slew of customers. First up was Ned Lerner at Sony who talked about the uses of both JIRA and Confluence for video game development and design. My memory is a bit fuzzy now, but I believe Jeff Calado at Apple spoke next on some tips for using Confluence, including how it can be used to capture knowledge from email. Chris Kolhardt, Gliffy, gave one of the most provocative presentations of the day of the Gliffy plugin.

That was followed by Joanna Thurmann on how Polycom are using JIRA to track tens of thousands of issues (thanks, too, goes to Joanna for leading much of the birds-of-a-feather group on advanced JIRA uses). Matt Doar, Consulting Toolsmiths, gave a presentation on how he's helped customers configure JIRA for unit testing and more. Last formal presentation of the day was from Atlassian's Josh Wold on different solutions users have created with JIRA and Confluence.

Last, but not least, there are many short interviews we did with customers, an analyst, and each other (that's what happens when you have a camera, microphone, alcohol, and a lot of talkative people!). Click the links above for individual presentations, or see them all here.

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This is the third in a series on wiki adoption, based on my visits with organizations in the midst of wiki adoption. Part 1, Part 2. One of the most interesting things I've noticed recently regarding wiki use has to do with how financial services firms are stereotypically perceived vs. how they actually work. Most peoples' inclination is to think of financial services firms - investment banks, securities trading firms, retail banks, etc. as very conservative, serious, and probably not the most likely to be early adopters of leading edge technology tools.

In my experience, however, the reality is quite different. That's not to say they aren't serious - after all, keeping track of peoples' and organizations' money is serious business! They are, however, regularly looking for tools that make their work easier since their work is highly regulated and monitored by government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Congress in the US. As a result, financial services firms are using wikis for maintaining and updating documents containing federal policies and rules that must be followed, and keeping internal policies up to date. These kinds of documents are constantly changing as new laws take effect, rules are updated and changed, so the wiki is an ideal tool for housing this information and enabling it to be quickly changed and immediately accessible so thousands of employees who use it daily. That's much more efficient than constantly printing and distributing addenda to policies and rules, and vastly more efficient than reprinting and distributing entire documents when enough changes have to be made.

So the lesson here is that in addition to being a great collaboration tool, wikis can also be incredibly useful for keeping information constantly up to date and immediately accessible. In addition to the efficiency of this, think of the cost savings and environmental benefit!

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I wanted to point out to everyone a brand new plugin we just released, Dynamic Tasklist 2.

We've had two tasklist macros in Confluence for a long time, {dynamictasklist} and {tasklist} but they were both fairly limited. I use tasklists in Confluence all the time, and I was ferquently frustrated. So when Developer Network member Bob Bargemen came forward with a new and improved Tasklist Macro, I jumped on it. We worked with Bob to tweak the new tasklist and add a couple of important features, and now we're able to release the result!

Importantly, this plugin is designed to replace the two older macros. In order for it to work, the older tasklist macros _must_ be disabled. Once they have been disabled, the first time any page with a tasklist is viewed, Dynamic Tasklist 2 will look for data in the old format and automatically convert it to the new format.

So, once you go to all that trouble, what do you get? Well, you get a snazzy, new ajax-ified tasklist that works beautifully. You can add tasks on the fly, drag-and-drop reorder them (and it remembers the order!), and even move tasks between multiple tasklists on the same page. You can edit the tasks (crazy, I know!), and even use wiki markup to add links and simple formatting. There are even more awesome features that you can read about on the plugin homepage.

We did make another bold decision with this plugin. It's always frustrated me that changes made to a dynamic tasklist weren't versioned. The tasks themselves were stored in page attributes and not editable by the user, except through the ajax-interface. This violated the way confluence was supposed to work, to my mind. When you make a change in a wiki, it is supposed to be transparent, safe, versioned, attributed and reversible. The dynamic tasklist macro was none of those things.

So we went to a minor amount of trouble to change the way the new tasklist stores data. It actually stores the data in the page content, so a change to the tasklist is also a change to the page. An additional benefit is that the tasklist is editable at the same time you edit the rest of the page, which is useful in some cases. It was an interesting exercise, and I think it turned out very well -- allowing the macro to implement the same ajax functionality but still be a good Confluence citizen.

We're anxious for your feedback, so download the plugin and give it a shot (or just install it straight from the plugin repository):

* When the Dynamic Tasklist 2 macro does its conversion, the data in the old format is not harmed. Should you wish to revert to the older macro, you must 1) renable the old macros, and 2) revert any page that has been automatically modified (that is, any page containing a tasklist that has been viewed) to the earlier version.

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