Today, we've launched our website redesign. The design introduces a per-product sub-navigation and should make it easier to navigate. Also, the new website is 100% server by Confluence.
Therefore we have moved the blog to http://www.k15t.com/display/en/Blog. RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/k15tnews
Please update your bookmarks and RSS readers, as this page will not be updated anymore.
The Atlassian Summit 2011 is over and our first a appearance at an Atlassian Summit ever was a huge success. We not only won the Codegeist Contest, but also Scroll Office, our upcomming Scroll Wiki Exporters and two Confluence 4-only plugins (Scroll Wiki Forms and the Zen Editor) gained a lot of attention.
Scroll Office 2.2: Table Styles and new Pricing Model
The new Scroll Office 2.2 is almost our of the door: It will finally be possible to use table style and define the design of tables such as background-colors, borders and more. This has been one of the most wanted feature on our forums and we are proud to have an implementation, which will cover all use-case.
Starting from Version 2.2 we will introduce a new pricing model: The prices for Scroll Office will now start at $240 for 25 Users and will go up to $3600 for unlimited users (that is roughly 30% of the license cost of the matching Confluence license). Also, we will office 10-user starter licenses. The change in the license model is, that Scroll Office licenses will now be bound to the Confluence license. We have done this to better align with Atlassian's licensing scheme, and also we had technical issues with named users on Confluence systems using Crowd for authentication.
Scroll Wiki Exporters
Our initial product Scroll Wiki Exporter will be split up into multiple plugins - each for every export format. We do this in order to allow our users to select the functionatlity they actually need.
In the first step we will offer the following plugins
We will introduce the individual plugins with all their features separately in the coming weeks/months. They all have in common a completely redesigned user interface.
All Scroll Wiki Exporters will be available from $240 for 25 users up to $3600 for unlimited users (which is more or less 30% of the cost of the matching Confluence license).
Scroll Wiki Forms for Confluence 4
The Scroll Wiki Forms are a new extension based on the new Confluence 4 editor for defining forms on pages. The intention of Scroll Wiki Forms is to keep the content on a page structured.
Confluence 4 will be released in the next 2-3 months. Soon after that we will release Scroll Wiki Forms.
Zen-Editor for Confluence 4
The Zen-Editor is an extension the new Rich-Text-Editor of Confluence 4. Built as a so-called Speakeasy extension, it hides all UI-components from the UI, except the editing area and by that lets the author really focus on what he/she is writing.
Today, the winners of the 2011 Codegeist contest were announced and we won the Best Overall Plugin category - hooray! Congrats to K15t's co-founder Tobias Anstett, who developed the plugin.
The Scroll Wiki EPUB Exporter leverages the Scroll Wiki infrastructure to export single pages or complete pages trees to the EPUB format and download it to your iPad, iPhone or any other EPUB capable format.
The Scroll Wiki EPUB Exporter is currently in beta and will be generally available later this year. If you want to try it out yourself now:
Wouldn't it be nice to take the content of your wiki offline on your iPad and read it on the plane? We have news for you...
For the Codegeist Contest by Atlassian, K15t's Tobias Anstett created a new Exporter for Confluence: The Scroll Wiki EPUB Exporter. EPUB is a standard for eBooks, and is used on iPad and iPhones. Just watch this:
If you like, it please don't forget to vote: http://codegeist.atlassian.com/entry/168739
Shortly after Atlassian announced a new license size for Confluence this week, we are also offering a 50 user license.
That way we want to offer to our customers working with smaller teams to also be able to purchase a smaller instance from Scroll Office.
Even better, Scroll Office is already named user based, as a matter of facts, it is not linked to the Confluence license size, so big customers can also only buy a 50 users license whereas their Confluence license might be of 2000+ Users.
The pricing model is the same as before, the 50 users license costs 50% of the Confluence one. Leave a comment or visit our Forum.
We are proud to announce that Scroll Office 2.1 for Confluence is out. We have added a lot of features to build even better Word documents:
To try out Scroll Office:
We would like to thank our users who helped us improving our product by providing feedback and suggestions. Please keep helping and add more requests on our discussion forum.
About Scroll Office
Scroll Office is a Confluence plugin that provides first-class Word export. What does that mean? Other than the default Export to Word functionality in Confluence, Scroll is exports multiple pages into one document, builds native Word 2007/2010 files and uses Word templates for styling the output.
Confluence provides a great infrastructure for doing all kinds of things in plugins. One requirement I came across a few times is sending emails from Confluence, which I will explain in this article.
There are two ways of sending emails in Confluence: 1. Synchronous 2. Asynchronous using a mail queue
I will explain option 2, as synchronous sending will make the user wait until the email is sent to the mail server. Asynchronous sending is implemented using a queuing mechanism, and will send the email every 60 seconds. This implementation build on the com.atlassian.core.task.MultiQueueTaskManager which can be injected as a dependency by the Confluence plugin system. After that it is very easy to send emails:
:
String emailText = "Email Text with HTML";
ConfluenceMailQueueItem item = new ConfluenceMailQueueItem(
contact.getEmail(),
null,
subject,
emailText,
ConfluenceMailQueueItem.MIME_TYPE_HTML);
item.setFromName("Example Inc.");
item.setFromAddress("website@example.com");
taskManager.addTask("mail", item);
:For rendering the email text from templates the VelocityManager is quite handy, which I will explain in another post.
We are proud to announce that Scroll Office for Confluence is out.
Scroll Office creates styled Microsoft Word documents directly from Confluence. It uses Microsoft Word files and their styling information as templates to output native Microsoft Word 2007 documents having the desired look.
This way, Scroll Office bridges the gap between content authoring in the wiki and styling in Microsoft Word: Use Confluence for collaboration and authoring and use Microsoft Word's capabilities for styling and printing professional documents.
Some facts:
For more information:
As more projects become agile, the amount of releases (deployments) increases excessively. These releases require a lot of manual work that can be automated with Maven. The following article describes how to release Jira plugins using the command mvn release:prepare and mvn release:perform
You need a svn command line client on your machine. Mac users are happy because their machine comes with one. Windows users have to download one. See http://subversion.apache.org/.
Add the following to code to your pom:
:
<packaging>atlassian-plugin</packaging>
<scm>
<connection>scm:svn:https://k15t.jira.com/svn/TEST/trunk</connection>
</scm>
<dependencies>
:
If the build fails you can roll it back with: mvn -DscmCommentPrefix="[TEST-1]MvnRelease" release:rollback
On Monday June 14th K15t Software made its first appearance at the Single Source Forum in Munich. The single source forum is a conference for the technical communication community in Germany. This year's focus was on software documentation and how make documentation work for highly customizable software.
Tobias Anstett, co-founder of K15t Software, talked at the Single Source Forum 2010 about "Variability in the Documentation Process using Wikis". He defined the terms variability and variants in the context of documentation and presented the reasons for the creation of variants in documentation such as product variants, internationalization and audience-specific presentation of content.
For example he went into detail about structuring content in Confluence:
Structure plays a important role for usability but also when it comes to re-use of content. Confluence allows you to structure your content in different ways. First spaces can be created to differentiate between e.g. different products, departments or types of documentation. Speaking from experience a space should always be used for a single documentation. Inside a space pages respectively hierarchies of pages can be used to introduce a global structure which can be further imporved by using headings of differnet sizes on the page level itself. Authors should always think about the granularity of content they create. Using a page for single sentences might improve context sensitive re-use of information by others but impair the readability and maintenance of the documentation in the wiki. Another concept which is more related to re-use than to stucturing is the ability to tag or label pages. Labels can be used to introduce semantic information which improves search but also the creation of filters for e.g. exporting with Scroll.
Here are the slides (German only):
