- AppFusions Blog

Have you seen the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software report?

It's a goodie for anyone in the market, purchasing or delivering - just to understand these perspectives and analysis.

I'll cut to the chase - here's the quadrant power image which says 1000 words without the rest of the 19 pages, but indeed the rest is still worth a read.

Here's the full doc to download if you wish!

July 14: traveling today - so will get back to this blog to add a bit more meat - but anyways, you got the important pieces... Enjoy!

Last weekend was busy since we decided to move off of Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud that was hosting our core systems infrastructure and move to Contegix Managed Hosting Services. We've had our Website hosted by Contegix for the past few months, but our larger infrastructure (x7 systems) was on AWS.

AWS was okay - until our needs grew

As a service, AWS was fine in terms of bandwidth and access - no complaints. However, as our efforts, projects and engagement has grown, so too was our fees on AWS - which is part of the snag.

The more time (literally, by minute) you are on AWS systems, the more your business grows in size, the more you pay.

Very quickly, with our team being from US, UK, and AU - and accessing systems almost around the clock, it became UN-cost-advantageous, let alone service UN-advantageous (since there is no service support - you are on your own).

Why we like Contegix

Contegix has become a better solution for us.

Why - well people put a whole lot of argument and discussion on cloud providers but it's really quite simple in our opinion.

With Contegix:

• you buy the server and/or VM and plenty of diskspace, RAM, and CPU power to serve you needs
• if you also go with managed hosting, you get 24x7 technical support and monitoring of your systems.
• you can also get regular "backups" support (daily or weekly).

But if we really need to sum it up:

Working with Contegix is like having a bunch of new guys on your team with great expertise -- overnight, for the same price (or maybe less) than it is on AWS -- where you have to do it all yourself!

Upgrades to latest releases - W00t!

Currently, we have the complete Atlassian Suite installed as our base framework for our cloud-hosted SDLC work environment.

These systems are the backbone to our company, let alone efficiency. AppFusions is a HUGE believer of the full suite for software development lifecycle best practices. Admittedly, we don't use them perfectly yet, but every week we push on them and get better and better, and so for that, we're good with it.

Since we had to migrate our data anyways to Contegix, and our systems will only get bigger, we decided to take advantage and upgrade to latest versions to get latest features. Internally, we now have:

• Confluence 3.3 (rels'd June 2010) - Latest feature news and video here.
• JIRA 4.1.2 (rels'd June 2010) - Latest feature news and video here.
• GreenHopper 5 (rels'd June 2010) - Lastest feature news and video here.
• FishEye/Crucible 2.3.3 (rels'd May 2010) - Latest feature news and video here.
• Bamboo 2.6 (rels'd June 2010) - Latest feature news and video here.
• Crowd 2.0.5 (rels'd July 2010) - Latest feature news and video here.

THIS is a W00t!!!

Collaborate online - no email (in general)

We have a general "no email" rule. I'd say we are about 90% working that way, and very little email communications is needed that is not better served in the Wiki and/or JIRA task.

We started this approach from the get go, so this was our initial habits.Sometimes we break out into 1-1 emails, but really they are rare now.

And if someone breaks out and shouldn't - you get accused of being so "Web 1.0"... Ouch. Slaps you back into the systems fast.

I'm super psyched that our "communicate in the systems" mode has not only taken off, but everyone seems to appreciate it.

SVN now, but evaluating Distributed Version Control System (DVCS)

We use SVN, now, yet we are evaluating Mercurial - seems it might us one step more efficient. Good quote on the topic:

"Mercurial is your smart friend who likes to explain things to you. Git is your genius coworker who sighs and rolls his eyes everytime you ask him a question." -- from thebuild.com

We have team members in the US, UK, and AU, so we need both reliable systems and flexibility.

Mercurial's Distributed architecture

Traditional version control systems such as Subversion are typical client-server architectures with a central server to store the revisions of a project. In contrast, Mercurial is truly distributed, giving each developer a local copy of the entire development history. This way it works independent of network access or a central server. Committing, branching and merging are fast and cheap.

Mercurial seems like it will give us what we need - and we can also take advantage of Atlassian's latest tricks too.

Here's a REALLY AWESOME video/talk on the subject, including great discussion on Git vs. Mercurial.

I'm stirred today to write a comment on this MyCustomer.com post, "Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy" that surfaced on Twitter the last few days.

See this tweetdoc for activity.

In general, it's a great post, and I am continually intrigued and inspired by the very notion of crowdsourcing for innovation, which has many elements -- Ross provides a nice overview of the following concepts in particular:

• Distributed innovation platforms
• Idea platforms
• Innovation prizes
• Content markets
• Prediction markets
• Competition platforms

My questions though arise in the definition of crowdsourcing -  and where does it start and stop, in terms of the process?

For me, on face, the word denotes pure collaboration, with a purpose based on the crowdsourced event or goals -- yet not merely at the front end of the process.

Products like Spigit or BrightIdea, among others, provide great provocation, good vetting and a tangible platform pull for crowdsourcing innovation ideas. 

What is not discussed is phase II

Great ideas, great contests for up-front vetting, great community rally getting people to help push the ideas forward, competition, prediction, etc. - all excellent, and all this data is now in a system.

But beyond, where does the data go?

• To me, the data needs a seamless phase II. It needs to go into a tacit development project system, ideally automatically, to push the ideas into life.
  
  
• To me, the vetted ideas now become product roadmap feature lists and design discussions, systematically, thus requiring direct integrations into in-house task and project management systems driving agile software development teams that may be geographically dispersed.
  
  
• To me, ideas that don't end up in a development or planning "system" for execution, quickly and painlessly preferably, can easily fall into the "just ideas" category - as fleeting as the next guys'.

The notion of floating meeting ideas come to mind. I used to call them "airball meetings". How many times have you been at a meeting with brilliant minds, and brilliant ideas -- all floating around, in the air -- and no one writes them down, or puts them into a system. Then the next week comes, and um, let's rehash and refloat those ideas again, and again... (and I've also been guilty -- don't get me wrong!)

What is simply AWESOME about innovation platforms is not merely the community collaboration elicited. I think it's about the enormous collected data over anything else -- in a system -- so much data that needs a life beyond.

Collected data, utilized, is extremely powerful.

Phase II - making the data useful in the software development lifecycle

With phase II, new product and innovation ideas that began, can now begin to come to life with the right hosted, shared, and collaborative environment. Phase II is the software development process (SDLC) -- with direct data integrations of innovation platforms' data into systems.

It would look like this:

• Valuable data from the innovation platforms flow directly -- systematically -- into a task or issue workflow management system, like Atlassian JIRA, to further kick off the agile SDLC.
  
  
  • Corresponding idea details, categories, priorities, voting, use cases, or other data are also mapped, and continually pushed directly into JIRA.
    
    
  • Feasibility of the ideas are further vetted through online discussion threads.
    
    
• Confluence wiki is used to enable collaboration, requirements vetting, and community development among the team.
  
  In fact, the dev team may even have been elicited by the initial crowdsourcing community. Conceptually, the dev team needs fluid communications channels, rich tools platforms, and they need it remotely accessible, cloud hosted -- not constrained by timezones, office hours, or card key access.
  
  
• GreenHopper agile planning tool is used to plan and progress the project forward, with weekly scrum and/or kanban agile SDLC management.
  
  
• Shared codebase (e.g., SVN), FishEye, Crucible, Crowd, continuous integration and good team agile processes are of course also core -- accessible from any corner of the Internet. Afterall, engagement flows will speed up globalization.

Am I stretching the term too much?

There is this one point in Wikipedia's definition:

Individuals who participate in crowdsourcing projects are often anonymous,

Am I stretching the definition too much?

I'm not sure.

While the origination of the term may have come from open anonymous approaches, keep in mind that the innovation platforms called out above are not merely anonymous. These are being sold into large closed organizations... So thinking that anonymous part is just a nit.

Maybe initially an open and anonymous crowd may work, but to translate into really making something - hmm....


Well that's my thoughts -- and in my crowdsource group of one here, vote was thumbs up, unanimous!

Okay - this blog, we're going to get a little off-topic, err, I guess.CHOCOLATE!!

But I have something I need to confess, and also thought a good lesson for others. I am SURE I am not the only one that has fallen prey to Chocolate dilemmas.

So here's the story, confession, and finally resolution! Glad I got to the last step!

The story, confession, dilemma ... and finally resolution!

A couple weeks ago I promised fat chocolate for Jessie Curtner given her non-food diet that had overcome her with busyness on the planning/run up to Atlassian Summit - I talked about it here.

While at the summit, I also realized that chocolate should also go to Trisha Hong - for her excellent and amazing efforts in planning the partner events. Just awesome!

strategy #1 - #fail

So then... Atlassian Summit arrived, and with best intentions - I thought - San Francisco would be one of the best places. Surely there will be a nice Chocolate place near by and I could pick up a killer chocolate bar. Not just Hershey's - something special.

Well, not so lucky. Could have gotten a big Babe Ruth, or 100,000 $ bar, or even Hershey with Almonds... but wasn't finding anything "special"...

So: "Nevermind". Will wait - needs to be special. Will do it AFTER the Summit = will taste just as good then.

strategy #2 - #fail

After the Summit, I flew to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and stayed near Harvard.

Have you ever been there?

Yep - this is the place for luxury stores and KILLER chocolate. On the second day, I bought 5 bars of killer chocolate ($4.55 each - THAT's killer chocolate!)

(Okay - I admit - I bought SIX... but I ate one :)

Great! Just need to get it into the Snail mailbox and should be good! Shouldn't be a problem. err... shouldn't be?

How many times have you tried to find the post-office in a strange town when you are traveling everywhere by subway?!!

I never found it!

==

Sooo... the chocolate traveled... from Harvard, to Boston, back and forth a few times on the subway ... and then eventually to New York with me via USAirways.

Glad to see my husband and kids, I kind of forgot about the chocolate for a day... but um, then my husband FOUND IT! and a day later, I found wrappers!

UGHH!!!!! Back to square one!!!

He said - "Thanks so much for the chocolate... that's awesome!"... (err... I was like, "um... Sure. Anything for you babe!")

strategy #3 - #fail

My husband the next day decided to return the favor and while at the store bought 6 bars of chocolate... Hersheys.

I um, said "thanks" - while in my head - was thinking "God bless the Father of US chocolate and all - but I need "Special" chocolate". I said thank you anyways, for the thought.

I didn't complain, but 2 hours later found 4 empty wrappers of Hershey's...

This time Thing One (Ryan) and Thing Two (Stella) scarfed the chocolate.

I wasn't that bummed of course - though shocked nonetheless on the lunacy of this Chocolate dilemma. It is like the most impossible thing to move outside of our walls before someone eats it!

strategy #4 - #SUCCESS

Today I made a resolution - never again will I try to buy and send chocolate via a brick and morter store. Never. No, always online.

Today I ordered some Dan's Chocolate for you Jessie and Trisha... should be there next week. It's great stuff!!! And Special!

Small tokens for your amazing coordination and planning efforts, top-notch all the way! NOT an easy task for that big of a crowd, and not to be underestimated.

At your choice, share your chocolate with your other Atlassian coordinating minions...

==

p.s. AppFusions team, while I was at it, ordered some for you too!

Thanks for getting the Alfresco to Confluence connector out... lets keep plugging... got big customers itching for that in their production environments.

Top-Tier Talent/People are what "MAKE" the Atlassian Summit and Enterprise 2.0 Conferences

Last week was a busy week -- much catch up from being away from my desk alot during the prior two weeks while attending Atlassian Summit 2010 (San Francisco) and Enterprise 2.0 Conference (Boston), and also AppFusions' release of the Alfresco to Confluence connector on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange .

Both conferences - exhilarating experiences in alot of ways, albeit really because of the people more than the events, for me.

This statement is not meant to be a criticism of the events -- actually quite to the contrary. Both events were very well planned, organized, and had large engaged attendance (in fact Atlassian Summit was sold out a month in advance; stopped counting the waiting list at 200+ over...).

It is the people though that each event drew in -- top talents of the Atlassian and Enterprise 2.0 industries, trekking in from all corners of the world -- that made the events so amazing. Having that much top-tier talent all in one city, let alone single venues, all at the same time, is just a do not miss experience on so many levels.

Endless exposure and share in conversation, stories, visions, designs, knowledge, tricks, insights, examples, networking, and simply inspirations over short periods of time is exhausting, seemingly unrepeatable, and very cherry.

And then comes the streams of blogs, write-ups, opinions, and tweets moving the experiences and knowledge even more. The After-Conferences are almost more intense actually. These are NOT passive conference attendee folks!

For the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, here's just a few notable recap/"archival"-like blogs, samplers -- of the tons out there:

• Enterprise 2.0 Session Notes - a complete chronology/detailed session accountings. Simply incredible! (by Bill Ives)
• Enterprise 2.0 Prepares for Relevancy - "The tide's about to rise" - a discussion about the movement of the industry (by Sameer Patel)
• When Should Management Push Enterprise 2.0 Adoption - Push-pull decision framework on E2.0 adoption (by Hutch Carpenter)
• Getting to Enterprise Scale 2.0 - Nice perspective on reality vs. the hype of Enterprise 2.0 ways (by Oliver Marks)
• A letter to Steve Wylie - Open what worked well and what could be done better letter (by Mary Abraham)
• Ten Tips from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Sum-up tips on deploying E2.0 (by Nigel Fenwick)
• "Social" Perspective on the Conference - Nice recap on both the social demographics of Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and resulting content coming out of the conference - while emphasizing the value of BEING THERE too. (by Mark Eggleston)
• Enterprise 2.0 Experience - Overview and interesting statistics on #e2conf (by Ken Domen)
• Running "wiki"-log of #e2conf writeups - by Jim Worth
• and many many more !

For Atlassian Summit, here's some recaps on that:

• Summit Starter Day Roundup and videos
• Summit 2010 - the Boxset and session videos
• Post-Summit Blog Roundup and session highlights
• Adaptavist LaunchPad Review 
• Contegix - Atlassian Summit - a Recap

I started this section with the title that "top tier talent/people "make" the conferences". Come to think of it, top-tier talent/people are also what makes Enterprise 2.0 work in organizations too! Interesting coincidence!

"Too Vendor-Centric at E2.0 Conference" - what to do about it

One of the loudest criticisms that I kept hearing about the E2.0 conference was:

Too vendor-centric...

I always find this criticism quite ironic - since it really is a cheapshot and also kinda short-sighted and lame. You need the vendors for conferences - they are critical; but indeed, with some thought, a balance in the planning and preparation can help.

If I recall a year ago, Atlassian Summit 2009 had the same criticism and I applaud Atlassian for really taking the bull by the horn on this issue for this year.

For the 2010 event, alot/most of the sessions were by Atlassian employees/experts, or real-world customer case studies, sharing their knowledge, and really trying to change the conference flavor to be less vendor-centric, yet to keep the conference enticing for both vendors and customers at the same time. Not easy.

For the conference sessions that were dedicated to vendors, Atlassian did a good trick to up the ante (quality) on those sessions.

They played the Superbowl angle, as @chrisyeh commented to in Megan Murray's blog about the #e2conf .

Vendors need to follow the Gladiator Principle..."Are you not entertained?"

Just because you've delivered your talking points doesn't mean that you've made an impact. Buying a keynote is like buying a Superbowl commercial -- yeah, you've got a big audience, but they're as likely to mock you as support you. Money gets you in front of people, but it's up to you to tell a story worth hearing.

At the Atlassian Summit, the Keynote was presented by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar - always good presenters (here's their Starter Day presentation ). Directly following was a LaunchPad event that allowed the 13 or so vendor sponsors a chance to show off their stuff, on stage. Here was the non-rules to the competition.

Do their "SuperBowl spot", LIVE, if you will.

Following each spot, the audience was given a couple minutes to SMS/text their vote in on it, which was calibrated and calculated in real-time on the big-screen so everyone could also see.

Some of the presentations were standout, others were mediocre at best.

The winner - Gliffy Design Software - for their pirates themed presentation.

Gliffy excited and rousted the audience. It was funny, charming, engaging, informative and simply - an Atlassian Summit "superbowl" standout. And to boot, they had a blast doing it - sometimes laughing harder than the audience.

That is good marketing! Having fun and sharing the fun, with a serious solution! So, as one pirate said at the end: "There you go Jack!"

Up the ante on those vendor presentations

Enterprise 2.0 Conference could rip a page off the Atlassian Summit conference playbook for their LaunchPad, and endless Keynote sessions too!

People like to be entertained at conferences, as well as informed - but engagement expectations are high.

• Up the ante on those vendor presentations.
• Provide real-time E2.0 friendly competition!
• Make the vendors earn their stage time, not just subject the audience to mediocre.I know I know - they paid for their stage time. But so did the attendees!
• Engage the audience to vote after each event and get into the fun!

As for next years' Atlassian Summit vendor events - I think the ante has already been up'd, and I'm sure next year will hold new surprises. In good Atlassian E2.0 way, continuous improvement - it always gets better and better.

NO ONE should take for granted their stage time though, at any conference event.

Very stoked about Atlassian Summit 2010 coming up next week ...

Will be great to meet many Atlassian enthusiasts, developers, customers, partners, and indeed Atlassian-folks themselves!

Bound to be filled with surprises and invigorating discussions on all levels with a crowd like this. Four of us from AppFusions are attending, with smiles and excitement!

HOWEVER, before we even get there - I know one thing:

I'm already extremely thankful to the amazing Jessie Curtner - Atlassian's event coordinator extraordinaire!

This is my fourth official event (aside from user groups or such) that she has pulled together that I have attended:

• AtlasCamp 2008
• AtlasCamp 2009
• Atlassian Summit 2009
• and now Atlassian Summit 2010)

So this is stated from experience and without hesitation!!

Truth be told, these events get bigger, more intense, and more complicated for her I am sure as each one evolves and grows - (just as Atlassian does :) ) - so the challenges are not to be underestimated at any level in pulling off grand-scale top quality events for so many people flying in from all corners of the world.

Atlassian official events (AtlasCamp and AtlassianSummit) are top of the scale on excellence - certainly in accommodations, but more importantly in the quality people drawn that attend and the always upping-the-bar information shared.

Early Kudos Jessie and best wishes in the coming days during the event! You simply ROCK!

.. and I loved these recent tweets of yours! I'll be bringing you a big fat dark chocolate bar just in case!

Looking forward.

Just love this video!

I think it sends home a million messages given so many day to day stresses in life - business, home, professional, personal - you name it.

We all have them - we all have a ton to do and get through each day - keep the balls in the air - meet our commitments, make things happen.

And to boot, don't know anyone that has not been affected by at least some kind of challenge during the recession over the last year or two. Life has never been more tricky!

==

Soo... while sure, business is serious indeed - with serious things to do and get done - still we all need to keep our sense and wits about it too! 

Lets get it done, and do it well - but keep it fun - with the fun theory!

We have released an initial demo of the Confluence to Alfresco integration implemented.

The following presentation describes the features - here's a link to a live demo:

• See Confluence to Alfresco Integration Live Demo

Editor Note: So tried to be sporty and support GoogleDocs in the following presentation, but the layout is not that fresh. I love the idea of GoogleDocs - but without powerful flexibility in the layouts and presentation, you are really limited. Next time, back to PPT or something more sophisticated until this improves by Google. Need clean/polished presentation!

Development will continue on this connector, as indicated, and it will be available for download on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange this week.

If every child had a Wiki space that carried with them throughout their gradeschool years, the children can change the world in ways we cannot even fathom...

Editor Note: So tried to be sporty and support GoogleDocs in the following presentation, but the layout is not that fresh. I love the idea of GoogleDocs - but without powerful flexibility in the layouts and presentation, you are really limited. Next time, back to PPT or something more sophisticated until this improves by Google. Need clean/polished presentation!

Just created the Ithaca, New York Atlassian User Group page ..

Come out to beautiful Taughannock Falls State Park (lakeside) for a great Friday afternoon to mingle, share, and learn form other Atlassian users and / or developers interested in Atlassian software!

More info to come!

HOWDY!!

Welcome to our 0.9 version of our site!

Much more to do to complete this website - but feeling like it just plain needs to get out in the world.

Getting calls, in discussions with clients, and much happening - and so at this rate, let the goodness continue and just plain acknowledge that isolated days for the Website are not likely going to be found in coming days..

Target - finish polishing rough edges in MAY 2010 though - bit by bit each day - we'll get there!

Thanks for coming by - and please do contact us if you have any questions or suggestions on anything!

CHEERS!