Why Enterprise Software Provider Atlassian Chose OpenSocial

Hi, I'm Mark Halvorson the "Chief Imagineer" at Atlassian Software. Whenever I tell people my title it is usually received in one of two ways - a chuckle and a blank stare, or for those in the know some comment about Walt Disney. No, I don't make rides for an amusement park, but I do get to imagine inventive ways to combine thorny, enterprise challenges with some of the exciting things happening on the consumer web. That is why I'm particularly excited to blog in this forum about how Atlassian is bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise.

Enterprise, meet OpenSocial

Much like "Imagineer" makes you think Walt Disney when you hear OpenSocial, you are likely thinking: Orkut, MySpace, and other Internet social networks. When we heard OpenSocial we thought: now there's some cool technology we can use to bring our portfolio closer together, and closer to lots of great stuff on the Internet.

Atlassian is a seven-year young software company, hailing from Australia, and building collaboration and productivity tools for developers and teams. Many of you may of come across two of our better known products: JIRA, an issue tracker, and Confluence, an enterprise wiki. The rest of the portfolio includes a series of developer tools: FishEye, for exploring source code on the web; Crucible, for peer code review; Bamboo, a continuous integration server; and Clover, for test coverage analysis. We also offer Studio, which combines several of these products into a hosted integrated development suite.

Development is a social activity

Development is social. Developers work in teams, often with other non-developers like product managers and technical writers. Those teams work together on a variety of shared objects: specifications, tasks, documentation, source code, builds and projects. Each of those shared objects generate lots of activity: comments, subtasks, notifications of changes and edits, build failures, code commits. These teams use lots of different tools and systems: wikis, bug trackers, build automation systems, source code repositories. That's a huge internal social network. People working with people, people working with systems, and systems working with systems - a river of activity that needs to funnel to the people who care about it most. Our mission is to help developers collaborate and communicate easier, and in the process help them write higher quality code faster.

Okay, so why OpenSocial?

With eight products that support various parts of the development process, each with their own dashboard, and each spitting off data and activity that the others could benefit from, OpenSocial gave us an inventive, proven integration pattern: gadgets . We've embraced OpenSocial gadgets as a method of integration between our own products and between other enterprise software, and we're using OpenSocial gadgets as a mechanism to inject functionality and information from our products into other OpenSocial-compliant containers on the Internet, like Gmail or iGoogle.

JIRA 4.0 will be the first OpenSocial container in our portfolio to ship. JIRA has implemented OpenSocial through Shindig as a series of Atlassian plugins, which we call the Atlassian Gadgets plugins. JIRA produces Gadgets that can be displayed by other OpenSocial-compliant containers, including iGoogle and Gmail, and authentication between Gadget producers and consumers is handled through OAuth. We're excited about the possibilities. JIRA dashboards can now quickly assemble build status from Bamboo, project updates from Confluence, assigned code reviews from Crucible, all in the context of the issues and tasks assigned to a developer in the context of a JIRA project. Are you a team lead, and spend most of your time in Gmail? No problem, take all of that same information and park it there, so it's right alongside your inbox.

We've launched a little site that talks more about what we're doing at http://www.atlassian.com/opensocial. You can also follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/atlassian. I hope to do more blogging here about things we learn and cool stuff we're experimenting with. In the meantime, here's short video of how a dev manager, who may live in Gmail, can file issues and track the state of projects and builds using Atlassian Gadgets in Gmail.



Posted by Mark Halvorson, Chief Imagineer, Atlassian Software Team