Hello Readers, Mark Halvorson from Atlassian posting. A while back Atlassian announced its commitment to bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise, since that time we've been working hard to get OpenSocial working in all of our products. In October we released JIRA 4.0, Atlassian's award-winning issue tracker. With JIRA 4.0's new Shindig-based dashboards, JIRA acts as both an OpenSocial gadget producer and consumer. Now we're happy to announce that Confluence 3.1 is now generally available for download from atlassian.com - and it too can now both produce and consume OpenSocial gadgets!
As many of you know OpenSocial gadgets make it easier to integrate with other applications on the web and behind the firewall. Along with many other new features it is now possible to embed OpenSocial gadgets on any Confluence wiki page. This will let groups of people collaborate around gadget content from virtually any application seamlessly.
Embedding OpenSocial Gadgets is Easy - Confluence 3.1 lets you embed Gadgets from other Atlassian tools like JIRA, Bamboo and FishEye directly into Confluence pages. You can add and configure gadgets in just a couple clicks using the Macro Browser, a visual editor available from any page: And because OpenSocial is an open standard, you can use Gadgets to integrate with 3rd party applications behind the firewall and thousands of applications on the web.
Add Confluence to other applications - Confluence also provides its own Gadgets that you can embed into other OpenSocial containers like JIRA or even Gmail. Confluence comes with three out-of-the-box gadgets: Activity Stream, QuickNav and Confluence News.
See for yourself Check out our brief overview video to see all of Confluence 3.1's new features in action:
Try it now! Download Confluence 3.1 now to upgrade or get started a 10-user license for only $10, or a free 30-day evaluation. We've introduced simplified evaluation installers for Windows and OS X to get you up and running quickly.
If you need instant gratification, you can also check out our Online Trial (also free for 30 days) or play around with our live Sandbox.
Our three platforms studiVZ, meinVZ and schuelerVZ are Germany's largest social network with close to 16 million users.
We are proud to announce that our platform has OpenSocial 0.8.1 up and running. Developers can upload and test their Apps against our platforms and request the approval to make them available to our users.
All interested developers are invited to visit our developer's wiki at http://developer.studivz.net/wiki, where more information can be found on how to become a VZ OpenSocial App developer. Following the strict German privacy regulations, we introduced a new concept called VCards, which enable users to determine which of their profile information they are willing to share with each of their installed Apps, this can be App-specific if they wish.
Services
Currently we offer the following OpenSocial services:
People
AppData
The next release will continue implementations of the following services
Messages
Activities
Payment (Scheduled for a Q1 2010 launch)
All services are also available in our REST API over two-legged or three-legged OAuth.
Views
Profile
Canvas
Group (VZ only)
Preview (VZ only)
Popup (VZ only)
Integration (VZ only)
Extensions
Beside the standard extensions we implemented some additional functionality in order to meet our platform's needs and to enhance the user-experience:
Our sandbox is the first instance a freshly developed App has to pass. This is the place where developers can test their newest App revisions before they are published. We currently offer the following features inside our sandbox:
Rrevision based storage and deployment
Online XML-editor
Statistics and tracking access
Logging
Multi-user access and shared development capabilities
Integrated previews
We strongly believe that OpenSocial should also be taken literally, so we initiated a monthly GeekNight, where all interested developers are informed about our current projects and get a chance to mingle with other industry professionals.
Mark Halvorson from Atlassian Software here! You may have read my blog post a while back about Why Enterprise Software Provider Atlassian chose OpenSocial Atlassian. We've been working hard over the past year adding an OpenSocial container based on Shindig into JIRA 4. I'm writing today because we've got some cool news for all you gadget developers out there.
But before I mention that, I wanted to give you a heads up about Atlassian. We build affordable, lightweight software that helps enterprises collaborate better. Our products include Confluence, recognized as the most widely-used enterprise wiki, and JIRA, one of the world's most popular issue trackers for IT project management. We also make a bunch of developer tools to help you write great code. Check us out.
We're excited to announce Atlassian Codegeist IV, our fourth annual plugin competition. We're giving away over $50,000 in prizes for the coolest, most useful, most elegant plugin or integration for any of Atlassian's products. There are six prizes, each worth $5,000 in cash, and thousands more in software, conference tickets, and even a new MacBook!
But the interesting thing for the OpenSocial community is that because JIRA 4 is now an OpenSocial Container, and gadgets are now a big part of our plugin competition! To jumpstart our gadget development, we're sponsoring a category for best OpenSocial gadget inside JIRA. In JIRA 4, we're focusing on the gadgets part of the spec, with more Social features to come in our next release. OpenSocial is a brand new technology for our community, so the field is wide open.
We've also got a first- and second-place Best Plugin prizes, and three other specific categories for different types of plugins (each still worth $5,000). There's something here for everyone, including opportunities beyond traditional Java development.
This year we will even be announcing the winners live on October 21 at AtlasCamp, our premier developer conference. You need not be present to win, but it sure will be more fun!
You can use the Developer Forums to communicate with your peers, find team-members, ask questions, and publicize your awesome new plugin. The Atlassian Developer Community is strong, and Codegeist is a wonderful chance to collaborate with other developers.
Check out the Codegeist website for more information and get started today.
I am pleased to announce that Sonico, one of Latin America's leading social networks, has successfully rolled out its OpenSocial container to over +39 million users! A fantastic group of launch partners, including Buddypoke and GameDesire, worked with us for this initial release! Sonico is one of the leading social networks in Latin America, and is positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil. It is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Sonico's OpenSocial (v 0.8) platform includes the following:
Full support for the core Opensocial APIs:
AppData
People/Person
Activities
Gadget rendering of home, profile, preview and canvas views
Dimensions for views are the same as used by Orkut
Viral features:
requestCreateActivity
requestShareApp
requestSendMessage
RESTful APIs
RESTful and RPC protocols
2-legged Oauth
Test & Publish your apps!
Our goal is to extend our application offering with useful and entertaining applications which bring value to our community and improve their experience!
We’re happy to invite the OpenSocial developer community to our sandbox and encourage the submission of engaging apps! It is a great opportunity to tap into a market that is eager for social applications.
Request sandbox access and read about our OpenSocial implementation:
Sonico is a social communication platform launched in July 2007 that merges social utility and entertainment to organize people’s life online. Developed with a strong emphasis in user legitimacy, privacy and personalization, it has been widely adopted across Latin America. Sonico is positioned as the second largest social network in Brazil, and is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Located in Buenos Aires and with a team over 80 people, Sonico was elected by BusinessWeek as the 5th tech startup with the highest global growth potential. Sonico closed its first round of capitalization of USD 4.3 million in May 2008.
