The wheels on the bus go round and round.
That song has been running through my head constantly over the past several days. Though it has been a long time since I've been on a bus this long so the lyrics "The people on the bus go up and down." is more meaningful to me now than it has ever been... man this bus is bouncy!
As some of you may have read a few days ago we announced that Atlassian was sponsoring The Startup Bus in its journey from San Francisco to Austin, TX for SXSW interactive 2010, and I was the lucky Atlassian who was selected to go along for the ride.
I had anticipated blogging about the experience more frequently but lack of reliable wi-fi and a non stop schedule has prevented me from pushing out the great content we've been capturing on the bus - but what I've found is that when everyone leaves the bus the wi-fi works much better so I decided to take the opportunity of a nice long lunch break to fill the Atlassian blog's readers in.
It has been quite a journey so far. Everything started on Monday with a kick off party at Atlassian headquarters in San Francisco. The event turned into a bit of a hack session as the buspreneurs were finishing up the features of the website for launch the next morning which came a little too early as the bus left around 6:30 a.m. and the site still wasn't finished. More hacking between San Francisco and Cupertino for a visit to HP's Executive Briefing Center for a session innovation with Phil McKinney, HP's CTO.
After an inspirational talk about how to come up with innovative ideas the team got profile photos taken and we were off to LA. Between San Francisco and LA the group split into teams and conceived their ideas. This is when the fun really started as there were only a few short hours to solidify the idea before pitching it to random people in Santa Monica on video. Video that we haven't been able to upload - but there is a LOT of content!
The bus continued on to Palm Springs for some rest (or I think its called rest - I haven't had any for a while).
Unfortunately my lunch break is almost over so I will need to fill you in on day two of the bus ride later, so stay tuned.
Incidently the Startup that I'm working on is called BeNeighbor.ly - which is a site that promises to bring together people in need with people who want to help. More details on that can be found on The Startup Bus blogs. As a fun little game people can invest virtual dollars in the startups you like best. So make our day and go invest in your favorite! (beneighbor.ly :)
Signing off for now.
There are more than 2 million businesses worldwide using Google Apps, and roughly 3,000 new ones sign-up for Google Apps each day. Atlassian is in the process of migrating from Zimbra to Google Apps, which many of us are eagerly awaiting, especially since most have been forwarding their mail from Zimbra to Google Mail anyway. Google Apps is a juggernaut, and it's no wonder Google is proud of the response it continues to receive.
The analog to Google Apps at Atlassian is JIRA Studio, our hosted software development suite. JIRA Studio (Studio for short) is our fastest growing product, which shouldn't be a surprise. In a single, hosted, just-turn-it-on-and-it-works product, Studio combines source control (Subversion), issue tracking (JIRA), agile planning (GreenHopper), enterprise wiki (Confluence), code browsing (FishEye), code reviews (Crucible) and continuous integration (Bamboo). All of that, beautifully integrated, and hosted as a single service. As a customer, you don't worry about managing or upgrading it - we take care of all that. Studio helps teams build great software, by giving them the tools they need to manage code and development projects, without the hassle of managing those tools.
So when Google decided to relaunch the Google Apps marketplace, it's no surprise they thought of Studio. For developers inside companies using Google Apps, Studio is the perfect complement. And now it's a perfectly integrated complement.

JIRA Studio for Google Apps
As of today, JIRA Studio is available from the Google Apps Marketplace. If you're a Google Apps customer, you can add Studio directly to your domain, straight from the marketplace. This means you'll logon to Studio using your Google username and password. If you're already logged in to Google Apps, JIRA Studio appears as a menu item at the top of any Google application, and you'll be signed in automatically to Studio when you select it.
But that's not all. We've also added some nifty features to Studio that integrate Google Apps and Studio together. The features are described in better detail here and include:
Oh, and here's a little video we put together to explain the combination at a high level. Hope you enjoy it:
SJUG:Michael Neale on RESTeasy, Matt Quail on Objectify
When: 6:00pm for 6:30 start, Thursday, 11th March 2010.
Where: Atlassian HQ, 173-185 Sussex St
Who: Michael Neale will be presenting first about 'RESTful web services in java (jax-rs/RESTEasy)'. Michael works for Red Hat, in the JBoss division, on the Drools project. He lives in the Blue Mountains, and has been working with java on and off since 2001.
The second presentation will given by Matt Quail on 'Objectify: The simplest possible typed abstraction to the Google App Engine datastore'. Matt is our lead architect of the FishEye and Crucible products. In his spare time he has recently become a committer on the Objectify project.
Cost: free (we're sponsoring beer and pizza on the night, as usual)
RSVP: before Thursday night
Agile Australia call for speakersThere is currently a call out for speakers for both Speaking spots and Lighting Presenters (submissions close end of April).
So if you're interested in Agile, make sure you throw your hat in the ring under one of these umbrellas:
Atlassian hosted a launch party for most of the Startup Bus crew last night. Over 40 people, many just meeting for the first time, gathered to get their survival kits*, eat, drink and talk about the next 48 hours on the road. We're happy to sponsor the Bus and we're keeping an eye on it as it makes its way to SXSW.
Now here's the fun part. Not only can you follow their Twitter stream here or become a fan on Facebook, you can also track their code commits. Every time they make a code commit via JIRA Studio, it's geotagged and displayed on an interactive Google Map on their website. Nice!
The party pics* Survival kit included water, granola bar, an apple, a Confluence t-shirt, product brochure, bottle opener, beer koozie, water and Tic Tac breath mints.
We're happy to let you know that we have launched two new exciting betas for our IDE connectors.
Atlassian Connector for Visual Studio 1.0-BETAWe have also launched the first beta of our brand new Atlassian Connector for Visual Studio. The Atlassian Connector for Visual Studio is the latest addition to the Atlassian IDE connectors, which also includes the Atlassian Connector for IntelliJ IDEA.
Release 1.0 of Atlassian Connector for Visual Studio will allow you to integrate JIRA issue tracker and Bamboo continuous integration server into your Visual Studio environment. Some features include:
The Atlassian Connector for Eclipse 2.0 introduces numerous new features, including:
For more details about the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse 2.0-BETA, please check out our release notes
What Next?We want your help to make these connectors even better! If you are using Eclipse or Visual Studio, please try out these connectors, and share your feedback by:

The National Hockey League (NHL) is widely considered to be the premier professional ice hockey league in the world. It was recently brought to my attention that they are happily using our tools, and they wouldn't mind chatting about how they use them.
I spoke with Andrus Adamchik based out of the NHL's New York headquarters. Andrus is in the Application Development department and has been at the NHL for the better part of a decade. The biggest take-away from the interview is that anyone who logs into the www.nhl.com is passed through Crowd, Atlassian's single sign-on (SSO) and identity management tool.
NHL at a glance
What is your role?
Consultant, Developer, and Architect. I helped design a more current and modern website. I have been one of the lead developers since 2006.
What department are you in?
Application Development.
What Atlassian products are you currently using?
JIRA, Confluence and Crowd.
How did the products make their way into the NHL?
I recommended them to the NHL. When we started a project in 2006, when we needed bug tracking software, it was a no brainer to use JIRA because I was familiar with it from doing various open source projects, including Apache Cayenne. Atlassian made a smart move giving free licenses to Open Source developers.
How are you using JIRA?
Internal bug tracking, but it has now spread around the organisation. A few hundered people are using it.
Do the different departments have their own projects?
Yes, exactly. Each development department or group has its own project. For example, we have one for sys admin and one for website development and so on. So, we have 5 projects right now.
What advice would you give another company considering using JIRA?
That it is one of the best tools on the market right now. We have tried a few other things. Maybe it is my past experience with JIRA, and I am biased, but it is really the best. We haven't even got into the customizations or plugins, we are just using the basic installation.
Just out of the box?
Yes. The only customization we have made is some workflow items. We organize our development and build process around JIRA workflow.
Can you comment on how Confluence spread in the company?
It was an organic growth. Some would send other people links to documents, and they would open it and start playing around. It spread organically, no one was forced to use it.
Prior to Confluence, was there another product in place?
It was the first wiki we brought in.
Have you guys done any customizations to Confluence?
Not yet. We just use it as is.
Do you know how many people are using Crowd on your site?
I can't give you the exact number, but it is anyone on the nhl.com website that logs in in the upper right hand corner of our site. All the social networking that we do, forums, and premium video packages; it all goes through Crowd. It is a LOT of people.
Do you use it for single sign-on between JIRA and Confluence?
Originally, we wanted to use Crowd for single sign-on, but because JIRA and Confluence evolved independently, we decided it was too much trouble to reconcile the accounts, we just left it as is.
Are there any other non-Atlassian tools that you integrate with?
Crowd integrates with our main application stack. We place a number of internal business frameworks inside the custom Crowd connectors.
Are people using our tools in ways you haven't expected?
Yes. When use started to spread out of our development group, many people wanted to have their own custom workflows. So, it was good the license we had supported custom workflows. I guess some other people wanted to tweak this and that, but mostly it was worklfow customizations.
Any final comments?
We have been relying on Atlassian tools for a couple of years and like Atlassian products.
Thanks Andrus!
As part of Atlassian's support for The Startup Bus, we're hosting a small send-off party for the Startup Bus gypsies participants this coming Monday 8th March at 6pm in our San Francisco office. We can't have them try to conceive a world changing software startup without inducing a good sized hangover.
We'll have some pretty hearty dinner, plenty of beers, Guitar Hero, and a bunch of clean whiteboards begging to be drawn on.
Join Us - 10 Free TicketsThe good news is that we have 10 spare tickets to give away to any budding entrepreneurial networkers. Want to join us? Grab a ticket
When & WhereThe Startup Bus Send Off Party
Monday 8th March | 6:00pm - 8:30pm
Atlassian - San Francisco
375 Alabama St, Suite 325
San Francisco, CA, 94110
Map
Can't make it? Follow the adventures of @thestartupbus as they travel to SXSW next week from March 9th-10th.
This year Atlassian will be making our first ever appearance at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. And as you probably know by now (heck, even Wired knows already), Steve Wiebe will be at our booth playing Donkey Kong and trying to regain his world record.
So, you may be wondering, what is Atlassian doing at GDC 2010?
Tools for game developers Well, we always knew that major games like Second Life and World of Warcraft were built with the help of Atlassian tools. But when we dug into our customer list, we discovered over 150 game development companies using our tools.With several thousand users relying on our tools to crank out the best games in the business, it's clear that Atlassian tools are ideally suited for game development.
Obviously tracking and eliminating bugs is of premium importance in every software application, but for game developers shipping with bugs is simply unacceptable.
Combine that with the pressure of meeting hard deadlines in order to release in time for the kickoff of the NFL season, a new blockbuster movie, or the launch of the latest gaming console, and it's no surprise that the top teams use Atlassian products for bug tracking, agile project management, collaboration and more!
But, we want to know more..
We're still curious to know how game developers use their tools (and not just ours) every day. So, that's why we decided to go to GDC and find out!
In prep, we sent a short survey to all of our game development customers to find out what they are working on -- if you're a game developer, it's not too late to participate in the survey. I'm already impressed by the diversity of gaming platforms being developed for using pretty much everything from C# to Python. We will share the full results of the survey at GDC, so come by our booth (#2132) if you're going to be there.
We even reached out to a handful of our customers to find out exactly how they use our tools and we plan to blog about this in the coming weeks. So, keep an eye on the blogs..
Last week, I blogged about Steve Wiebe, Donkey Kong world record holder, coming to the GDC with Atlassian. He'll be trying to beat the world record at our booth #2132.
We've gotten some great response for this and we want to make sure to share Steve's attempt with as many people as possible. For those of you unable to make it to San Francisco for the GDC next week, we'll be filming Steve's world record attempt and streaming it live.
Tune in next Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 11AM - 1:30pm PST (approximately) to watch live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/atlassian
San Francisco, CA and Austin, TX (PRWEB) March 4, 2010 -- On March 9, 40 strangers will board a bus in San Francisco, and over two days will "conceive, build and launch" several tech startups by the time they arrive at South by SouthWest (SXSW) in Austin. The Startup Bus was conceived by Elias Bizannes and is sponsored by Atlassian, who will provide software development tools, technical know-how, gas, food and beer to power the bus as well as the travelers on board.
Participants on The Startup Bus will be able to use JIRA Studio, a hosted software development suite that integrates Subversion source control with issue tracking, continuous integration, collaboration wiki, code review and source code searching.
Mark Halvorson, "Imagineer" at Atlassian, will be one of the 40 innovators boarding the bus on March 9th. In addition to coding, Mark will configure and support the Atlassian developer tools for other participants during the trip.
"Atlassian's tools are perfect for fast-moving teams like those on The Startup Bus," said Bizannes. "Whether they prefer hassle-free hosted tools, or want to get started with just a $10 donation to a great charity, Atlassian really fits the bill. I can't think of another company that better embodies the spirit of The Startup Bus."
JIRA Studio is used by hundreds of companies, including many small businesses and startups that don't want to invest in the infrastructure necessary to host the applications themselves. Because the application is hosted in the cloud, it can be accessed from anywhere, including on a moving bus.
"After hearing about The Startup Bus, we knew we wanted to help make it a success," said Jay Simons, VP Marketing at Atlassian. "Ever since our early days in a Sydney garage, we've been actively supporting startups and other grass-roots development efforts. This is one of the coolest ideas we've seen and we're excited to be involved."
About the StartupBus
Twelve strangers will board a bus in San Francisco. At 60 MPH and over 48 hours, they will conceive, build and launch 3 tech startups in time for a SXSW party. The StartupBus was dreamt up by Elias Bizannes and is supported by several sponsors, including Atlassian (who is "powering" the bus with software) and eStrategy Group (who will be mentoring the teams). Starting Tuesday you can follow the StartupBus on Twitter as it motors into the startup history book. http://twitter.com/thestartupbus
About Atlassian
Atlassian is an Australian software company specialising in software development and collaboration tools. More than 17,000 organisations of all sizes use Atlassian's issue tracking, collaboration and software development tools to work smarter and deliver quality results on time. Learn more at http://www.atlassian.com.
On March 9th, the Startup Bus, brainchild of Elias Bizannes, embarks on a 48-hour journey to SXSW. A few dozen entrepreneurs will meet each other on the bus (many for the first time) and together this ragtag crew will attempt to build 3 standalone technology startups from scratch. Their crazy goal is to arrive at a party at SXSW where they sell their startup ideas to investors and the press.
Along the journey from San Francisco to Austin, the developers will be using JIRA Studio, our hosted software development suite, to code, document, and track their projects. We're happy to be sponsors of the Startup Bus, and we're happy that our own Mark Halvorson, software engineer and "Imagineer," will be one of the twelve on the bus.
It won't come as any surprise that we're stoked to power the Bus. We love supporting startups, maybe because we still think of ourselves as a startup, an outsider in the enterprise software world. Yeah, we know that market forces are pointing in our direction — transparency, low cost, easy set-up — and that lots of other companies have sprung up to challenge us with equally radical notions of how enterprise B2B should look, but in some ways we consider our 8 year-old business as an experiment in progress.
JIRA Studio is primarily used by startups and small teams that want to get down to brass tax and start coding without having to bother with the fuss and muss of server management and upgrades. The latest version of JIRA Studio included our continuous integration server, Bamboo, which itself leverages another cloud-based app, Amazon Web Services.
On Monday, March 8, you can find many of us at the send-off party for the Startup Bus, powered by Atlassian and other sponsors like the eStrategy Group (who will be mentoring the teams). Starting Tuesday you can follow the Startup Bus as it motors into the startup history book.
We apologize if you recieved the following email yesterday, and do not live anywhere near Michigan or Ohio.

We send emails on behalf of customers that are running an Atlassian User Group (AUG). In yesterday's email sent to promote the Michigan AUG, we accidently included 'OR country is USA' instead of 'AND country is USA' on the subscriber list criteria. This means that everyone in the United States got the email, instead of the intended list of just those located in Michigan and Ohio.
The title of this email — the Genuine Atlassian Email Mistake — came from one of the many responses we received. It was a genuine mistake indeed.
Yesterday I held a webinar with Kap IT on the ConfluenceFx plugin.
ConfluenceFx is the first enterprise solution that brings Confluence to your desktop. It enables your teams to collaborate more effectively and keeps all your community up-to-date thanks to its real-time notifications and collaborative user interactions.
A vibrant Q&A session goes to show that people are really interested in this product. It was an excellent demo which shows the perspective of an end user, as well as an admin installing and configuring the product. See the video now:
For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.
Also, don't forget about following us on![]()
In just a few weeks, Atlassian will be participating in the Game Developer Conference in our home town of San Francisco. This is our first year at the show and we really wanted to make a splash.
Last weekend, I watched the documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" It's an awesome flick about the World Champions in the classic arcade game, Donkey Kong. The star of the show is Steve Wiebe, and he currently holds the world record in Donkey Kong Jr. and is runner up for Donkey Kong classic (he's gone back and forth on the champion title for the last few years). After watching the documentary I thought, "wouldn't it be cool if Steve would come play Donkey Kong at the GDC Confernece?" Well, Steve has agreed to do just that.
Steve will be at the Atlassian booth (#2132) March 11-13th from 10AM-6PM hanging out, signing autographs and most importantly trying to beat the Donkey Kong world record. On Friday March 12th, Atlassian will sponsor a happy hour for GDC attendees at John Collins bar and Steve will be there as well.
If you're going to be around for the Conference don't miss stopping by to say "hi" to Steve, get a free drink on Atlassian and possibly see an elusive "kill screen!"

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow I'm hosting a Plugin of the Month webinar with Kap IT on the ConfluenceFx plugin.
ConfluenceFx is the first enterprise solution that brings Confluence to your desktop. It enables your teams to collaborate more effectively and keeps all your community up-to-date thanks to its real-time notifications and collaborative user interactions.
We created a short, fast-paced clip to promote Atlassian Summit. This 11-second interstitial can now be seen in many of our AtlassianTV videos to remind, educate, and enthrall audiences about our upcoming user conference. Enjoy!
Last year's clip can be watched here.
This week we held a webinar with Tino Winkler of Communardo. Based out of Germany, Tino went over the Content Import Plugin for Confluence. This is a great webinar to watch if you have a legacy system that you want to exctract the data from and migrate to Confluence.
The Content Import Plugin faciliates imports of any type of content into Confluence. The data has to be provided in a transfer format (XML notation of Confluence data structures). The format supports nearly all of the Confluence content type (pages, spaces, blog posts, comments, attachments) and the according meta data (creator, modifier, dates, labels). The plugin is an efficient tool to support the migration of content from any system, e.g. legacy wikis, blogs and message boards, without the need to know the Confluence API.
Watch the video now:
For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.
Also, don't forget about following us on![]()
There were so many Atlassian blogs these past couple weeks, it was really hard coming up with the few to "roundup," but here they are:
Managing projects in the real world with JIRA. Kim Bryant, NPR, gets her "geek on" by diving into the nitty gritty details of how NPR.org uses JIRA to manage daily activities.Read more.
Join Atlassian! News about our recruitment efforts. We've been on a hiring campaign to find 32 of the best and brightest people to join our team. In the spirit of being an open company, no bullshit, here are a few details of how it's going so far. Read more.
FishEye & Crucible 2.2 Released - Now with Git and ClearCase! The FishEye & Crucible team is pleased to announce that FishEye 2.2 and Crucible 2.2 are now available for download. These releases continue to build on the UI introduced in 2.0 and refined in 2.1. Read more.
Skin your wiki. One of the great things about Confluence is the flexibility and control it gives you over its look and feel. You've got a pretty good set of options right out of the box, from making simple changes like changing the colour scheme, applying a custom stylesheet to a space, or even installing a custom theme. Read more.
Ad hoc JIRA installation package for Ubuntu. It's not a true package, but Ivar Abrahamsen has put together a page explaining how he made a shell script for Ubuntu that does all the JIRA installation work for you. Read more.
22 topic ideas for Summit 2010 presentations. Not coming up with any good ideas for what to present at Atlassian Summit? Here are 22 great ideas. Read more.
Want to follow all the stories as they happen? Read and subscribe to these blogs:
Prefer Twitter? You can follow us here.
When we announced Atlassian Summit last month, there were 9 sponsors. There are 17 today. And only 4 spots remain.
Summit is our annual user conference taking place in San Francisco, June 9-11. Our call for speakers is still open (until March 1 — speakers get a free pass to the event), and as you can see below, we have a huge number of Atlassian partners, plugin developers, and complementary tool vendors showing off their latest and greatest apps and services. If you're looking to learn more about Atlassian products or the Atlassian ecosystem of services and apps, this is the place to be.
Meet the sponsors: .entry table td, .entry table th { border-width:1px 0 0; padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:20px; vertical-align:top; }
Interested in being a sponsor of Summit 2010 and having a booth, demoing your tools to customers, and meeting Atlassian devs? Read about all the sponsor benefits and contact us asap!
UPDATE (Feb. 22, 2009): Bronze sponsorships sold out. Only 2 Sliver-level sponsorships remain.
As Pete announced yesterday, FishEye and Crucible 2.2 were launched yesterday and are now available for download. The big news is that in addition to Subversion, CVS and Perforce, FishEye 2.2 now officially supports Git & ClearCase! Crucible has provided support for Git & ClearCase for a while through "lightSCM" plugins, but now Crucible users can benefit from faster and deeper integration through FishEye.
Upgrades are of course included for all customers with current maintenance (that includes anyone who has purchased in the last 12 months). Get the complete update on our Dev Tools blog post.