Atlassian Confluence blogs atWikiConsulting.com

A few months ago we announced the availability of JIRA Studio, which combines JIRA, Confluence, Subversion, FishEye, and Crucible in a single integrated hosted suite. A big part of what makes JIRA Studio work is Atlassian's AppLinks, a series of plugins which tie the applications together and allow for a number of new integration points. We've now released this plugin for free for our JIRA and Confluence customers - if you're running a combination of JIRA, Confluence, and/or FishEye/Crucible, please check out the plugins at the links below:

AppLinks documentation
Confluence AppLinks Plugin
JIRA AppLinks Plugin

What does AppLinks give you?
First off, it gives you inter-application hyperlinking with a common link syntax. Once AppLinks is configured, you can type a JIRA issue key (ex. BUG-123) in any Confluence page/comment and it will render as a link once the page/content has been saved - no need to enter the full URL. Along the same lines, referencing a wiki page using format [space key:page] in a JIRA ticket will automatically render it as a link, again with no need to enter the full URL of the Confluence instance. Further, Subversion revisions can also be linked using the same syntax in JIRA and Confluence.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, AppLinks provides ecosystem awareness. This means that because each Atlassian application is now aware of the other applications, plugins no longer need to be manually configured to provide the URL of the associated instance name, as long as the plugins have been updated to rely on AppLinks. There are two examples of plugins which already do this:

The JIRA FishEye plugin will check for AppLinks, and if AppLinks is configured for a FishEye instance, will not require further manual setup. The FishEye plugin gives you visibility into your source repository through JIRA - see source and changes in your code at the project and issue level.

The FishEye plugin in use on a JIRA issue


The Activity Stream plugin gives the user visibility into activity across applications from the JIRA dashboard, and so is an obvious candidate for AppLinks usage. If you're running JIRA/Confluence/FishEye/Crucible, installing the AppLinks and Activity Stream plugins will let your users track activity for a single project, all projects, or for a given user.

Activity Stream


Going forward, we will continue to expand the uses of the AppLinks plugins, both from an ecosystem perspective (working with plugin developers to build AppLinks reliance into their plugins) and within the products themselves. There are a tremendous number of ways that AppLinks can be leveraged to make Atlassian applications work better together, and we've only just begun to scratch the surface.

Interested in learning more? Please follow the links below to the plugin home pages. And if you'd like to take advantage of all the features these plugins have to offer without having to set it up yourself, check out JIRA Studio.

AppLinks documentation
Confluence AppLinks Plugin
JIRA AppLinks Plugin

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Laura blogged about Balsamiq on the News Blog, but this is just too cool not to share here on Dev Blog. New Atlassian partner, Balsamiq, has released an amazing new tool called Mockups: it's a flash-based drawing tool that is built specifically for designing software GUIs.

Lots of designers preach the value of designing paper prototypes before you start to code a feature. And we do it ourselves for much of our feature design. Some of the most productive design sessions I have involve nothing more than the whiteboard. But as fast as it is, there are still some shortcomings. But what happens when you need to have a design session with someone seven thousand miles away? Or what happens when you need a record of what you just designed? (I can't count the times I've taken a digital photo of a whiteboard but then never managed to get the photo uploaded to the right spot.)

And besides, we make a wiki! We've moved beyond static Word documents -- God forbid we regress all the way back to paper!

Fortunately, Balsamiq mockups solves exactly this problem. It's a collaborative design tool that works right in your browser. Which is great, but what makes Balsamiq really stand out is how tightly focused it is. Everything is geared toward imitating the experience of designing on paper: the whole app even looks like a sketch pad.

Across the top, you'll see some of Mockups' huge library of GUI elements. You can drop and drop, resize, re-title, and reposition inside your design. But they looks like they were drawn with a felt tip pen -- you can't get too caught up in making things pixel-perfect, or worrying about color and fonts choices. Paper prototyping is way to early in the design process for those decision. By enforcing some of the same constraints as paper, Mockups forces you to get down to the real task of design, and prevents you from being distracted by visual styling.

Check out this 2.5 minute video to see how it all works:

And you can do an amazing amount of design with these simple elements. Check out the example gallery.

>

Mockups is super-easy to use: it's all drag and drop. You can use Mockups in Confluence or to enhance design or requirements documents, or Mockups in JIRA to illustrate tasks or bugs. Find out more about mockups, including licensing and price, on the Balsamiq site. Go try it out!

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Atlassian Partner EditGrid just put out an awesome new release of their core product, the EditGrid Online Spreadsheet.

I'll start with a quick re-cap: EditGrid is a brower-based spreadsheet that allows to collaborate (in real time!) with your colleagues. The experience is amazing. I'm not an expert Excel jockey, but I find the EditGrid UI and editing experience superior to its offline counterpart. It offers a wiki-like experience, in that multiple people can collaborate and every change is versioned and kept in history. EditGrid can also imports and export Excel files, so there's no barrier to getting started, and no fence to lock you in.

Wiki-like spreadsheet editing -- sounds like just the thing for Confluence, no? You might be working on numbers instead of words, but you still need an always accessible, canonical version of a document, great searching to find it, a simple URL to share it, and a version history to show you who's changed it. So, EditGrid created a plugin for Confluence that allows you to embed an EditGrid spreadsheet right in a wiki page. I love it, and find myself using it more and more often.

I was pretty excited to hear from David Lee, CEO of EditGrid, who let me know about their new release: EditGrid now offers Data On Demand. They've taken information from a ton of places on the net and allowed you to add live data into a spreadsheet. A simple example would be a call that gets the current price of YHOO stock, or the current exchange rate between a US dollar and an Australian dollar. That data will be updated every time the spreadsheet is viewed, and the you can base calculations off of it.

This live Data on Demand is only available on the Hosted version of EditGrid at the moment, but we hope to see it in the Confluence plugin soon.

Example Spreadsheets

• Live data from Alexa, Compete and Yahoo! Finance is used to calculate a startup valuation: http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/Web_Startup_Valuation_Model.new
• Analyst estimates and recommendations come together in this spreadsheet to help you compare a stock with a few of its competitors: https://www.editgrid.com/tnc/dave/Peer_Estimate_Report.new

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Atlassian Partner EditGrid just put out an awesome new release of their core product, the EditGrid Online Spreadsheet.

I'll start with a quick re-cap: EditGrid is a brower-based spreadsheet that allows to collaborate (in real time!) with your colleagues. The experience is amazing. I'm not an expert Excel jockey, but I find the EditGrid UI and editing experience superior to its offline counterpart. It offers a wiki-like experience, in that multiple people can collaborate and every change is versioned and kept in history. EditGrid can also imports and export Excel files, so there's no barrier to getting started, and no fence to lock you in.

Wiki-like spreadsheet editing -- sounds like just the thing for Confluence, no? You might be working on numbers instead of words, but you still need an always accessible, canonical version of a document, great searching to find it, a simple URL to share it, and a version history to show you who's changed it. So, EditGrid created a plugin for Confluence that allows you to embed an EditGrid spreadsheet right in a wiki page. I love it, and find myself using it more and more often.

I was pretty excited to hear from David Lee, CEO of EditGrid, who let me know about their new release: EditGrid now offers Data On Demand. They've taken information from a ton of places on the net and allowed you to add live data into a spreadsheet. A simple example would be a call that gets the current price of YHOO stock, or the current exchange rate between a US dollar and an Australian dollar. That data will be updated every time the spreadsheet is viewed, and the you can base calculations off of it.

This live Data on Demand is only available on the Hosted version of EditGrid at the moment, but we hope to see it in the Confluence plugin soon.

Example Spreadsheets

• Live data from Alexa, Compete and Yahoo! Finance is used to calculate a startup valuation: http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/Web_Startup_Valuation_Model.new
• Analyst estimates and recommendations come together in this spreadsheet to help you compare a stock with a few of its competitors: https://www.editgrid.com/tnc/dave/Peer_Estimate_Report.new

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I must apologize that these results have been so long in coming. The developers did their part and got me their votes on time. But I ended up at Enterprise 2.0 and our Boston Users' Group last week, which turned out to be pretty all absorbing, leaving no time for Codegeist. E2.0 was an entertaining conference; the collaboration/social-software market has made tremendous strides in the last year. And I really enjoyed meeting many Boston-area customers (and a few plugin developers) at the Users' Group.

But, to the topic at hand, the winners of Codegeist III. To remind everyone, there is one category for each of our pluggable products, and one winner in each category who will receive all this and more. I'll be going in reserve chronological order, with our newest product first:

May I have the envelopes, please?

Crucible

The Plugin Framework in Crucible is brand new. It shipped with Crucible 1.5, which is only a few months old. And the documentation for is still, shall we say, rudimentary. But we wanted to make sure that Crucible was in Codegeist, and that the brave early-adopters could give it a try.

Consequently, we had a handful of solid entries, and one winner: Ross Rowe's Crucible Reporting Plugin. It allows you to generate reports about previous code reviews for statistics gathering, tracking trends or compliance and auditing reasons. This was a solid entry, exploring the new territory of Crucible plugin development, and demonstrating some of what is going to be possible as the Crucible plugin framework matures.

FishEye

FishEye, likewise, has only had its plugin framework for a few months. Shipping with FishEye 1.5, the plugin framework is going to open new horizons for customization. In Codegeist III, developers got their first chance to explore.

Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist was able to get the very first FishEye plugin working, the Developer Report Plugin. Like Ross, he started with a simple reporting framework, but he was able to demonstrate the potential of plugins in FishEye, and point out some valuable directions for further development. He also took the extra step of providing tons of priceless feedback on the process itself, which will help us flesh out the documentation and capabilities of FishEye plugins.

Crowd

The Crowd category winner is Graham Bakay's Grails Integration plugin. This is 1) and incredibly useful plugin that can expand Crowd to lots of new projects, 2) works exactly as advertised 3) is beautifully and throughly documented, and 4) takes advantage of our Atlassian's recent salivating over the coolness that is Grails. Best of all, active development is continuing at a quick pace and I'm sure this is going to prove to be a valuable tool in the Grails toolkit. Unfortunately, a Crowd Connector Plugin doesn't lend itself to interesting screenshots, but trust me, the technology is dead sexy.

Bamboo

The first place prize for Bamboo goes to Jonathan Doklovic for his Pre- / Post-Build Command Plugin. This is terrific plugin that enables all sorts of new possibilities for Bamboo. It's one of those gateway plugins that opens up a whole new category of customizations. It gives admins the tools to connect Bamboo even more tightly to their build process.

Confluence

As usual, Confluence was our most fiercely contested category, with almost thirty entries. After much discussion and debate, the Confluence developers selected Martin Breest's Confluence Page State Plugin.

Here are a few of the reasons that the developers liked Martin's plugin so much:

JIRA

The JIRA developers selected Sharvin Ragavan's Scheme Configuration Plugin.

The Scheme Config plugin is a full and detailed solution to a problem that many instances of JIRA with lots of projects run into. A lot of thought clearly went into designing the solution, and the plugin is well documented. Sharvin also made use of several more advanced techniques with ajax interaction. The developer judges even mentioned that they wanted to recommend this to the support team as a diagnostic tool.

So this officially concludes Codegeist III. Congratulations to all the winners, and a huge thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be contacting the winners this week about your prizes.

We were all super happy with the entries this year -- we had entries in every category and lots of new ground was broken for plugin development in the new products. We had some very polished plugins submitted for the more established categories. There were lots of first-class entries, and next week I'm going to do another post highlighting some of our favorite honorable mention candidates, so keep an eye out.

Over the next few days, all of these plugins will be moved into the main Plugin Libraries for continued use and development. In the meantime, feel free to use them and send feedback to the developers -- we love to hear how things go in the real world.

If there is anything that we can do to help you in your plugin development efforts, please let me know. We have big plans for improving plugin development this year. I'd love to hear your feedback on the whole Atlassian plugin process. What can we do better? What could be made easier?

Thanks again, and I've already starting planning for next year's contest!

• Comments Off

I must apologize that these results have been so long in coming. The developers did their part and got me their votes on time. But I ended up at Enterprise 2.0 and our Boston Users' Group last week, which turned out to be pretty all absorbing, leaving no time for Codegeist. E2.0 was an entertaining conference; the collaboration/social-software market has made tremendous strides in the last year. And I really enjoyed meeting many Boston-area customers (and a few plugin developers) at the Users' Group.

But, to the topic at hand, the winners of Codegeist III. To remind everyone, there is one category for each of our pluggable products, and one winner in each category who will receive all this and more. I'll be going in reserve chronological order, with our newest product first:

May I have the envelopes, please?

Crucible

The Plugin Framework in Crucible is brand new. It shipped with Crucible 1.5, which is only a few months old. And the documentation for is still, shall we say, rudimentary. But we wanted to make sure that Crucible was in Codegeist, and that the brave early-adopters could give it a try.

Consequently, we had a handful of solid entries, and one winner: Ross Rowe's Crucible Reporting Plugin. It allows you to generate reports about previous code reviews for statistics gathering, tracking trends or compliance and auditing reasons. This was a solid entry, exploring the new territory of Crucible plugin development, and demonstrating some of what is going to be possible as the Crucible plugin framework matures.

FishEye

FishEye, likewise, has only had its plugin framework for a few months. Shipping with FishEye 1.5, the plugin framework is going to open new horizons for customization. In Codegeist III, developers got their first chance to explore.

Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist was able to get the very first FishEye plugin working, the Developer Report Plugin. Like Ross, he started with a simple reporting framework, but he was able to demonstrate the potential of plugins in FishEye, and point out some valuable directions for further development. He also took the extra step of providing tons of priceless feedback on the process itself, which will help us flesh out the documentation and capabilities of FishEye plugins.

Crowd

The Crowd category winner is Graham Bakay's Grails Integration plugin. This is 1) and incredibly useful plugin that can expand Crowd to lots of new projects, 2) works exactly as advertised 3) is beautifully and throughly documented, and 4) takes advantage of our Atlassian's recent salivating over the coolness that is Grails. Best of all, active development is continuing at a quick pace and I'm sure this is going to prove to be a valuable tool in the Grails toolkit. Unfortunately, a Crowd Connector Plugin doesn't lend itself to interesting screenshots, but trust me, the technology is dead sexy.

Bamboo

The first place prize for Bamboo goes to Jonathan Doklovic for his Pre- / Post-Build Command Plugin. This is terrific plugin that enables all sorts of new possibilities for Bamboo. It's one of those gateway plugins that opens up a whole new category of customizations. It gives admins the tools to connect Bamboo even more tightly to their build process.

Confluence

As usual, Confluence was our most fiercely contested category, with almost thirty entries. After much discussion and debate, the Confluence developers selected Martin Breest's Confluence Page State Plugin.

Here are a few of the reasons that the developers liked Martin's plugin so much:

JIRA

The JIRA developers selected Sharvin Ragavan's Scheme Configuration Plugin.

The Scheme Config plugin is a full and detailed solution to a problem that many instances of JIRA with lots of projects run into. A lot of thought clearly went into designing the solution, and the plugin is well documented. Sharvin also made use of several more advanced techniques with ajax interaction. The developer judges even mentioned that they wanted to recommend this to the support team as a diagnostic tool.

So this officially concludes Codegeist III. Congratulations to all the winners, and a huge thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be contacting the winners this week about your prizes.

We were all super happy with the entries this year -- we had entries in every category and lots of new ground was broken for plugin development in the new products. We had some very polished plugins submitted for the more established categories. There were lots of first-class entries, and next week I'm going to do another post highlighting some of our favorite honorable mention candidates, so keep an eye out.

Over the next few days, all of these plugins will be moved into the main Plugin Libraries for continued use and development. In the meantime, feel free to use them and send feedback to the developers -- we love to hear how things go in the real world.

If there is anything that we can do to help you in your plugin development efforts, please let me know. We have big plans for improving plugin development this year. I'd love to hear your feedback on the whole Atlassian plugin process. What can we do better? What could be made easier?

Thanks again, and I've already starting planning for next year's contest!

• Comments Off

I must apologize that these results have been so long in coming. The developers did their part and got me their votes on time. But I ended up at Enterprise 2.0 and our Boston Users' Group last week, which turned out to be pretty all absorbing, leaving no time for Codegeist. E2.0 was an entertaining conference; the collaboration/social-software market has made tremendous strides in the last year. And I really enjoyed meeting many Boston-area customers (and a few plugin developers) at the Users' Group.

But, to the topic at hand, the winners of Codegeist III. To remind everyone, there is one category for each of our pluggable products, and one winner in each category who will receive all this and more. I'll be going in reserve chronological order, with our newest product first:

May I have the envelopes, please?

Crucible

The Plugin Framework in Crucible is brand new. It shipped with Crucible 1.5, which is only a few months old. And the documentation for is still, shall we say, rudimentary. But we wanted to make sure that Crucible was in Codegeist, and that the brave early-adopters could give it a try.

Consequently, we had a handful of solid entries, and one winner: Ross Rowe's Crucible Reporting Plugin. It allows you to generate reports about previous code reviews for statistics gathering, tracking trends or compliance and auditing reasons. This was a solid entry, exploring the new territory of Crucible plugin development, and demonstrating some of what is going to be possible as the Crucible plugin framework matures.

FishEye

FishEye, likewise, has only had its plugin framework for a few months. Shipping with FishEye 1.5, the plugin framework is going to open new horizons for customization. In Codegeist III, developers got their first chance to explore.

Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist was able to get the very first FishEye plugin working, the Developer Report Plugin. Like Ross, he started with a simple reporting framework, but he was able to demonstrate the potential of plugins in FishEye, and point out some valuable directions for further development. He also took the extra step of providing tons of priceless feedback on the process itself, which will help us flesh out the documentation and capabilities of FishEye plugins.

Crowd

The Crowd category winner is Graham Bakay's Grails Integration plugin. This is 1) and incredibly useful plugin that can expand Crowd to lots of new projects, 2) works exactly as advertised 3) is beautifully and throughly documented, and 4) takes advantage of our Atlassian's recent salivating over the coolness that is Grails. Best of all, active development is continuing at a quick pace and I'm sure this is going to prove to be a valuable tool in the Grails toolkit. Unfortunately, a Crowd Connector Plugin doesn't lend itself to interesting screenshots, but trust me, the technology is dead sexy.

Bamboo

The first place prize for Bamboo goes to Jonathan Doklovic for his Pre- / Post-Build Command Plugin. This is terrific plugin that enables all sorts of new possibilities for Bamboo. It's one of those gateway plugins that opens up a whole new category of customizations. It gives admins the tools to connect Bamboo even more tightly to their build process.

Confluence

As usual, Confluence was our most fiercely contested category, with almost thirty entries. After much discussion and debate, the Confluence developers selected Martin Breest's Confluence Page State Plugin.

Here are a few of the reasons that the developers liked Martin's plugin so much:

JIRA

The JIRA developers selected Sharvin Ragavan's Scheme Configuration Plugin.

The Scheme Config plugin is a full and detailed solution to a problem that many instances of JIRA with lots of projects run into. A lot of thought clearly went into designing the solution, and the plugin is well documented. Sharvin also made use of several more advanced techniques with ajax interaction. The developer judges even mentioned that they wanted to recommend this to the support team as a diagnostic tool.

So this officially concludes Codegeist III. Congratulations to all the winners, and a huge thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be contacting the winners this week about your prizes.

We were all super happy with the entries this year -- we had entries in every category and lots of new ground was broken for plugin development in the new products. We had some very polished plugins submitted for the more established categories. There were lots of first-class entries, and next week I'm going to do another post highlighting some of our favorite honorable mention candidates, so keep an eye out.

Over the next few days, all of these plugins will be moved into the main Plugin Libraries for continued use and development. In the meantime, feel free to use them and send feedback to the developers -- we love to hear how things go in the real world.

If there is anything that we can do to help you in your plugin development efforts, please let me know. We have big plans for improving plugin development this year. I'd love to hear your feedback on the whole Atlassian plugin process. What can we do better? What could be made easier?

Thanks again, and I've already starting planning for next year's contest!

• Comments Off

Atlassian is holding two more user groups in the next few weeks. Next week, on Thursday June 12th, we'll be holding a Atlassian User Group in Boston, at the Westin Waltham hotel from 2:00pm until 7:00pm. This event is extra special because I, your friendly neighborhood Developer Relations guy, will be in attendance.

Then on June 19th, we'll be holding an Atlassian User Group in Paris, at the Salon Eisenhower from 9:00 until 14:00. This event will be conducted mostly in French and will focus on Confluence, wikis, and social networking.

Each user group will start with a State of Atlassian talk, given by our President, Jeffrey Walker. There will be several talks from customers, talking about where, how and why they've deployed Atlassian product in their organizations. And the end of the day will consist of separate round-table discussion about questions of interest. The audience decides the topic, and then we all (Atlassian staff and attendees) discuss together. You can also pre-suggest some topics of conversion at the bottom of the RSVP page.

We'll have lots of Atlassian staff at both events -- including actual, in-the-trenches product developers. It's a great opportunity to get into details with some folks who know the product best.

Atlassian user groups are free for all attendees. It's always a terrific thrill meeting our customers and hearing about what you're doing with our products. We'd like very much to see you there. Come say hi! And please RSVP on the event pages: Boston and Paris.

• Comments Off

Atlassian is holding two more user groups in the next few weeks. Next week, on Thursday June 12th, we'll be holding a Atlassian User Group in Boston, at the Westin Waltham hotel from 2:00pm until 7:00pm. This event is extra special because I, your friendly neighborhood Developer Relations guy, will be in attendance.

Then on June 19th, we'll be holding an Atlassian User Group in Paris, at the Salon Eisenhower from 9:00 until 14:00. This event will be conducted mostly in French and will focus on Confluence, wikis, and social networking.

Each user group will start with a State of Atlassian talk, given by our President, Jeffrey Walker. There will be several talks from customers, talking about where, how and why they've deployed Atlassian product in their organizations. And the end of the day will consist of separate round-table discussion about questions of interest. The audience decides the topic, and then we all (Atlassian staff and attendees) discuss together. You can also pre-suggest some topics of conversion at the bottom of the RSVP page.

We'll have lots of Atlassian staff at both events -- including actual, in-the-trenches product developers. It's a great opportunity to get into details with some folks who know the product best.

Atlassian user groups are free for all attendees. It's always a terrific thrill meeting our customers and hearing about what you're doing with our products. We'd like very much to see you there. Come say hi! And please RSVP on the event pages: Boston and Paris.

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I'm a little behind mentioning this, but Codegeist III is officially over!

There was a burst of activity this year, bringing in fifty-three entries from forty-three different authors. There are some very ambitious entries as well, and some that I hope we will all continue to build on in the months to come.

We received entries in every category, despite the fact that the plugin framework was brand new in a few of our products. I know that figuring out the new plugin systems without all the documentation was rough going, but I'm thrilled that some competitors pushed through. And we're going to learn from what you've done in order to smooth out the process of building plugins for our newer products. We'll be adding to the documentation, the examples, and the plugin points in the near future.

We're in the process of judging all of the entries, and hope to announce the winners in the next two weeks. After the judging, all of these plugins will be moved into the main Plugin Libraries for continued use and development. In the meantime, feel free to use them and send feedback to the developers — they'd love to hear how things go in the real world. And developers are also free to continue improving their plugins if they want. Thanks to the magic of subversion, we'll look at the plugin as it was on the day the contest closed.

Thanks again to everyone who entered! I'm amazed at all you were able to accomplish. After the judging is complete, I'll highlight some of my favorite plugins in a separate post. But in the meantime, everyone is free to use the plugins as they are now, so go take a look at the great new stuff.

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