Kickass agile development suite by Atlassian
A few days ago Atlassian, the developers of respectable products like Jira and Confluence, released their *complete suite under a new starter licensing model ($10 each component) [1]. Basically you get a whole web based development system on the cheap. I am not talking about small isolated tools here. These tools are used by the big guys in the industry.
With Jira you get a bug tracking system that is extremly flexible and can be adapted to a variety of specialised applications featuring a workflow based approach. If this sounds like an empty marketing phrase – rest assured it is not. It is really that flexible and has many hooks where external systems can be attached. Also the community produced an assload of plugins to extend Jira further.
My main focus however is Confluence. This is the enterprise wiki from Atlassian that is quite frankly the best wiki software available period. Due to my current job and out of personal interest, I have been in contact with many wiki systems, approaching them both from the users and administrators perspective. Even the actual fork of Twiki called Foswiki which can be described as the best available opensource wiki product, doesen’t even come close to Confluence. I won’t go into detail here because I am still at the beginning regarding Confluence, but what I have seen so far, really blows my mind.
Together with Crowd, the single sign-on identity management software (again from Atlassian) one can build an easy to administer integrated ecosystem. And that is not all. Bamboo (continuous integration server) and Fisheye (source repository frontend) complement it.
It took me two hours to set up Crowd and Confluence under Gentoo Linux. I followed their highly amusing “Dragon Slayer” quest [2]. I am looking forward to work with Confluence and arrange my knowledge and the knowledge of those in my vicinity in interesting new ways. I will hit the 10 user limit soon for sure but that’s another story…
Why I wrote this? Pure enthusiams, that’s all. Im not payed by Atlassian to penetrate the blogsphere with fake positive reviews. I am happy that I have found something I like very much where I can live out my compulsive urge to organize informations 
* Clover and Crucible were left out of the starter pack
[1] http://www.atlassian.com/starter
[2] http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ATLAS/Here+Be+Dragons
Hi Stefan,
Du hast diesen Link vergessen:
http://confluence.seibert-media.net
Und eigentlich auch den hier:
http://jira-einfuehrung.seibert-media.net/
Ciao
Martin Seibert
Hi,
das war “leider” Absicht. Ich wollte dem kleinen Artikel keinen komerziellen Touch geben. Sollten sich aber Anfragen ergeben weisst du genau dass ich das an dich weiter leite
Hi,
You forgot to mention GreenHopper, also available as a 10 user for $10 Starter license. GreenHopper is an agile project management tool that you may wish to have a look at.
Glad you like Confluence. Keep us posted on your thoughts.
Thanks,
Nicholas Muldoon
Product Manager – GreenHopper
Atlassian
Indeed. But for me Greenhopper is tied to Jira. Can’t remember using Jira without it
Great to hear that you are digging Confluence! What are you guys using it for specifically?
If you have any questions feel free to hit me up on Twitter – @ConfluenceGuru
You may also like to subscribe to our brand spanking new Confluence Product Blog – http://blogs.atlassian.com/confluence/
Cheers,
Matt
Confluence Product Marketing Specialist
Atlassian
I am using it for three things. First Confluence for my personal knowledge management system – I still don’t get it why most people don’t use wikis – I hate the feeling that I knew something and now it’s gone.
The second usage scenario is Jira, Confluence and Fisheye for our small iPhone dev Lab over at http://spielhaus-ftw.com.
For the last scenario I will be using Confluence again to introduce my friends to wikis. I’d like to share things that we have in common. Gotta get creative with the creation of users tho.
Thanks for the tip about the Confluence blog.