Atlassian Confluence blogs atWikiConsulting.com

Brian Solis writes about some of the resistance to blogging that he encounters from companies, and much of this applies to to wikis and enterprise 2.0 tools in general. For example, one questions he was asked is, "How would you recommend clients use blogging as part of their PR strategy? The easy answer is I would love them to start..." The same is true with wikis in the enterprise (for a wide range of things, not just PR — keep in mind Brian's blog is primarily about PR and Marketing). The key is starting — as I wrote earlier: You can't win if you don't play.

Another argument has to do with measuring return on investment: "The challenge initially is to justify and measure the investment against a legitimate and proven ROI model. It just doesn't stack up or compare to anything most companies do today, so it's an incredibly difficult first step." Same with wikis. One bright light is this comment by Stan Gibson about wiki use at Motorola: "As at many enterprises that have seen wiki proliferation, Redshaw and Singh performed no cost/benefit analysis ahead of time and have not tracked return on investment. That's because the investment in wiki technology is so low as to be negligible and the payback is intuitively understood, yet difficult to quantify."

Brian ends the post with this quote: "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and it looks like hard work" — Thomas Edison. This is true, but it goes even further than looking like hard work to start. Blogs, wikis, and social media are difficult to measure using the traditional means, and change the existing power structure in organizations. This scares some people because it means they might lose a certain level of power they've enjoyed, but trying to delay adoption of the new tools will only work temporarily, since others who see their value and will directly benefit from them are already bringing them in under the radar.

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We're excited today to announce public availability of Enterprise Hosting for JIRA and Confluence. Enterprise Hosting is a great way to start using our wiki and issue-tracker without an upfront investment or dedicated IT resources. Your only concern is focusing on your business, not system and application administration.

A few features of Enterprise Hosting:

• Dedicated (non-shared) instance of JIRA or Confluence
• Ability to create custom themes in Confluence
• Integration with your existing applications via LDAP, API access, etc.
• Enable anonymous access
• Manage your own plugins

Enterprise Hosting is our second hosted offering following last February's launch of our popular Confluence Hosted. In less than a year, we've had nearly ten thousand people sign-up to try Confluence Hosted, which makes us even more excited to expand our hosted offerings to other products.

You might be asking yourself, what does Enterprise Hosting give me that isn't already included in Confluence Hosted? The answer is enterprise-level control. Confluence Hosted is perfect for smaller organizations who want to use the world's greatest wiki and who don't need additional customisation. However, some customers require things like integration with their internal applications, custom plugins, or simply outgrow what they're using and need something more.

That's where Confluence Enterprise Hosting comes in. You get the benefits of hosting (nothing to install, no additional license cost, automatic upgrades, etc.) and the full power of the world's most popular enterprise wiki, with no compromises.

We're especially excited about JIRA Enterprise Hosting. We had generally assumed that developers would be less interested in a hosted bug and issue tracker. However, over the past couple of years, the number of customers enquiring about this has increased substantially, further substantiating the general acceptance of software as a service, and we're happy to oblige. In fact, we already have a couple customers using Hosted JIRA.

For more please see our press release: http://tinyurl.com/yvp8nh

Details and pricing at: http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/enterprise/

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I'd like to announce the latest version of the new Dynamic Task List 2 plugin for Confluence. This release features over 30 new features, enhancements and bug fixes. You can find more details here, but here is a quick overview:

• Much more robust handling of task names: improved support for all character sets and for wiki markup, such as links, in task names.
• Permissions to modify a tasklist now match the permissions of the page the tasklist is on
• Issues with task lists not working in IE 6 & 7 were fixed
• User and group pickers for assigning users were added

UI Enhancements

In addition to the new features and bug fixes, the dynamic task list also got some UI attention. In particular, look for these improvements:

• The gray border and background was lightened up to make the task lists not stand out as much from Confluence
• New icons were added for all the sort options and an icon for the task priority was added to the main task line so users will no longer have to expand the task information to see task priorities
• When dragging task items to reorder them there is now a visual que to the user about where the task will land
• The way users work with task priorities also got an update, changing to a much clearer set of radio buttons.

Upgrading from original {dynamictasklist} and {tasklist}

The Dynamic Task List 2 is meant to completely replace the original {tasklist} and {dynamictasklist} macros. For anyone that had problems upgrading to Dynamic Task List 2 2.0, all reported issues have been fixed and others found and resolved as well. The upgrade process itself happens much more intuitively now. Instead of upgrading when a user first views a page that has one of the old versions of the macro on it, this new version of the plugin will only upgrade when a user manipulates the dynamic task list. Also, due to the improved task name handling, this version of the macro supports all the task names that previous versions did.

Let us know what you think!

In short, if you're using Confluence 2.5 or above, there should be no reason not to upgrade and pending feedback from the community this new Dynamic Task List will be bundled with the next major release of Confluence. So install it, try it out, and most importantly, let us know what you think!

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Today, I'll be joined by Anne Goldenberg, Ted Ernst, Mark Bernstein, François Beauregard, and Dirk Riehle on a panel called, "Wiki Patterns: What Works and What Doesn't?" at WikiSym 2007. We'll share & discuss the best ways people have found so far for stimulating collaboration in organizations and communities. Some of those ideas are documented on Wikipatterns.com, and panelists will further explore these and other ideas, share stories about getting a wiki started, and discuss their experiences building participation and interest in using it.

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Why do some people spend endless hours pondering the details and splitting hairs over whether using a wiki will provide any value to their organizations? Couldn’t that time be better spent actually using it, and finding out? In Social Media is About Sociology Not Technology, Brian Solis says: Almost daily I hear, "There are so many tools out there that I don't even know where to jump in" and "I don't get why any of this matters, maybe I'm just too old."

I hear the same thing from some of the organizations I visit. They think their environment, problems, etc. are different from anyone else. The reality: they're all the same, and the reason people inside these organizations think they're different is a direct result of the inefficiency of their current communication methods. Brian sums it up well: "...how we do things today is long overdue for a complete overhaul and social media is only forcing the evolution that should have happened long before. Whether you jump on board or not, evolution will happen without you. And, not everyone will survive the transition..."

So the question is: Will you get with the program, or not?

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Why do some people spend endless hours pondering the details and splitting hairs over whether using a wiki will provide any value to their organizations? Couldn’t that time be better spent actually using it, and finding out? In Social Media is About Sociology Not Technology, Brian Solis says: Almost daily I hear, "There are so many tools out there that I don't even know where to jump in" and "I don't get why any of this matters, maybe I'm just too old."

I hear the same thing from some of the organizations I visit. They think their environment, problems, etc. are different from anyone else. The reality: they’re all the same, and the reason people inside these organizations think they’re different is a direct result of the inefficiency of their current communication methods. Brian sums it up well: “...how we do things today is long overdue for a complete overhaul and social media is only forcing the evolution that should have happened long before. Whether you jump on board or not, evolution will happen without you. And, not everyone will survive the transition...”

So the question is: Will you get with the program, or not?

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New tours, no tickets required
Shiny new feature tours await you for our newest products:

• FishEye: open up your repository to help you better understand your changing source.
• Clover: the industry standard in code coverage, Clover improves your testing.
• Crucible: review code changes, make comments, and record outcomes in an efficient, distributed, and process-neutral way with Crucible.

He's got big webinars, she's got big webinars, but we've got the biggest webinars of them all
For those evaluators who prefer their feature tours to be more live and interactive, we have weekly webinars, too. We've always had them, but we decided to advertise them better. You can now find links on the JIRA, Confluence and Bamboo pages and soon on the other product pages.

And then arrived Enterprise Hosting, and it was good
In addition to Confluence Hosted, we now offer dedicated hosting for JIRA and Confluence. With dedicated hosting, you get all the perks of JIRA or Confluence and none of the admin worries.

No sign ups, just downloads
We have removed the sign up form that's required of visitors who want to evaluate our products. When you visit the software product pages, you can click Download and, intuitively, start downloading.

The forms aren't going away entirely. After you install the product, you'll still need to fill out a form to get a license key. Why do we do this? The main reason is that we want to send three emails to you while you're trying the product. The first email is to say "thanks" for giving our product a try. The next couple emails let evaluators know how to try and buy our software—that is, where you can find documentation, get support, participate in forums, or how to purchase.

Confluence Hosted users will still need to fill out a form first because we need to know what URL you want for your hosted wiki site.

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Today at the kick off the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, we're announcing our new SharePoint Connector for Confluence.

So, what is it?
In sum, the SharePoint Connector for Confluence does exactly what it sounds like it would do: allows customers to bridge the products together. Two separate collaboration repositories can live separately yet be used together. First generation features of the new plugin include cross-product search, content sharing, and linking. Single sign-on between the products is accomplished via Atlassian Crowd.

Why build a connector?
For us, the work we're doing with Microsoft is important for a number of reasons:

• You, our customers, had requested it. Around eight or nine months ago, after Microsoft started marketing SharePoint Server 2007 to their customers, the SF office was deluged (only slight exaggeration) with calls from our customers asking how they could use the two solutions together... or if they competed? We didn't have a good answer for them. Now we do.
• Even though MOSS 2007 has wiki capabilities, some SharePoint customers will want a dedicated enterprise wiki solution. Now there's an awesome solution that doesn't obviate their SharePoint investment.
• There are a lot of terrific wiki solutions available on the market today. We're delighted that Microsoft picked Confluence as the one they wanted to work with for their inaugural launch of the SharePoint platform for Web 2.0 solutions. (And whoever said Java and .NET, the lion and the lamb, couldn't lay down together? )

More details: Overview, FAQs, Features, Download, etc here. The SharePoint team will be contributing their $.02 on the official blog of the SharePoint product group.

The product is in beta now and there's a slew of people to thank for building a very brilliant Connector in a short time, but none more so than Jonathan Nolen and Brendan Patterson... seriously, you guys rock!

If your company is using SharePoint but you think they could benefit from a full-time, full-featured wiki, try Confluence and the new Connector.

UPDATE: Here's Robert Scoble's interview with Mike and Jeffrey about the announcement:

Click below to read the complete press release.

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Back in July, I encouraged readers to contribute to a survey on wiki use in business being conducted by Penny Edwards for her MBA dissertation at The Open University Business School. The results of that research are out now in Managing Wikis in Business, on Penny's blog. The wiki where she has documented the research is worth a look as well. It even has a page on Wiki Patterns, and cites a book called Patterns for Effective Use Cases that calls patterns a sign of quality: "a pattern expresses what is present in a well-formed example" and a sign of strategy: "a pattern names a way to deal with conflicting pressures." These are excellent terms to describe patterns, and good reasons to use them to help start or grow your wiki. After all, who wouldn't want to use tools that signify quality and strategy?

This quote especially stood out for me in the report: "Given the relative newness of many wikis, the responses suggest that wikis and capabilities regarding their use/management are still being developed internally before being extended outside the organization, where important collaborations lie with customers."

That's the next great step. Once you get comfortable with a wiki inside your organization, there's immense potential waiting to be tapped when you use it to interact with customers and give them a place to share knowledge and strengthen the community around your products.

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Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's co-Founder, recently presented on Organisational Wiki Adoption at WebDirections South 2007 in Sydney, Australia. The presentation is excellent on both content and design – in fact, Mike set a goal of no bullet points: "FYI I set myself the challenge of

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