Monday December 18, 2006
1st Atlassian User Group Meeting
I just returned from the 1st Atlassian User Group Meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was a great meeting, mostly b/c 5 Atlassians attended the meeting - even Mike and Scott (the founders).
First of all Scott presented the roadmap for Jira and Confluence. There wasn’t too much new info here, but it seems that Jira is going 4.0 next year, which will obviously be a major make over - improvements to expect: reconfigured and role-dependent dashboards, reworked custom fields which allow for field-level security. These plus the improvements released today, do make Jira to a pretty good, general purpose workflow solution - keep going Jira!
Regarding Confluence Scott provided some pretty impressive examples of customers (namely SAP and Accenture), which run Confluence for 50.000+ users. To support these large user bases the next Confluence release will provide clustering using Tangosol. Besides product news the featured some plugins one of which was Gliffy, a flash-based, online Visio replacement.
After other talks by Arne Schirmacher of Pix Software, Mike demoed the Atlassian build server Bamboo. Although I was sceptic initially (”yet another continuous integration server”), Bamboo convinced me. Setting up new projetcs is easy and straight-forward, the reporting features are comprehensive and I like the build-notifications via instant messaging. According to Mike Bamboo will be released in Q1 next year.
Crowd is a simple identity management solution to be used with Confluence and Jira. Although it seems to be a pretty simple solution, IMHO it may have potential in medium size enterprises.
After the talks, Scott and Mike took some time sit down with the users in two working groups to discuss requirements and wrote down some feature requests. That’s what I like about Atlassian’s culture - open and down-to-earth. 
Posted on Dec 18, 2006 at 20:09 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
