Party @ Atlassian San Francisco 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 Tickets

The 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 & Where

The 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

Follow the bus

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.

Every day I get in the queue (Too much, the Magic Bus)
To get on the bus that takes me to you (Too much, the Magic Bus) - The Who, Magic Bus

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.

UPDATE: VIDEO HERE

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:

• JIRA blog RSS
• Confluence blog RSS
• Dev Tools blog RSS
• News blog RSS
• Developers blog RSS
• All blogs RSS

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.

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.

New Support for Version Control Systems - Git & ClearCase In addition to Subversion, CVS and Perforce, FishEye 2.2 now officially supports Git & ClearCase. Announcing support for an old mature commercial SCM like ClearCase at the same time as a new open source one like Git, speaks volumes of FishEye's versatility. With support for five of the most popular version control systems available FishEye can provide a common way to share code in more teams than anyone else.

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.

FishEye Highlights

• Sexy new IDE like side-by-side diffs (pictured)
• Faster more accurate quick navigation
• Copy code from annotations without line numbers
• Context menu in annotations

FishEye 2.2 release notes

Crucible Highlights

• Patch anchoring - link patches to SCM revisions
• Reviews without moderators
• Enhanced review creation & editing
• Log time direct to JIRA
• Lots of UI tweaks

Crucible 2.2 release notes

There are of course stacks of other improvements behind the scenes, including bundling of database drivers and some new admin options. Upgrades are of course included for all customers with current maintenance (that includes anyone who has purchased in the last 12 months). So don't delay, schedule your upgrade now!

This Thursday, we are running a Plugin of the Month webinar with Communardo on the Confluence Content Import Plugin.

Based out of Germany, Tino Winkler will walk us through how the Content Import Plugin faciliates imports of any type of content into Confluence. The import data must be provided in a transfer format, which is an XML notation of Confluence data. The format supports nearly all of the Confluence content types (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.

UPDATE: VIDEO IS HERE

Sydney, Australia (PRWEB) February 16, 2010 -- In their latest recruitment campaign - 'The Atlassian 32' - Atlassian has been embracing the power of social media to find quality new employees for the company. Since the campaign launch in August 2009, Atlassian has seen applications more than triple with the number of applicants soaring to 2,500 in just 6 months.

The company has almost halved recruitment costs by leveraging word of mouth marketing and use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. "We were able to almost halve recruitment costs because referrals from staff and external people almost tripled," says Atlassian's Head of HR Joris Luijke "We offered a referral bonus of $2-10K for people that were hired, and it's been a huge success. This means we've also reduced the number of staff hired from recruitment agencies from 27% of new hires to 6% of new hires."

Luijke is a believer in giving people, including current staff, a reason to talk about the company. "We offered 'talkable' incentives to people that encourages discussions on social networks - new hires were given a free holiday before they started, and people could refer-a-mate and earn $2K." The campaign has seen applicants apply from from over 55 countries. "We've just hired an ex-Microsoft employee from the USA working for us in Sydney" says Lujike.

Atlassian has been consistently recognised (BRW, Deloitte) as one of Australia's fastest growing software companies. From a team of two university students Atlassian has grown to 195 employees worldwide in Sydney, San Francisco and Amsterdam. To sustain and continue this rapid rate of growth and success, Atlassian set a goal of hiring 32 people in FY10 during a time when IT companies globally were making cutbacks. Founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar states proudly "We've already invested $3m in new IT jobs in Australia in the last 6 months, and expect to invest an additional $2m over the next 6 months." Currently there are openings available for Head of Engineering, Product Managers, Build Engineers and Software Developers.

About Atlassian
Atlassian develops affordable, lightweight software that helps enterprises collaborate better. Its products include Confluence, recognised as the most widely-used enterprise wiki, and JIRA, one of the world's most popular issue trackers for IT project management. The company has more than 15,500 customers worldwide, including 30 of the world's top 50 corporations. For more information, visit www.atlassian.com

Atlassian has something special going on... It starts with, of all things, their core values and shows up in the quality of the products they create and their almost fanatical user base. They have the most holistic approach to software I think I have ever seen --Marlena Compton, Atlassian's newest QA Engineer Marlena is just one of the 24 new hires that we've made at Atlassian in the last 6 months. We were all thrilled to read her blog about how she is tossing out the map and coming to work with us. So far 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:

• 2,500 applications -- That's an increase of over 350% in the number of applicants we usually get. Some of these are currently being processed
• 55 countries -- The applications have come from all around the globe. With so many people coming in from overseas we've decided to make sure with new staff members that we Welcome them to Oz in style
• halved recruitment costs -- We've almost halved our recruitment costs per hire. This is because our referrals from staff and external people almost tripled with our Refer-a-Mate program that offers a $2k cash bonus
• 4% of hires from recruiters -- We caused quite a stir last year when we told recruiters that we would only let them play with us on our terms with our Bounty Hunters program. In the past about 26% of hires came from recruiters. Are the recruiters not playing ball? Or have they just not delivered with any of their applications?
• $5m in new Australian IT jobs -- We've already invested $3m in new IT jobs in Australia in the last 6 months, and expect to invest an additional $2m over the next 6 months.

24 down, 8 more to go On top of that we have added a few more roles in the meantime. We have some very important positions to fill:

• VP of Engineering. Watch the video
• Build Engineers. Watch video
• Senior Product Manager (Confluence)
• Java Developers and more

Do you know anyone who would be a good fit at Atlassian? Refer them to us and earn yourself $2K.

Watch this short video summing up 5 reasons to apply!

Atlassian is still at the beginning of what I think will be a great success story. A lot of that has to do with their products, their culture and their leadership. - Kim Heras, The Next Web

It's been a good Friday here in the Atlassian Sydney office, despite the horrible humidity we got out, threw back a few beers and played some backyard cricket. We also got the good news that Next Web thinks we're not only the 'Best Enterprise Startup' in Australia, but also that they we're 'Most Likely to Change the World'. That's a lot of responsibility for a Friday afternoon!
Next Web talks in particular about the Atlassian Foundation and the partnership that we have with Room to Read. They point out that "It's such a software engineer approach to doing things - find a way to scale your efforts (giving people the tools to influence others) so you get the biggest bang for your buck." It's one of the reasons why we love working with Room to Read. If you've missed it, here are two of the highlights of the Atlassian and Room to Read relationship so far:

• Through our starter license program and the help of all our customers we've sold over $250,000 worth of licenses, all of which has been donated to Room to Read.


• In November and December 2009, the Atlassian Foundation assisted with the Financial Times seasonal appeal by matching readers donations along with companies such as Barclays Capital and Credit Suisse. This saw a whopping $4.3m raised for Room to Read.

What a great way to end the week.

Summit 2010 is just around the corner, and we are full-swing in planning to make this year's event even better than last. As with any event planning, there are deadlines. The most important deadline coming up is the Call for Speakers submissions on 1 Mar.

In last month's newsletter, I asked the question "what would you like to see or learn if you were to attend Summit?" I got 22 responses, and they are so good, we wanted to share them all with you. So, if you want to come to Summit for free, think you might speak, but don't have a topic, browse through these ideas to get your creative juices flowing and submit your topic:

1. Training that includes all the macros that come with Confluence. Different and creative ways of using Confluence on the most basic level without a bunch of plugins.
2. See more possibilities and examples with integration of Crowd, Confluence and JIRA. Learn more about performance optimisations in large instances of Confluence and JIRA in particular.
3. Deployment success stories.
4. Success stories and how JIRA has streamlined company processes.
5. Last year I placed my focus on Confluence. I've convinced my University that JIRA was the way to go to replace our current work order tracking system, so this year I'd like to see a lot of information surrounding that.
6. Practical ways of using the Atlassian portfolio in ways Atlassian did not imagine.
7. Case Studies - how JIRA, Bamboo and the rest of the Atlassian tools have been deployed in different organizations.
8. How others use JIRA and other Atlassian tools, best practices and use cases.
9. Instalation and customization for JIRA in the enterprise. Possibilities for use in NGO organizations - especially free editions, licensing etc. JIRA in virtual, hosted environments with SaaS.
10. Closer look at Atlassian products.
11. Best practices around using the products in different verticals. I can use wordpress for more than a blog, what can I use the Atlassian products for?
12. To get new ideas from speakers ask partners about Atlassian product usage.
13. How to maximize the use of a wiki and how to organize your wiki to allow your users to quickly find the information they need.
14. Advanced JIRA and Confluence workshops.
15. I'm interested in integration of Atlassian products and plugin development.
16. I would like to see/learn how to implement the full suite of Atlassian tools in our development team. It would be great to get a case study/example of someone else (maybe Atlassian) doing this and how the processes/workflows go. All the way from requirements gathering/idea generation in Confluence, ticket creation/prioritization/planning in JIRA, development workflow in JIRA and integration with Crucible/FishEye/Bamboo, etc.
17. Confluence roadmap - what's planned for future releases? Success stories, different use cases. Upgrade advice for moving to the latest version of Confluence - how much testing do other customers do?
18. How Atlassian's culture as a company is reflected in the end results - the products.
19. JIRA plugin development, integration of JIRA and Confluence and how other people are using the apps (live demos would be nice ;)
20. More tips and tricks for JIRA 4.0
21. How the tools work together, reviews of newest and planned features for Confluence and JIRA, and sessions about how other users use the tools.
22. How I might engage my company to use Atlassian tools to do more than just software tracking.