A few days ago, we rolled out a significant update to our hosted development tool, JIRA Studio.

First, we've upgrade JIRA Studio to Confluence 2.8. Laura posted all the details about 2.8 earlier, but in brief, Confluence 2.8 features an updated user interface focused on making our Wiki easier to use (and look at), better searching, and more, for a total of over 90 improvements. Check out Laura's Post for more details on Confluence 2.8.

Speaking of search, this update to JIRA Studio includes Studio-wide searching. The search box found on every page now allows you to search across Issues, Wiki pages, Reviews, and Code. And you can filter the results based on Project. Have a look:

Performance was another focus of this update, and you'll see big improvements in the Source and Review tabs.

Finally, we now allow certain 3rd party plugins to be installed into your JIRA Studio Instance. Currently we support Gliffy and EditGrid for Confluence. EditGrid and Gliffy licenses are, as they say, sold separately. Check out the JIRA Studio Plugin Policy for complete details.

About a month ago, we quietly launched JIRA Studio. Now JavaOne is here, the official launching platform for JIRA Studio, and the time to be quiet has come to an end! We started briefing the press, bloggers and analysts last week and earlier today we sent out a press release (which you can find below). We've updated the JIRA Studio home page on our website with a bunch of new content, including a cool video and a revised feature tour. Best of all, we're featuring JIRA Studio at our booth at JavaOne, so stop on by and say hello!

But most importantly, we've been listening to your feedback, and have updated JIRA Studio itself with new features, new pricing, and a special promotion:

Data Imports

We now offer a data importing service when you begin your use of JIRA Studio. At no additional cost, we'll import your Subversion or JIRA Repository into your JIRA Studio instance.

Web-based Subversion Manager

The new Subversion Repository Manager allows you to manage the permissions for your project's Subversion repository.

New Volume Pricing

In March, many of you let us know that you wanted volume discounts on JIRA Studio purchases. We listened, and are now offering several tiers of pricing. Full details are on the JIRA Studio pricing page.

Special offer for existing customers

If you currently use one or more of our tools, and want to switch over to JIRA Studio, we're offering a 25% discount on your first monthly or yearly purchase. Details are, again, on the JIRA Studio pricing page.

And finally, here is the full text of the Press Release we sent out earlier today:

Announcing Atlassian JIRA Studio: What SaaS for Developers Is Meant to Be

Newest product gives developers an on-demand environment based on Atlassian's best selling tools

May 6, 2008 (Business Wire), JavaOne Conference, San Francisco, CA - Atlassian today announced the release of JIRA Studio, the all-in-one, on-demand development suite. JIRA Studio is a hosted development environment that solves one of the biggest headaches for developers: the deployment and maintenance of their tools. JIRA Studio includes many of Atlassian's award-winning products and provides a world-class issue tracker, an enterprise wiki for collaboration, as well as the ability to manage the code repository and manage code reviews.

A recent McKinsey report (May 2007) highlights the growth of software as a service (SaaS) because SaaS provides, "more frequent upgrades, a lower cost of ownership and a higher level of service". McKinsey expects that development tools will migrate to SaaS by 2010-- however, Atlassian is bringing SaaS to developers today. JIRA Studio fills that niche, integrating Atlassian's award-winning tools, together in a single secure hosted development environment, hosted by Contegix.

"Whether you're a development shop, a professional services team or an IT group, JIRA Studio gets your team up and running in as little as an hour and no more than a day" said Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and co-founder of Atlassian. "Since we're maintaining the applications, our customers can focus on writing brilliant code and project management."

Highlights of JIRA Studio include:

Activity Stream: Inspired by Facebook, the Activity Stream displays real-time updates and activity from the wiki, tasks, bugs, source commits and code reviews
Project Toolbar: JIRA Studio is comprised of many tools which seamlessly work together. The Project Toolbar, available on every JIRA Studio page, lets you switch between your projects with only a couple of clicks
Product Integrations: easily cross-link issues and bugs to the wiki as well as source code and code reviews
Importing: import existing JIRA and Subversion databases into JIRA Studio

Pricing for JIRA Studio is $50 per user per month. Volume discounts for large deployments are available. Pricing is online at http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio

Users can log on to a demo of JIRA Studio at http://demo.jira.com.

About Atlassian

Atlassian develops affordable, lightweight software that helps enterprises collaborate better. Its products include Confluence, widely recognized as the most advanced enterprise wiki, and JIRA, one of the world's most popular issue trackers for IT project management. The company has more than 11,000 customers worldwide, including 30 of the world's top 50 corporations. For more information, visit: www.atlassian.com/

About Contegix

Contegix provides high-level managed hosting solutions for enterprise applications. We deliver proactive, passionate support that is unparalleled in the industry. We were our first client, building a reliable infrastructure for the hosting of our software development customers. That success led us to offer hosting services to other companies, ultimately matching our expertise in system administration and software development with a superior level of support that matched our original internal needs. Contegix is a national company with a hard-won reputation for reliable hosting, reasonable pricing and expert support that goes beyond managed hosting. With a focus on the Linux, OSX, and JEE markets, Contegix continues to provide advanced connectivity solutions, such as our trademark Beyond Managed Hosting® service, colocation, and managed application delivery. We have not lost sight of our founding mission - to deliver high level hosting, support, and connectivity for enterprise applications. Contegix is based in St. Louis, MO, with a seasoned leadership that has been answering the hosting needs of businesses for over 10 years. Interested in learning more please visit: http://www.contegix.com

After a couple of months in Beta, today JIRA Studio launches into production!

JIRA Studio integrates JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible & Crowd, and then adds in Subversion, Streams, the JIRA Studio toolbar, and makes them all available as a hosted, on-demand service available for just US$50 per user, per month. There is nothing to install and nothing to maintain. Using JIRA Studio you can track your issues and tasks, control and view your code repository, collaborate with your team, and manage your code reviews all from a single URL.

A Closer Look at JIRA Studio

Much of JIRA Studio will be familiar to users of our products. But there are unique features in JIRA Studio, too.

Streams

Streams keeps you in touch with your team, showing you who's up to what, and when. Streams brings together updates from the Wiki, Issues, source commits and code reviews, and displays them in a single time line. Tim Moore, one of the developers of Streams, described it in great detail on our developer blog.

Tool bar

JIRA Studio acts and feels like a single, integrated system, capable of managing multiple projects. The Project Toolbar, available on every JIRA Studio page, lets you switch between your projects with only a couple of clicks.

Up and running in 24 hours or less

Purchase JIRA Studio, and within one business day you'll get an email with the URL of your own private, secure JIRA Studio instance. We do all the heavy lifting for you. No installation, no configuration. Just you, a URL, and your code.

Learn More

If you'd like to take JIRA Studio out for a test drive, head over to our demo instance and have a look. Or head over to the new JIRA Studio Homepage to see the feature tour, read the FAQ on purchasing, and more.

And when you're ready to buy, the purchase page is waiting for you.

A new job always brings with it changes. I've already mentioned the different tools I've had to use, and their effect on me. But one cultural change in particular is having the biggest impact on me.

This. Right here. Blogging!

Blogging isn't new. Not even close. And Atlassian isn't unique in embracing blogging. But, man, we sure do a lot of it!

Blogging is part of being open, and being open is a core part of not just Atlassian, but the individuals who make up Atlassian. Not all of us blog, but a lot of us do! We have not only the News and Developer blogs, but planet.atlassian.com syndicates blogs from 20 different Atlassians -- about a sixth of the company!

Internally, we do a lot of blogging on our Confluence instance. There are somewhere around twenty internal blog posts a day, from pretty much every group within the company. The majority of posts solicit at least a few comments, and some prompt lengthy conversations.

Blogging has changed the way I think about my job. Everytime I check something off my to-do list, I wonder if I should post a blog on EAC. I'm constantly asking myself "should I blog about this?" The answer is often "Yes!"

And then, of course, there's blogging here, in public. Believe me when I tell you that knowing your Mom is checking out stuff you do at work is.......strange. Very cool, but strange. (Hi, Mom!)

And now that I've been bitten by the blogging bug it won't be too long until I start my personal blog and add it to our Planet.

As I mentioned last time, everything we do here at Atlassian is on our internal Confluence Wiki, available for everyone at Atlassian to see and comment on. I learned this the very first day, when my boss asked me to put a short bio up on my Profile.

"Sure, no problem. Once I'm done, how do I tell people it's there?" I asked.
"As soon as you save it, it'll show up in everyone's RSS feed, and also be on the Dashboard page."
"Ummm, everyone? Like, everyone in the whole company?"
"Yup."

"Oh, OK." I paused for a moment, thinking that through. "But when I write something like a Launch Plan, how do I publish that to just the Marketing team so I can get some feedback before I send it out?"
"You don't. Same thing, when you save it to the Wiki, everyone will see it. And have the chance to comment on it."

I had to let that sink in for a moment. The idea that everyone in the company: the founders, the engineers, the sales guys, that all of them would be looking over my shoulder as I did my job was sort of terrifying. I can be a fairly private person, and having to sit out in the open was bad enough, but now you want to make everything I do public?

Three weeks later, and I think it's awesome. Doing everything out in the open creates a sense of cooperation & teamwork greater than anywhere else I've worked. Everything I do harnesses the Wisdom of the Atlassian Crowd. When I get feedback, it's extremely valuable. And on the other side, the ability to give others feedback makes me feel more plugged in to what's going on.

So here I sit, exposed for all the world to see. And loving it.

(By the way, Confluence has, in fact, a very powerful set of security features. It wouldn't be hard to setup the wiki differently and isolate different groups or projects. But that's not how we've choosen to do things here.)