I've had many recent studio customers ask me about running my plugins in their studio instance.
The questions/requests are at many different levels. Some want to know if it's possible to get 3rd party plugins installed, some want to know if the pricing is the same, and some have gotten the plugins installed only to find out they don't work.
Maybe there should be more discussion around studio and plugins. These are some topics I'd like to hear about:
Debugging Customer Issues
Customers don't really have much of an option right now. They can submit support tickets to Atlassian, but only the customer and Atlassian can see the ticket. As a plugin vendor, I'd have to request access to the ticket via another Atlassian support ticket. If I finally do get access and then need a jira log or something, I have to request it, wait for someone to get the log from Contegix and post it in the issue. This seems like a lot of wasted middle-man work. There's got to be a way to streamline this.
Studio Test Instance
In studio, things don't work exactly like the standalone apps. For instance, the soap APIs don't exist, and instead the apps use a trusted connection. This means that plugins that communicate cross-product will need to be refactored into a "studio" version. And I'm sure there are other differences as well. As a plugin vendor, it would be nice to be able to test my plugins in a test instace of studio somewhere.
Studio Certified
Due to the issues above, it would be nice if there was some way for customers to tell which plugins have been verified to work in studio and which have not.
Help on Pricing
Someone who is using a 5 user instance of studio may get sticker shock if they see a plugin is priced at $1000. It doesn't make sense that they would have to buy the plugin outright instead of "renting" it the way they are "renting" studio. It would be awesome if there was a way for customers to choose plugins and have a small additional fee attached to their monthly bill. Of course, if it was my plugin, I'd want to receive that additional fee from Atlassian. 
Feel free to add/comment!
4 Comments
Hide/Show CommentsOct 07, 2010
Fabian Lopez
Jonathan,
Excellent point!
I asked the same question during the last Atlassian Summit. As a customer I have the same situation and during the evaluation of the solution for one of our associated companies we had to propose a standalone environment instead of Studio. They have the same issues due to the dependency or desire of using some key plugins.
Oct 07, 2010
Petur Agustsson
We where faced with both these issues in the process of making our plug-in available for Studio. We had to rely on network of early addapters for about 6 months, but when it came for to test then of course we had to work our own Studio instance, however we face few problems perhaps because our plugin is plugins 2.0. But then of course there are questions moving on not having to maintain multiple versions.
In regards of pricing that we have debated and our strategy, but was finally based on migration so if somebody wants to use our Tempo plug-in in there JIRA or Studio the price should be similar otherwise we are going to have complex upgrade matrix. However that is not the only problem, dealing with developer/collaborator license and matching them into one license was another decision point. Finally we had to make a decisions that will hopefully be good for the 80% of users.
Cheers
Petur
Tempo Plugin
Oct 07, 2010
Alex Loddengaard [Atlassian]
Hi Jonathan, thanks for sharing your experience with plugins in studio. Excellent thoughts and feedback. One neat thing Salesforce does with their applications is a one-click trial, where with the click of a link a customer can try out an application to learn if it'll be useful for them.
Let's chat more in person at AtlasCamp, guys. Perhaps we can have a discussion after the licensing roundtable?
Looking forward to meeting you all.
Alex
Oct 07, 2010
Stefan Kleineikenscheidt
We have similar issues with supporting Scroll Office. So: I would like to join that discussion, too.
-Stefan