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Welcome to the latest Atlassian newsletter. We know we promised you that these would be monthly - 9 months ago. Our only excuse is that we've been busily working hard all that time!

This month we have some tips for users, the usual latest product announcements, links to new documentation, an interview with Bob McWhirter of Codehaus fame and more. We hope this newsletter is of interest - if you have any feedback at all, please do let us know by emailing legendaryservice@atlassian.com with your thoughts.

Enjoy!

Thanks (until next month),
The Atlassian Team

In This Issue

Tips For Users

Using Confluence and JIRA Together

JIRA and Confluence were designed to complement each other. We've all seen projects where people try to store all their knowledge in the issue-tracker, and we've seen projects where people have suffered trying to track issues in a knowledge-management tool. We say: collect your team's thoughts, plans and knowledge in Confluence, track your issues in JIRA, and let the two applications work together to help you get your job done. Read more about using JIRA and Confluence together here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/CQs

JIRA Tip #1: Quick-Search

In JIRA 2.6, the quick-search in the top right hand corner of each page has got a lot smarter. The search queries recognise project keys, issue types and issue statuses. A search like "JRA open bugs" will find all open isues in the JRA project that are classified as bugs, while "my JRA open bugs" will find those that are assigned to you.

JIRA Tip #2: Hot-Keys

After performing a search in JIRA 2.7, alt-p and alt-n will take you to the previous and next search results respectively, while alt-f will return you to the full search results page. (OS X Safari users will need to use ctrl instead of alt)

Confluence Tip #1: The {rss} Macro

More and more applications are sharing information in the RSS format these days. The {rss} macro allows you to embed these feeds into a Confluence webpage. Use this macro to create a "portal" page in Confluence that summarises information from many different sources.

Confluence Tip #2: Make a Staging Space

Want to keep documents out of sight before they are ready for public view? Because Confluence makes it easy to move pages between spaces, it's simple to create a private space for staging unfinished documents, and then move them into the public space when they are ready.

Watch This Space!

Confluence and JIRA are big applications: sometimes even we are surprised by some useful feature we hadn't noticed before. To help you get the most out of them, we will periodically post tips, tricks and pointers to features you may not have noticed online. For defails on how to subscribe to these tips by email or RSS, look here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/Ghw

Product Announcements

Confluence 1.2

"Confluence Rules the Known World."

That's just one comment we've received from a customer about Confluence, our new knowledge management product. If you haven't tried Confluence yet, you should check it out. It combines the best concepts from wikis and weblogs with the professional functionality you expect from Atlassian, giving you a great way for your team to share information, collaborate and brainstorm.

This week saw the release of Confluence 1.2: the second major update since the release of 1.0 in March. New in 1.2 are improved space-level navigation, a massively enhanced search interface to help you find your information, overhauled user permissioning, threaded comments, automatic image thumbnailing, and much more.

Read more about Confluence: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
Read the Confluence 1.2 release notes: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/rhs

JIRA 3.0

JIRA 3.0 will be the second major JIRA overhaul (after 2.x) will be the biggest single release in Atlassian's short history. There are over 400 bug fixes and new features included in this release, as well as a great many changes "under the hood" that make JIRA even more flexible and powerful than before.

Preview Release

JIRA 3.0 Preview is available today. Please note that this is not a production release, but a chance for you to provide your feedback on the new features that will be available soon. While we do not recommend that you use JIRA 3.0 in production, we do suggest that you try migrating your data to this preview release. This will help you find the areas where your current data is incompatible with JIRA 3.0 - ensuring any issues you encounter will be fixed prior to the final release and your production migration will be as painless as possible.

Read more about the JIRA 3.0 Preview Release: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/bhs
Read the JIRA 3.0 Release Notes: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/Pxw

New "Standard Edition"

Previously, there was a large gap between the Professional and Enterprise editions of JIRA. With 3.0, we will be introducing a new 'Standard' edition of JIRA and moving the Professional edition towards the Enterprise to provide a better spread of options for customers.

Read more about the different editions of JIRA: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/aBw

Atlassian Non-Profit and Open Source Initiative

Did you know that Atlassian now offers free licenses of its award winning software to qualifying non-profit organisations and open source projects?

If you are interested in this unique offer, please complete one of our applications online:

Atlassian strongly believes in Open Source software and its potential to produce lower cost, higher quality software for businesses everywhere. We support and contribute to the Open Source community in a number of ways - from supplying our own code, to supporting other projects. Our staff write lots of Open Source code, both on their free time and on company time. As well as sponsoring the OpenSymphony project's website, we have also released three open source modules on our http://opensource.atlassian.com site that may be of interest:

Atlassian News

Atlassian @ WWDC 2004

In case you didn't notice, Atlassian exhibited at the recent Apple WWDC 2004 in San Francisco at the end of June. The event was a big success, and we met a lot of new and existing customers both at WWDC, and across the road at JavaOne. A big thankyou to everyone for stopping by the booth and saying hello!

Atlassian has recently become overrun by Powerbooks, and we couldn't resist putting up this page just before we left for WWDC to introduce Mac users to our software: http://www.atlassian.com/apple/

Inaugural User Gathering

Also, while we were in San Francisco, we held the inaugural Atlassian User Gathering, at which some lucky attendees got to see a demonstration of new features in upcoming versions of JIRA and Confluence, and provide us with some welcome feedback, face-to-face. Another, even bigger thank you to everyone who turned up to let us know how we were doing, and what we could do better.

Brochures Now Available

JIRA and Confluence brochures are now available. These colourful flyers provide a product overview and customer testimonials. If you're trying to win over colleagues or management to try to buy one of our products, these might just do the trick. Alternatively, they make a nice conversation-starter at parties, and are perfect for printing out and leaving randomly on tables in bars and cafes.

Download our brochures: http://www.atlassian.com/brochures/

Can you think of an interesting use for our brochures? Send your ideas (preferably with photographic evidence) to: legendaryservice@atlassian.com

New Documentation

JIRA

Confluence

Wiki/Blog of the Moment: JavaPolis

JavaPolis is a Java conference that is being held in Belgium, December 13-17, and is endorsed by some of Europe's top Java User Groups. We have always been impressed by their integrity and leadership in the Java space, and now seeing what they've done with their new Wiki, we had to give them a plug here in our Wiki/Blog of the moment (and not just because they're using Confluence, either).

You can see their wiki and blogs here: http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP04/Home

The Atlassian Interview: Bob McWhirter of the Codehaus

The Codehaus has quickly emerged as a place to find some really useful open-source tools such as the Groovy programming language, the DamageControl continuous build system, AspectWerkz and Nanning for AOP, and of course PicoContainer, which now forms the backbone of JIRA.
They also use JIRA for their issue-tracking, and have done some really interesting work integrating Confluence with their public website.

Mike Cannon-Brookes conducted this interview with Codehaus founder Bob McWhirter by email, late at night.

Give me the two minute elevator pitch on codehaus. What does it do, how did it start etc? What's your role?

I've been active in the open-source community for ages, and had hosted my own projects under the auspices of The Werken Company. Others, such as Martin van den Bemt and his Xulux project, were also using my server for their projects. So, in early 2003, we rebranded the open-source efforts on my server from Werken to the Codehaus to make it clearer that not all of the projects were my own.

Read the rest of the interview: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/Tx0