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Knowledge Management Gets Practical as Atlassian Announces Confluence 1.2

Today, Atlassian Software Systems announced the second major update to their knowledge management product, "Confluence - The Professional Wiki." Confluence 1.2 features an enhanced search interface, new ways to explore the content of spaces, threaded comments, image thumbnails and galleries, a new permissions interface and a raft of additional improvements and bug fixes. This is the second major update to Confluence, and once again all existing customers can upgrade for free, thanks to the provision for one year of free upgrades in your license.

Sydney, Australia August 27, 2004 -- Today, Atlassian Software Systems announced the second major update to their knowledge management product, "Confluence - the Professional Wiki." Confluence 1.2 features an enhanced search interface, new ways to explore the content of spaces, threaded comments, image thumbnails and galleries, a new permissions interface and a raft of additional improvements and bug fixes. This is the second major update to Confluence, and once again all existing customers can upgrade for free, thanks to the provision for one year of free upgrades in your license.

"Confluence 1.2 is our second major update and it is really starting to raise the bar in terms of practical knowledge management. Confluence 1.2 is not only easily integrated into any company's intranet/extranet environment, but it allows both technical and business users alike to create, share, store, organise and search information. in true collaboration. Making it easier for teams to share information with each other and with the world is our goal, and 1.2 demonstrates that fact", Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's CEO and co-founder said.

Wiki technology was established by Ward Cunningham in 1995 and has been continuing to gain traction in the collaboration and social networking market place. Confluence builds on these foundations adding sophistication and professional qualities customers come to expect from enterprise software to create a truly practical knowledge management tool that removes any notion of the esoteric or cumbersome. In fact, Confluence adds professional features rarely seen in wiki software such as flexible privilege-based security management, blogging, automated refactoring, exporting pages or entire spaces to HTML or PDF, a comprehensive remote API and easy "unpack and run" installation, all wrapped up in Atlassian's "Legendary Service".

With Confluence 1.2, the user is now offered three ways to browse the contents of a space (a discrete wiki or content area). Firstly, the Alphabetical View allows you to find pages quickly by the first letter of their title. Secondly, the Directory View presents the contents of a space as a tree, allowing you to drill down the hierarchy of parent and child pages. Lastly, the Search View presents the newly enhanced search interface focused on the space you are looking at.

The ability to display a thumbnail of any image attached to a page has also been added. Clicking on the thumbnail will pop up a window containing the full-sized image. In addition, the gallery macro will create a thumbnail gallery of all the images that are attached to a page. Responding to customer demand, the ability to arrange comments by the message thread has been added. This allows users to respond to a particular comment, and the comments will be arranged in accordance with who responded to what.

The site-search functionality of Confluence has been greatly enhanced, both subtly behind the scenes, and quite obviously in front of them. Behind the scenes, we now index more information such as attachment comments and filenames. The team has tweaked the ranking algorithms behind the search so that you are more likely to find the content (page, space, comment, blog post, attachment and user) you are looking for as well improved the indexing of PowerPoint presentations so that more text is extracted from the PowerPoint file. The user has also been given a lot more control over searching with an intuitive user interface that allows users to limit searches by space, type of content, or date last modified, and to group search results by type and space.

To provide some insight into the other improvements that can't make it into this release, take a look at our full release notes here: http://www.atlassian.com/c/PR-C/10451

Once again all existing customers can upgrade for free, thanks to the provision for one year of free upgrades in your license. Existing customers who wish to upgrade, or new users who wish to try out Confluence for 30 days, can download either the standalone or WAR distributions from the Atlassian website: http://www.atlassian.com/c/PR-C/10450

Confluence is a J2EE application which runs on any platform. Confluence 1.2 is available now via Atlassian's web site. Confluence's fair and upfront licensing policy includes free upgrades and support for 12 months. Existing customers who wish to upgrade, or new users who wish to try out Confluence for 30 days can download either the standalone or WAR distributions from the Atlassian website http://www.atlassian.com/c/PR-C/10450

Atlassian is an innovative Australian software company providing enterprise software solutions to the world's leading organizations. Our mission is to build a different kind of software company, one that listens to client needs, values innovation in development and solves customer problems with brilliant simplicity. Atlassian's commitment to legendary service provides consistent, high quality support for all our customers. Atlassian also publishes JIRA, the world leading issue tracker.

For further details or to arrange an interview, please contact:
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Director