The new blog site will allow you to

• retweet those articles you want to share with your peers
• like the page for your Facebook friends

If you are an active Facebook user, you can follow us on our  Facebook fan page where we will share interesting links and updates.

With these changes, you can now follow us at

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.

Kudos to Mike & Scott and the Atlassian Team

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.

For details, check out Wiki Workflows: Publishing a Knowledge Base Article

Atlassian, our partner and the developers of JIRA and Confluence has been selected as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.

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.

However, Ad Hoc Workflows plugin for Confluence patches the gap and enables Confluence with the capabilities of:

• assigning of tasks
• defining workflows

How we use it

I will share one of the scenarios on how we use the Ad Hoc Workflows plugin to collaborative actively.

1. After each meeting, one of us will draft the meeting minutes into our wiki
2. Upon the completion of the draft, the author will assign the attendees a task to review the minutes
3. We will receive an email notification to inform us of the task with a link to the wiki page
4. Likewise, we can also see a list of our outstanding tasks on the dashboard for follow-up
5. We will go to the wiki page to make minor changes or post comments
6. Once everything is ok, we will mark the task as completed
7. The wiki page is then marked as approved once everyone has completed their reviewing tasks

Another example

It can also support more sophisticated workflows as shown in the video below.

For more information, check out Ad hoc Workflows’ official website

Here’s a short video clip summary of the new features released.

For details, you can also release to Confluence 3.3 release notes

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)

You can download the slides together with her notes at her blog.

http://ffeathers.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/summit2010-earthmove-sarahmaddox-slideswithnotes.pdf

• 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
• drawing diagrams online with the Gliffy plugin
• drawing mockups with Balsamiq Mockups
• and many other plugins

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
• Don’t give up

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