Check out the Atlassian Stimulus Package!

$5 / 5 days – get…

• JIRA ( Issue tracker – 5 users )
• Confluence ( Wiki – 5 users )

So for a whopping $10 you can have an enterprise level bug tracking and documentation system in place!

They are raising money for Room To Read…

Who help improve education in the developing world by establishing libraries, schools and more.

This was announced on Monday and they’ve already reached their $25,000 goal!

On the Atlassian Developer blog Adrian Hempel has a nice write up on how you can  Setup Jira and Confluence in Minutes by running in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  

On our wiki I’m trying to avoid using it as a document repository (Sharepoint) and have encouraged people to convert Word documents to a page versus simply attaching a document.

Confluence makes this relatively easy!  Hit the Tools menu and click “Doc Import”.

Doc Import

You will be presented with a simple upload field.

Upload

After browsing and selecting your document you can select the “Advanced” button which allows you to fine tune your import:

Import Options

And finally your imported document!

Imported Document

I have found importing simple docs works fairly well.  The more formatting and Word specific features (tables, etc) present the less reliable the import will be but it will still give you a head start on getting the content into Confluence.

Got one of those co-workers who just HAS to kill a tree?

Confluence can help!

OK. So Atlassian probably didn’t create this feature to kill trees – imagine  during development you can enter all your documentation in Confluence then easily dump it all out and provide it to your customer at the end! You can easily export an entire space in various formats.

Lets take a look at how easy this is to do in Confluence…

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Another quick Confluence tip.  I’m often adding pages to the wiki and want to let my team now about them so I send out a URL in email.  Often this can be very long depending on the name of the page.

Instead of using a third party URL shortening tool like Snurl or TinyURL you can get a short link from Confluence!

First click Tools then Info from the drop down:

Click Tools > Info

You will get a page with all sorts of info on your page – including a “Tiny Link”:

Short Link

You can easily cut-n-paste this into emails!

In addition to JIRA (which is our bug tracking system) I’ve been working on getting Confluence (wiki) setup as part of our knowledge management system.  We have Sharepoint but I find that a real pain to use for anything other than document storage.

As I get things setup I thought I’d post on some features of Confluence you may not be aware of – today I’ll cover how to get Confluence to send you a daily email with what has been updated.  Very nice when you are trying to grow your wiki!

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