- Posted by liammclennan on November 18, 2009
Atlassian is the company that I wish was mine. They make cool web products, they have a unique voice and they are successful. But recently they lost their minds, and starting giving their software away (almost).
If you are a small organisation like me you can buy the main atlassian products (jira, confluence, greenhopper, bamboo, fisheye & crowd) for US $10.00 each. User limits apply.
We are using Jira + Greenhopper for agile project management, and confluence for our project wiki. Confluence is VERY nice. It is the best wiki I have worked with. Simple, powerful and it works. It also is very good at converting word documents to wiki pages which is something that our BA has appreciated. JIRA + Greenhopper is a workable solution for agile project management if you don’t want to go with walls and post-it notes. At times it can be a bit confusing because Greenhopper is a JIRA plugin that adds mingle-like functionality to a bug tracking application. Jumping between JIRA and Greenhopper is not entirely smooth, however, it is still one of the better solutions I have tried, and I have tried them all. This is the first project I have been on that has had a burn down chart, and I am finding Green Hopper’s burn down to be an excellent big visible chart / information radiator. JIRA reminds me of Gemini, and Greenhopper reminds me of Mingle. Not sure who copied who. The good news is that unlike Mingle, JIRA does not require a dedicated super computer.
The only disappointed I have is that Atlassian’s code review tool, Crucible, was not included in the deal.
- Posted by liammclennan on May 20, 2009
Every project needs an efficient way to record and share information. My favourite is a project wiki. Wikipedia defines Wiki as:
A wiki is a collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone with access to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.
Instiki is a simple wiki engine developed by the people behind Ruby on Rails. Not suprisingly, it runs on ruby on rails. Instiki's strengths are that it is easy to install and easy to use. It is not a enterprise class wiki, however I find that simplicity is often better. One thing that does bug me about instiki is the installation instructions:
Windows
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Download
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run “instiki.cmd” with Ruby 1.8.4 or greater installed (get One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows)
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Chuckle… There Is No Step Three™! :) (See note)
Apparently installing ruby is not a step in the installation process. Using the same technique it turns out that screwturn wiki has only one installation step:
Deploy the Wiki's files into your production ASP.NET server, being sure that the ASP.NET runtime has write permissions for the public\ directory (Setup your Wiki configuration by editing the Web.config file (Download the ScrewTurn Wiki site-only package and extract it on your hard disk ))
Appart from that instiki is a wonderful tool. It supports revisions, RSS, authors, search, multiple webs, password protected webs and a number of other features. On windows it will run as a console application by default, which is clearly not desirable. The instructions to convert it to a windows service are scary but easy to follow.
If you looking for a simple wiki tool consider Instiki.