Atlassian, the maker of Confluence & JIRA was featured recently on the CNBC – US National TV for a short interview.
It’s an amazing feat that a company started by 2 university graduates with a $10k credit card loan has grown into a company with 225 employees worldwide and 59 million revenue in FY2010.
Recently, Roberto from Comalatech, the creators of Adhoc Workflows plugin for Confluence has also contributed a guest post too. In his post, he shared how people can use workflows to streamline the process of publishing Frequently Asked Questions into a knowledge base.
The thirty-one winners of this year’s award hailed from 13 countries. Past winners include some of the most sensational names in business such as Google, Mozilla and Twitter.
This is a strong endorsement of Atlassian’s leadership in the collaboration and software development market.
We extend our congratulations to Atlassian and share the honour of being an Atlassian Partner.
Here’s a short interview with Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s Co-CEO
Being a Confluence wiki user for several years, I have experienced the following difficulties:
I have to email people after posting pages/comments to get their acknowledgement/approval/comments
I got difficulty tracking which pages/comments that I need to reply after a few days elapsed
There is a lot of extra work duplicated between the wiki and emails. And when people conveniently reply to the email instead of posting to the page. The collaboration and knowledge leaves the wiki back into the emails.
As such, I observed that a lot of wikis are mostly used for passive collaboration like knowledge bases, FAQs and intranets.
Almost every people hates writing documentation. It usually takes place only after everything is done where it is very difficult to recall all the tiny details. And it is likely that nobody else will read it since the person who wrote it has all the knowledge in their head. That’s why a lot of technical people dread writing documentations.
Sarah Maddox has given an very useful and interesting presentation with tips on making documentation more useful and engaging.
By increasing the engage-ability of the documentation, it increases the value of the documentation as
more people is likely to read the documentation
more people will be encouraged to contribute to the documentation
more people will be encouraged to keep it updated
more people will share their experiences too
A wiki helps to increase the engage-ability of the documentation by
making it easier to create documentation during the project rather than end of the project
making it easier to search (with a in-built search engine)
making it easier to share and link related information (with threaded comments on the same page)
The latest version of the Confluence SharePoint Connector has been released. The key features in this release are:
Support for SharePoint 2010
Integrated Windows Authentication
Easy Connection to Additional SharePoint Site Collections
Multiple AD Domains
Confluence SharePoint Connector allows Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) users to tap on the strengths of Confluence wiki and its extensive plug-ins:
viewing SharePoint content on Confluence and vice versa
search within the content of pdf documents attached on Confluence pages
While documents are commonly used for work, web pages are a better way to share information and collaboration. One of the strongest evidence is the Internet, where there are more web pages than documents. For a quick overview of the Confluence SharePoint Connector, check out the video below.
For more details on the new features of Confluence SharePoint Connector 1.2, please refer to the release notes
Post It Notes were invented 30 years ago, but it wasn’t a huge success upfront and a lot of people were sceptical about it. Nevertheless, Geoff Nicholson persisted and that’s why we have Post-It being used pervasively around us (including the sweet love story in the video below).
The key ideas being shared are:
Actions speak louder than words
Start small to get buy in
Get valid use cases and measure benefits to help in your justification
Social Media is leading a revolution in the way we communicate and a “Content Explosion” on the Internet.
From the video above, we can see that it is going on strong growth in personal use and many organizations are also trying out. There are also stories about bosses complaining their employees productivity going down when a lot of time is spent on Facebook or important information being leaked out.
For those who can see the value and use it to their advantage, it is definitely going to make a difference to their organization. Even the US military thinks that the pros outweight the cons by lifting off the ban on Facebook.
Social Media is a double-edged sword. For those who are willing to give it a try, these are my recommendations
have a clear idea what are your objectives to adopt Social Media (Begin with the end in mind)
assess on the risks/costs versus the benefits
provide policies or mechanisms to mitigate your risks
provide clear guidelines and expectations upfront on the usage
start on a small scale to assess the suitability for your organization first
start internally if you are very concerned with the security of your information