-
Managing your Git Repositories behind the Firewall with Atlassian Stash
Atlassian has released the latest product for their suite of development tools – Atlassian Stash
Tapping onto their experience with BitBucket and SourceTree, they are aware that
- Development Teams need a way to develop quickly and share their source code in a central location
- Businesses need an efficient way to keep their source codes in a secured manner
- IT Administrators need a reliable system that can be configured to fit their environment
The key features of Stash are:
- Permissions – easy to manage permissions for your Git repositories
- User Management – link up to Corporate LDAP, Atlassian Crowd or even JIRA to manage the users
- Development Traceability – link up with Atlassian JIRA for full issue and source traceability
- Fast Source Browsing – browse code changes, file history directly from the browser without using an IDE
For more info, check out the official blogpost from Atlassian.
One place for your source codes – Atlassian Stash
Share this post
-
Improving productivity by encouraging suggestions from the ground
One of the best ways for improving the productivity of the company is to get suggestions from the employees. This is because they will be able to identify the tasks and processes that is causing them more work and time.
However, as shown in the video below, most employees are less prone to voicing out their suggestions. This is more obvious with the Asian culture. Another common reason is because they feel their suggestions are not followed up.
There are a few ways to encourage them
- Giving recognition to those who provided good suggestions
- Follow up on the good suggestions
- Provide them with an easy platform to submit their suggestions
- Allow them to vote on suggestions
- Allow them to comment and refine on their suggestions
- Let them know why their suggestions are not adopted eventually
For existing JIRA users, this can be easily done by creating a new project with an Suggestion issue type. Fellow team members can come in to comment and vote on those suggestions that can benefit them.
The manager can also enforce a simple workflow to track whether the suggestion is under review, approved or implemented. He can also view statistics via the JIRA dashboards.
Share this post
-
Atlassian Goes Social with JIRA 5
Do you know that JIRA is used by more than 70% of the Fortune 100 companies? And the most popular issue tracker is improving itself with more useful features in the latest release of JIRA 5.
The focus of this issue is to improve how people communicate with JIRA and to make life easier by providing better integration with other systems.
The key features introduced in JIRA 5 are:
- Sharing & Mentions – Mention another user with the ‘@’ symbol to trigger an email notification together with your comments
- Search Change History – You can now build new searches to find issues with a change status, assignee and even specify when it happened or by whom
- Remote issue links – You can link your JIRA issues to issues from another JIRA site, Confluence page or even any web page URL
- JIRA to JIRA issue copy – A new (beta) plugin you can use to copy issues from a JIRA site to another JIRA site
- Improved Activity streams – Activity stream can now show external activity from another Atlassian application (e.g. Confluence)
- New Email Handler Wizard – A new wizard to configure email handlers for creating issues or comments from email messages
- and many more
Check out the video summary of the new features in the video below
Likewise, you can also check out the official release notes
To commemorate this launch, we also prepared a video edition of screenshots of JIRA sites on the Internet.
Share this post
-
Will your data always be there?
People tend to believe that Web operators will keep their data safe in perpetuity
This sentence from Technology Review’s article – Fire in the Library is a good reminder on how vulnerable we are with our data and the useful information stored on the Web.
Try out this test by answering the following questions:
- You posted your photos online to share with your friends
- You posted status updates on a social network
- You write a blog
- You have a personal web page
- You put your documents online
- You posted some stuff in an online forum
- You signed up for Google Wave
Share this post
-
Dementia in the Organization
Photo by dierk schaefer (Flickr)
A recent study has indicated that memory decline sets in as early as 45 years old. This has influenced me to commit to more exercises and healthy food to delay its on-coming. Like many other knowledge workers, our memory and thinking skills are essential to our meaning in life.
It will be interesting to examine how Dementia are taking place in the Organization
- When does the Organization starts losing memory?
- What are the implications of memory loss
- What are the possible means to minimize memory loss?
1. When does he starts losing memory
An organization does not need to wait for 45 years. It starts losing memory as soon as it is born. It takes place when
- the employees forget about it
- the employees leave the Organization
- the computer is infected by viruses or crashed
- the documents are shredded or the files deleted
2. What are the implications of memory loss
It will depends on the nature of the Organization. A knowledge-based organization will be more severely affected.
Some of the implications are
- Loss of customers due to poor service level and not following up
- Loss of productivity due to additional rework required
- Loss of opportunities due to inability to build on existing knowledge
3. What are the possible means to minimize memory loss
While it is not totally possible to avoid memory loss, there are also ways akin to exercises and healthy food which the organization can use to minimize memory loss.
- Promote staff retention
- Embed important knowledge into the work processes (e.g checklists, templates) to prevent people from missing them out
- Put in place a Knowledge Management Strategy to identify important knowledge and how to capture them
- Encourage knowledge sharing & documentation
- Make use of systems like CRMs to track customers information, blogs to track lessons learnt/case studies, discussion forums to track ideas and discussions
- Perform backups regularly
Share this post
-
Edit Like a Pro with Confluence 4.1 – Available Today
It’s the season of giving and the Confluence Team decided to splurge this year, bringing you Confluence 4.1 just in time for the holiday season. It’s jam packed with new features and improvements that make everyone look like an editing pro.
Create and Share Rich Content, Effortlessly
Take the completely redesigned editor that we gave you in Confluence 4.0 and add instant Autoconvert, professional Image Effects, and quick Find and Replace. What do you get? Confluence 4.1 – the fastest online content collaboration tool going around.
Give everyone in your organization the power to create and share rich content, effortlessly – check out Confluence 4.1 today.
Share this post
-
100 Sites Powered By JIRA (Part 2) – How to jazz up your JIRA site
This blog post is a continuation of last week’s blog post on well designed JIRA sites.
100% JIRA (Part 2)View more presentations from Akeles Consulting.Based on our recent survey, we summarized a few tips on how you can jazz up your JIRA site.
- Logo – A logo helps to establish your identity and branding. The size of the logo should be between 50 to 90 pixels tall to be sufficiently big and yet allow enough working space on the screen. It is also possible to use a banner graphic as a logo too.
- Header Background Color – Try to use the same header background colour as your logo’s background color. You can use a color picker tool like Colorzilla.
- Navigation Bar Background Color – Likewise the navigation bar background color should use a different shades of the same color. The navigation bar text color can be changed to white or black to match the chosen color.
- Introduction Gadget – A short writeup to introduce the purpose and usage of the site to first-time users will be useful. Links to a quick guide or contact email address will even be better.
- Gadgets colour – The color of the gadgets in the system dashboard should ideally match with the navigation bar background colour
- Links to other sites – Some organizations will add links to other auxiliary sites like their corporate website or wiki. This enables the users to surf to other sites easily within all the JIRA pages.
A good design helps to establish a corporate branding and brightens up the user’s day. You can reference how other people do it with our slides and JIRA’s guide on customizing the look and feel of JIRA.
And do drop us a comment if you have revamped your JIRA sites or come across any well designed JIRA sites. We love to share it with the rest.
Share this post
-
100 Sites Powered By JIRA (Part 1)
Have you ever wondered
- Who uses JIRA?
- What are they using JIRA for?
- What content do they put on the main dashboards?
- How do they jazz up the look of JIRA for their users?
We got curious one day and ended up with lots of screenshots of nicely designed JIRA sites. And the best way to inspire more people to jazz up their sites and make JIRA more user-friendly is to show them how other folks are doing it. Hence, we decided to share 100 sites from the set.
This week, we present the first 50 sites. We will put up the second half in next week together with some tips on jazzing up your JIRA site.
100% JIRA (Part 1)View more presentations from Akeles ConsultingShare this post
-
2 good news for cloud computing in Singapore
Cloud computing is gaining more attention in Singapore. This week, I attended the VMWare Forum and saw a huge crowd of attendees. Besides utilizing cloud platforms, organizations are also trying to acquire the knowledge to set up their own cloud.
With the growing importance of Cloud Computing, IDA has also decided to include Cloud Computing services under the Productivity & Innovation Credit Scheme (PIC). This means that organizations adopting Cloud Services can enjoy tax deductions of up to 400% subjected to a maximum of $400k.
Likewise, Atlassian has also introduced the Cloud version of Confluence and JIRA with Atlassian OnDemand. This means users can start using these tools with subscription starting from US$10 per month without having to set up the systems themselves.
Share this post
-
GreenHopper 5.8 available: Rapid Board for Kanban
The Rapid Board is an exciting new way to use GreenHopper, and includes support for multiple projects, the biggest feature request in GreenHopper’s history!
Swimlanes powered by JQL
The power of JIRA Query Language (JQL) is behind every aspect of the GreenHopper Rapid Board. Each Rapid View is built on a JIRA search, then enables additional filters. Swimlanes are horizontal lanes built on JQL search parameters, to break down the Rapid View into horizontal sets of data, such as issues relating to a specific team or portion of the project. Quick Filters are buttons built on JQL, and are commonly used to toggle between assignees or issue with a particular date value.
Track & Report
The Rapid Board includes a new Control Chart to show the mean cycle time and trends and an updated Cumulative Flow Diagram. The Rapid Board view and charts are also available as gadgets, to display information on a JIRA dashboard or a Confluence page.
Check out the video to see the new Greenhopper in action
Share this post
Subscription Options:
