Atlassian on CNBC Power Lunch

Atlassian, the maker of Confluence & JIRA was featured recently on the CNBC – US National TV for a short interview.

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

Publishing a knowledge Base Article with a wiki workflow

Last month, I shared a blogpost (How to enable active collaboration with your wiki) to share the benefits of using workflows together with wiki.

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 Named 2011 Technology Pioneer at World Economic Forum

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

How to enable active collaboration with your wiki

What a wiki cannot do

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.

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