$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).  

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.

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…

Hit your Browse navigation and go to the Advanced item:

Browse > Advanced

Click “Export Space” (sounds like a SciFi Channel ‘made for TV’ movie)

Export Space

Now you will be presented with a host of options – first select your format:

Select Export Format

Next you can configure what pages you want to export:

Select Pages To Export

Once you have everything configured click “Export” and Confluence will crunch away and generate the desired documents.

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!

While individuals can add a ‘watch’ to pages or spaces I wanted to know EVERYTHING that was being edited.  Turns out Confluence makes this very easy – though the option is a bit buried.

First navigate to your “Preferences” – this is done via the top navigation menu:

Open your preferences

Next – “Edit Profile”:

Click Edit Profile

Click “Email”

Email settings

Now you can select what and how you want to be notified:

1. Select “Subscribe to daily update”
2. Select your mail format
3. Click Save

Subscribe to daily updates

Done!

Now every morning you will get an email with ALL changes made to your wiki.  Note you will only see changes to spaces you have permission – I’m an admin so I can see everything :)