For one night only North Sydney Oval, turned from cricket ground to Atlassian Fairground folly and Twilight Cinema.

Our closest friends and family held the V.I.P passes, opening the gates to a free carnival of inflatable rides and giant lawn games.
The adults ruled the Charlie cornhole, while the kids owned the dinosaur slide and kicked-ass at Giant Jenga.

In between the fun and games, our personal Mr Whippy van made sure all the kids (and kids at heart) had enough ice-cream to keep themselves going until the sun set and the candles started to twinkle.

The smell of buttery popcorn lured the crowd toward the field of beanbags, spotted with low tables laid out with lamps, glow sticks and mountains of sweets.
Amongst the soft and intimate cinema setting, our family and friends cuddled up in their blankets, hotdogs in hand to enjoy Pixar’s ‘Brave’ under the stars.

Watch all the days fun here to see for yourself how Atlassian builds with heart and balance <3

The problem of multiple account silos is common across the technology domain, yet is a surprisingly difficult one to resolve. It starts with a simple requirement: “We want to use the same login for multiple systems.”

But what sounds easy on the surface can quickly evolve into a complex blend of concerns across technology, data migration and separate functional teams. As a project manager for Atlassian’s Internal Systeam team, I learned this the hard way.

So I am pleased to be able to outline the process and technology solution we used as part of this project, in the hopes that it will mitigate some of the headaches in delivering similar initiatives.

Welcome to a Behind the Scenes look at the creation of Atlassian ID.

Challenges and Learnings

Before diving into the solution and design process, I will comment on some of the key challenges (both technical and non-) and learnings. Our biggest challenges were:

• Multiple teams. By its nature the project required engagement across a number of functional groups within Atlassian. This was made somewhat easier than in most organisations due to Atlassian’s fast moving pace and can-do-it culture, but it was also a double-edged sword. Once we had agreement with the teams, it was necessary to keep up with them as they powered ahead providing new services and capabilities on their system.
• Availability. Having one user base for all your applications can be effectively like putting all your eggs in one basket. You don’t want that basket to break. Availability was a significant challenge to tackle throughout the solution.
• Customer migration. This was a big one. We had seven systems and a large user base that had been diverging for over 10 years. You name the scenario… we had it.

What did we learn from the process? What stood out were:

• Data migration is hard. I have learnt this a couple of times previously in my experience but I was once again reminded. Data migration is hard and always takes more effort than you think. Plan it out…then double.
• SSO is important. From a technical perspective there is an urge to dismiss this as unimportant. The reality is that SSO is hard. It raises a number of security and distributed ‘state’ concerns that need to be dealt with. The alternate argument is that all browsers remember usernames and passwords, meaning only one additional click for users. Surely a single username and password rather than SSO is ‘good enough?’ More often than not the answer is ‘no.’ By giving away SSO you are sacrificing the ability to really provide a seamless customer experience. In addition, you are losing additional technical capabilities that can be extremely useful. The primary one I would cite is the ability to produce finer grained application or services that can act together to form a larger site (micro-sites/services). The ability to divide your applications into a number of smaller modules has significant benefits for maintenance and development speed.
• Authentication is complex. It is quite amazing how complicated a simple concept such as authentication can become, this domain is littered with many different (and often competing) standards and options for implementation. We dealt with a handful of these methods including your standard web based login pages, OpenID, BASIC-AUTH and some other custom authentication mechanisms including of course the Seraph connector (used by Confluence and JIRA).  There are many others and it is an area to tread with caution.
• Design patterns are good. Implementing without a reference architecture is equivalent to exploring uncharted territory, you never know what is going to happen. Having a good design pattern is like having a map with all the pit-falls and dangerous areas to avoid highlighted. If possible always find a relevant design pattern.

Our Solution

We had seven systems that were immediately in scope for the project, each owned by a different business unit here at Atlassian. So the first step was to understand the immediate and potential future requirements of each of these systems and units. They boiled down to the following key requirements:

• Single sign-on (SSO). The ability to sign-on once and access multiple applications without the need to re-authenticate.
• User aliasing. The ability to ‘harmonize’ non-uniform local user identifiers by the means of aliasing or mapping, i.e., username brendan on system A is the same user as bhaire on system B. This was an important capability in relation to legacy users and migration as it meant we could onboard systems to the solution without imposing the need to rename user accounts on the target system.
• Central identity management. The ability to capture, store and manage user identity information centrally.
• Provisioning. The ability to push user identity events across multiple applications e.g. New User, Updated Profile.
• Federated authentication - The ability to provide authentication services to a 3rd party system external to Atlassian, e.g., OpenID, SAML based auth styles.

We used Crowd to form the backbone of the solution, and extended it using the Interceptor or Gateway architecture pattern. We also settled on SCIM as a standard for the identity management space. The final solution is one that can be used to provide the access and identity management services both to JIRA and Confluence applications as well as commercial off the shelf (COTS), open source and home grown applications.

I’ve got great news for you: JIRA 6.0 is coming soon!  Amongst many great new features, this release of JIRA will support bulk watching of issues.

Atlassian has a public JIRA instance, jira.atlassian.com, where we get a massive amount of feedback from our customers.  When making decision about how to evolve a product like JIRA, the product managers consider a wide variety of factors: customer content, community forums, support, Atlassian Experts, in-product feedback, as well as votes and issues from jira.atlassian.com.  We heard y’all loud and clear on JRA-2429: Bulk Watch.  That single issue has 229 votes!

So, how will you be able to bulk watch issues in JIRA 6?

First, Subscribe

Subscriptions and bulk watch go hand in hand to keep you connected to JIRA.  Subscriptions keep you abreast of a large set of issues, while bulk watch keeps you informed about all the small updates.  Let’s walk through a simple example to see how these features work hand in hand.

• Subscriptions let you stay on top of a large set of related issues. You can subscribe to any filter in JIRA, and you’ll be emailed a consolidated version of those issues.
• Bulk watch lets you subscribe to individual notifications for each issue at once.

You are a development manager with a program nearing release.  You want to be notified when someone files a blocker or critical issue.  You can create a filter in JIRA that matches those criteria.

Let’s set up a simple filter in the Issue Navigator.  In JIRA, click Issues->Search for Issues from the menu bar.

In this example we are looking for all open issues for the JIRA project that are blocking or critical for version 6.0. We then save this search as a filter. If we click details, we can then subscribe to that filter.

Whenever a new issue matches that filter, JIRA will email you.  You can set notifications to whatever period you want. For example, you can make sure the list of critical issues are in your inbox every morning.  As new issues come in, you can decide if you want to watch them to follow all the issue traffic.

Now, Bulk Watch

Watching an issue notifies you of any changes to that issue.  In JIRA 5.0.3 we enabled autowatch by default.  This feature adds anyone who comments on an issue as a watcher.   As a development manager nearing release I want to get detailed notifications on some key issues in my program.  In prior versions of JIRA you’d have to find each issue individually and watch it.  Now you can do so in bulk. Using our filter above, we can use the bulk change feature to watch a set of issues.

The first step in the bulk change wizard is to choose the issues from the filter results you want to change.  It’s OK if your search is a bit broad.  As the development manager I may only want to watch most, but not all of the issues that match my search.  In the bulk change wizard it’s easy to opt out of some of the issues.  When you press next, the highly voted option appears!

With two more clicks you will become a watcher on all the issues selected in the prior step.  Pretty cool, aye?

WARNING: While bulk watching issues is useful, it can also generate a lot of email traffic.  Once you no longer need to watch an issue, you can bulk stop watching issues to ensure that JIRA is only sending detailed emails on the issues you care about.

This is only one of the great new features in JIRA 6. Be the first to find out when JIRA 6 is released.   Sign up for the JIRA Insiders Email!

Subscribe

Are there alternatives? The answer is: yes! There are (at least) two tools that can help track the history of software dependencies in your project while allowing you to keep using git:

• git subtree
• google repo

In this post I will be looking at git subtree and show why it is an improvement – albeit not perfect – over git submodule.

As a working example I run to my usual use case. How do I easily store and keep up to date the vim plugins used in my dotfiles?

Why use subtree instead of submodule?

There are several reasons why you might find subtree better to use:

• Management of a simple workflow is easy.
• Older version of git are supported (even before v1.5.2).
• The sub-project’s code is available right after the clone of the super project is done.
• subtree does not require users of your repository to learn anything new, they can ignore the fact that you are using subtree to manage dependencies.
• subtree does not add new metadata files like submodules doe (i.e. .gitmodule).
• Contents of the module can be modified without having a separate repository copy of the dependency somewhere else.

In my opinion the drawbacks are acceptable:

• You must learn about a new merge strategy (i.e. subtree).
• Contributing code back upstream for the sub-projects is slightly more complicated.
• The responsibility of not mixing super and sub-project code in commits lies with you.

How to use git subtree?

git subtree is available in stock version of git available since May 2012 – 1.7.11+. The version installed by homebrew on OSX already has subtree properly wired but on some platforms you might need to follow the installation instructions.

Let me show you the canonical example of tracking a vim plug-in using git subtree.

The quick and dirty way without remote tracking

If you just want a couple of one liners to cut and paste just read this paragraph.

First add the subtree at a specified prefix folder:

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git subtree add --prefix .vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround https://bitbucket.org/vim-plugins-mirror/vim-surround.git master --squash

(The common practice is to not store the entire history of the sub-project in your main repository, but If you want to preserve it just omit the –squash flag.)

The above command produces this output:

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git fetch https://bitbucket.org/vim-plugins-mirror/vim-surround.git master

warning: no common commits

remote: Counting objects: 338, done.

remote: Compressing objects: 100% (145/145), done.

remote: Total 338 (delta 101), reused 323 (delta 89)

Receiving objects: 100% (338/338), 71.46 KiB, done.

Resolving deltas: 100% (101/101), done.

From https://bitbucket.org/vim-plugins-mirror/vim-surround.git

* branch            master     -} FETCH_HEAD

Added dir '.vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround'

As you can see this records a merge commit by squashing the whole history of the vim-surround repository into a single one:

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1bda0bd [3 minutes ago] (HEAD, stree) Merge commit 'ca1f4da9f0b93346bba9a430c889a95f75dc0a83' as '.vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround' [Nicola Paolucci]

ca1f4da [3 minutes ago] Squashed '.vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround/' content from commit 02199ea [Nicola Paolucci]

If after a while you want to update the code of the plugin from the upstream repository you can just subtree pull:

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git subtree pull --prefix .vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround https://bitbucket.org/vim-plugins-mirror/vim-surround.git master --squash

This is very quick and painless but the commands are slightly lengthy and hard to remember. We can make the commands shorter by adding the sub-project as a remote.

Adding the sub-project as a remote

Adding the subtree as a remote allows us to refer to it in shorter form:

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git remote add -f tpope-vim-surround https://bitbucket.org/vim-plugins-mirror/vim-surround.git

Now we can add the subtree (as before), but now we can refer to the remote in short form:

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git subtree add --prefix .vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround tpope-vim-surround master --squash

The command to update the sub-project at a later date becomes:

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git fetch tpope-vim-surround master

git subtree pull --prefix .vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround tpope-vim-surround master --squash

Contributing back to upstream

We can freely commit our fixes to the sub-project in our local working directory now.

When it’s time to contribute back to the upstream project we need to fork the project and add it as another remote:

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git remote add durdn-vim-surround ssh://git@bitbucket.org/durdn/vim-surround.git

Now we can use the subtree push command like the following:

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git subtree push --prefix=.vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround/ durdn-vim-surround master



git push using:  durdn-vim-surround master

Counting objects: 5, done.

Delta compression using up to 4 threads.

Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.

Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 308 bytes, done.

Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)

To ssh://git@bitbucket.org/durdn/vim-surround.git

  02199ea..dcacd4b  dcacd4b21fe51c9b5824370b3b224c440b3470cb -} master

After this we’re ready and we can open a pull-request to the maintainer of the package.

Without using the subtree command

git subtree is different from the subtree merge strategy. You can still use the merge strategy even if for some reason git subtree is not available. Here is how you would go about it:

Add the dependency as a simple git remote:

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git remote add -f tpope-vim-surround https://bitbucket.org/vim-plugins-mirror/vim-surround.git

Before reading the contents of the dependency into the repository it’s important to record a merge so that we can track the entire tree history of the plug-in up to this point:

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git merge -s ours --no-commit tpope-vim-surround/master

Which outputs:

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Automatic merge went well; stopped before committing as requested

We then read the content of the latest tree-object in the plugin repository into our working directory ready to be committed:

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git read-tree --prefix=.vim/bundle/tpope-vim-surround/ -u tpope-vim-surround/master

Now we can commit (and it will be a merge commit that will preserve the history of the tree we read):

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git ci -m"[subtree] adding tpope-vim-surround"



[stree 779b094] [subtree] adding tpope-vim-surround

When we want to update the project we can now pull using the subtree merge strategy:

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git pull -s subtree tpope-vim-surround master

Conclusions

After having used submodule for a while I appreciate git subtree much more, lots of submodule problems are superseded and solved by subtree. As usual, with all things git, there is a learning curve to make the most of the feature.

Follow me @durdn and the awesome @AtlDevtools team for more Git rocking.

What We Need From You

1. Download your favorite distribution. Along the way you’ll be asked for your email address. This tell us how many people are actually participating vs. how many indicated interest, which helps us plan for future beta programs, and ensures we have an open line of communication with each participant.
2. Learn about the benefits that Deployment Projects, the foundation of Bamboo 5.0′s new deployment capabilities, have to offer your team.
3. Install Bamboo 5.0 and start exploring! You can set up a test instance and import a copy of your Bamboo data (If you need a new license, you can get a evaluation license from my.atlassian.com). We’re especially interested in the setup process, so if you remember to note how that goes for you, we’d love to hear about it.
4. Look for an initial survey from us about 1-2 days after you download and install–should take five minutes or less.
5. As you’re using the beta, relay your thoughts about things you like or dislike by clicking the “Feedback for Bamboo 5 Beta” button, found at the top of each page.
6. Look for a second survey after you’ve been using the beta for about a week. Again, shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

What We’ll Provide in Return

1. Participants who step through both surveys will get a nerd-tastic Bamboo t-shirt.
2. Our product owner and user-experience specialist will follow up personally with as many participants as possible to dig deeper into the aspects of Bamboo 5 that you don’t love (yet).
3. The development team will prioritize their work between now and release time based on your feedback.
4. A final release of Bamboo 5 that is tailored for our users, by our users.
5. Our eternal gratitude n’ stuff 

Ready… Steady… DEPLOY!

We’re excited to usher in a whole new era of build & deploy orchestration with Bamboo 5, and can’t wait to hear from you!

Download the beta

1. Creating content

This one’s a no-brainer. The must fundamental thing you do in Confluence is create content you need to get work done. Here’s the fastest way to create content, without touching your mouse.

Create new content by pressing:

Then select what you want to create:

If you’re anything like me sometimes you don’t want the structure of a Confluence Blueprint or page template, instead you want the freedom of a blank page. No sweat.

Create a blank page by pressing:

2. Editing content

You’re not always creating content from scratch in Confluence. More often than not, you’re updating a page you’ve already created or contributing to someone else’s work. For that, there’s one key – e.

Edit an existing page by pressing:

3. Saving content

Finished making edits? There’s still no need to touch your mouse. You’re just two keystrokes away from publishing your changes to a page or adding a comment to a page.

Save edits and post comments to pages by pressing:

Using Windows or Linux? Just sub ‘⌘’ for ‘control’

4. Sharing content

There are times you need to make sure your team sees a particular page. There’s a shortcut for that too.

 Share pages with co-workers by pressing:

Then enter the names of co-workers or any email address:

5. Finding content

This one’s my favorite. It’s quick to find content – pages, blog posts, file attachments, and people – and navigate to other Confluence spaces using Quick Navigation.

Search for content by pressing:

Start typing to find what you’re looking for:

Shortcut for more shortcuts?

You bet. These are just 5 of the many shortcuts I use in Confluence every day to help me get my work done, faster.

View a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in Confluence by pressing:

What’s your favorite keyboard shortcut?

Try Confluence for FREE

So what’s our secret?

Start small and think long-term.

We reached this milestone in increments of just $10 through our unique ‘starter licensing program‘ or Causium model (the mash-up of freemium with a ’cause’) where teams of ten users or less can purchase our software for $10/month and then the revenue is donated to charity. Since 2009, the program has more than doubled, generating more than $2.5 million in charitable donations. Our Causium program is part of our larger philanthropic endeavors known as the Atlassian Foundation, through which we donate one percent of profits, employee time and equity to charity.

Focused on giving youth of the world access to a world-class education to break the poverty cycle, the Atlassian Foundation was founded in 2008 and has now donated more than 1,500 hours of employee volunteer time and $3 million in donations to various charities around the world. The $2.5 million in donations to Room to Read have empowered the non-profit to positively impact the lives of nearly 90,000 children, mostly in Cambodia, by giving them access to education. The funds, which support literacy and gender equality, have built more than 150 libraries and six schools, sponsored 1,500 girls to attend school, published 10 new local language books, and enabled much-needed renovations. Atlassian is the original donor of the Reading and Writing pilot in Cambodia.

“This is a huge milestone for the Atlassian Foundation and a wonderful example of how powerful our Causium model can be,” said Jeremy Largman, who helps lead the Atlassian Foundation. “By making donations of just $10 at a time, we’ve made a huge impact on an important issue at a global level. By making small changes and thinking long-term, there’s no reason why every business can’t give back and support its community on important causes.”

Room to Read is just one of nine education-focused charities that the Atlassian Foundation supports, including four near both our US and Sydney offices. Several months ago, we awarded four SF-based charities with grants of up to $10,000 in order to increase our impact on our local community. We’ve also donated more than $350,000 to the Sydney-based Social Ventures Australia, which currently supports AIME, CareerTrackers & Beacon. As Atlassian continues to grow, we’ll continue to uphold our pledge to give back to our community and look for more ways to expand the impact of our philanthropic efforts.

Come celebrate and learn more about this growing trend at our “Causium in Action” event

We’re celebrating this milestone by hosting a joint event with Room to Read on Tuesday, May 14 at our San Francisco office. The event will feature a panel discussion with Room to Read Founder John Wood, Atlassian’s vice president of corporate development Jose Morales and knowledge management program manager Jeremy Largman talking about the success of Atlassian’s unique model. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join!

RSVP now!

Check out our article on Fast Company!

]]> http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/its-official-atlassians-causium-model-has-produced-more-than-2-5-million-in-donations-to-room-to-read/feed/ 0 http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/its-official-atlassians-causium-model-has-produced-more-than-2-5-million-in-donations-to-room-to-read/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AllAtlassianBlogs/~3/mrYxCdv-KQw/ http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/how-to-manage-complex-versioned-content-in-confluence/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 15:00:31 +0000 Dave Meyer http://blogs.atlassian.com/?p=25293

This is a guest post from K15t Software, Atlassian Experts and makers of Scroll Office, Scroll Versions, Scroll PDF Exporter, and many other Confluence add-ons.

If you manage complex content in Confluence, Scroll Versions is a must-have add-on for keeping your Confluence instance organized. With it, you can manage concurrent versions of pages or product documentation in one space, enhance content-reuse, improve SEO, and now publish to an existing Confluence space!

We’ve taken all the customer feedback we’ve received since we launched Scroll Versions last year, and today we’re proud to announce what’s new in Scroll Versions 2.0.

Page Info Panel

Scroll Versions introduced the “Page Info Panel” and in Versions 2.0, we’ve overhauled it completely. Its primary function is still to select the working version in which you are making changes, but it now also provides all the important information you need to know about the current page, including:

• A list of all page versions
• Which variants of the page are available
• Where it has been reused
• Where it has been published

But the best thing: It’s fun to work with! We’ve incorporated the Atlassian Design Guidelines to give it an awesome look and feel. (My personal favorite: you can now double-click to expand and collapse the page info panel.)

Variant Management

Variant Management is especially important when you need to document slightly different variations of the same product or service. It’s necessary to define which content is relevant, in the right context, to the right users.

So we allow you to get content attributes at the page level or within pages (using the new Conditional Content macro), and variants define which attributes are required to make the content relevant to a variant.

See the Variant Management feature in action:

The one thing we heard loud and clear is that you’re looking for a way to share all the tips and tricks out there with the rest of your colleagues. Enter the JIRA Tutorials YouTube playlist!

This playlist is where we keep our best up-to-date tutorials showing off keyboard shortcuts, tips about searches and filters, and killer admin tips like editing the set of workflows in your project. And if you’re keen to get tips and tricks straight in your inbox, sign up for the JIRA Insiders email list!

Sign up for JIRA Insiders

Ever since the initial release we’ve been heads down making improvements to the Confluence Blueprints experience. Here are two of the many improvements available to Confluence OnDemand customers today:

1. Add viewing restrictions to your File Lists

The File List Blueprint makes it easy to create a list of files that teams need to get their work done. You can use File Lists to give all your employees one place to find approved company graphics and logos, download the latest version of sales and marketing presentations, and store all documents related to a particular project. Features like drag-and-drop file sharing, automatic versioning, instant previews, and full-text search make for a powerful case to ditch your shared network drive.

While making files and documents more accessible and easier to find will undoubtedly boost your team’s productivity, there are times when you need to restrict the viewing of certain files to individual co-workers or groups. Now you can.

2. Define custom page titles and location for new pages

Blueprints are more than page templates. When you create a page using a Blueprint, Confluence automatically organizes your Meeting Notes, File Lists, and Product Requirements in each space under ‘index pages’. Automatically generated Space Shortcuts in the Space Sidebar provide quick access to these index pages so teams have one place to find the work they need to get their jobs done. From any index page a user can create new Meeting Notes, File Lists, or Product Requirements in a single-click.

Creating new Blueprints from index pages is made easy using the ‘Create from template’ macro. While this macro was originally created for use on Blueprints index pages, it’s possible to use it on any Confluence page. We’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining other business practices, such as creating project plans.

Two new parameters, editable in the Macro Browser, allow you to define dynamic page titles and can specify which space the page is created in to help everyone keep content organized in one place no matter what space they are working from.

Try it Today

Using OnDemand?

You’ve been auto-updated –  log in and make use of the new improvements now!

Using Confluence Download?

We’re currently working to make these improvements available to you via plugins that need updating in the Universal Plugin Manager in the Confluence Administration Console. Please stay tuned and we’ll let you know as soon as they are ready.

New to Confluence?

Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free 30-day Confluence OnDemand trial.