StiltSoft Atlassian Day 2019

November 29, 2019
#News
6 min

In 2017, we decided to host our first conference about Atlassian products in Minsk. It was a lot more work than we anticipated, and a lot harder to do something cool than we expected. However, in the end, it all came together, and we’ve already organized three events in a row (smile)

The main objective of our conference is to connect Atlassian users in Belarus since we are the only certified Atlassian Solution Partner in our country. We want to collaborate and brainstorm with our attendees and presenters, share ideas and best practices, raise awareness, and develop solutions together. We feel that the Belarussian Atlassian community needs more information about Atlassian products to find a way to get the most benefit out of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket.

Last week, our StiltSoft Atlassian Day 2019 gathered nearly three times more people than in 2017! Compare the figures to see that our event enjoys increasing popularity in Minsk.

We started our event with a networking hour to help our attendees mix and mingle with each other. They had a chance to ask us questions about Atlassian products. Some of the participants told us more about the challenges they have at work, and, of course, grabbed some pizza after a busy day at work.

Our product owners spent the first hour of our event talking to the attendees about our apps. We’ve chosen our most popular apps Table Filter and Charts for Confluence, Awesome Graphs for BitbucketCourses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence, and Smart Attachments for Confluence. We asked 15 attendees who have never used them before to work with these apps and provide us with some feedback. It helped us understand what features users like when working with our solutions.

Maxim Kuzmich, a co-CEO at StiltSoft, started our event with a short introduction about our company to tell new attendees more about our company and Atlassian updates.

Siarhei Barysenka, a principal iOS engineer at Atlassian, visited our conference and provided our attendees with an overview of Confluence Cloud Mobile. He told a bit about their team structure and how they on the quality of their products.

Aleksandr Bogun, a team lead of IT solutions at Wargaming, showed the participants how their team organized access to Jira and Confluence in general. The attendees learned more about how Wargaming archived part of tasks in Jira. Aleksandr demonstrated simple automations that they implemented in their instances.

Ivan Spresov from Agile Belarus shared the best practices of the Agile approach. He showed the audience how to build and manage a project roadmap using Jira and Confluence, as well as how to ensure team transparency in managing requirements.

We want to thank our speakers for their presentations tailored to help users better understand Atlassian products. We enjoyed the positive and energizing atmosphere of this evening because all the attendees were so active, asking questions about Atlassian products.

We hope that our attendees left StiltSoft Atlassian Day with a handful of new contacts, connections, and support!

Atlassian Events 2019: StiltSoft’s Summer Tour

June 28, 2019
#News
7 min

Atlassian events are about attending useful sessions, finding potential tools and solutions for Atlassian products and learning from each other. We love summer because it is always full of various interesting conferences organized by Atlassian Solution Partners. This year our team participated in four great events in a row:

These events provided us with a great opportunity to meet our customers and people who are interested in our products and tell them more about our solutions for Confluence, Jira and Bitbucket.

Table Filter and Charts for Confluence

The attendees of Jira Day, META-INF Atlassian Day and catworkx Midsummer Day had a chance to visit our workshop ‘Creating handy Jira dashboards and reports in Atlassian Confluence’. Natalie Paramonova, a product analyst at StiltSoft, showed how to create a flexible and dynamic Jira project dashboard with the help of the native Confluence tools. The participants discovered such capabilities of the Table Filter and Charts app as:

  • building Gantt chart
  • comparison of graphs of open and resolved tickets by types
  • sprint storypoints calculation
  • visualizing team worklogs and more

You can check our documentation site describing the use cases mentioned during this workshop.

Confluence dashboard

Smart Attachments for Jira and Smart Attachments for Confluence

Vadim Rutkevich, a product owner at StiltSoft, highlighted the basic approaches and comprehensive practices for managing documents in Jira and Confluence with Smart Attachments for Jira and Smart Attachments for Confluence at Jira Day, META-INF Atlassian Day.

He showed how our apps can simplify the retention of documents, their searchability, and further collaboration with the team on project documents and files both in Jira and Confluence. Check out his presentation ‘Document management in Jira and Confluence at scale’.

Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence

At the K15t Solution Forum, Katerina Kolina talked about using Confluence as a learning management system (LMS) with the help of Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence.

She showed the attendees how to use Confluence for onboarding new hires, certification, education, employee training, checking the level of skills, and evaluating how well people understand processes and know products they work with.

Check out her webinar ‘Organize learning and training in Confluence’.

Let’s recall the best moments of these four events (smile).

Jira Day

META-INF Atlassian Day

catworkx Midsummer Day

K15t Solution Forum

Atlassian events help us meet Atlassian vendors and users and develop long-term relationships with them. The more we attend Atlassian events, the more we enjoy them!

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Year in Review: The Most-Read Blog Posts of 2018

December 28, 2018
#News
11 min

2018 is almost over – so it’s high time for us to look back and review the most popular topics of the year highlighted in our blog. This is the last blog post of the year and we do hope that over the past 12 months you’ve learned something new and interesting from the articles we posted every week.

You can check the five most-read articles of 2017 that caught your attention more than any others last year. So what were the most popular posts of 2018? Here is the list of the topics that trended in our blog:

  1. Collaboration on Backlog With External Users in Jira
  2. 9 Confluence Best Practices Your Users Should Know
  3. Calendar of Atlassian Events 2018
  4. How to Create Education Courses Right in Confluence
  5. 5 New Confluence Apps to Level Up Your Productivity – Fourth Quarter 2017

1. Collaboration on Backlog With External Users in Jira

The blog post about how to give external users visibility into your work stream in Jira leads the list of the most-read articles of this year. We described various ways you can use to collaborate on projects with your customers, partners or colleagues that do not have an account in Jira. Making each customer a Jira user is not a very scalable solution.

So what to choose from?

custommer support portal Jira

Each solution has its pros and cons, so it’s up to you to decide which of the suggested options to choose.

2. 9 Confluence Best Practices Your Users Should Know

The guest blog post written by Balkis Khouni, an Atlassian certified consultant at Valiantys, takes the second place in our chart. Confluence is a useful team collaboration tool with an intuitive interface, but a good place to start is with the nine best practices for effective communication and information sharing outlined by Valiantys.

Here is a brief overview of the nine Confluence best practices suggested by Valiantys:

  1. Identify the list of spaces you need to create
  2. Take the time to define your page structure
  3. Use page templates
  4. Increase productivity by using Confluence macros
  5. Organize your attachments
  6. Avoid redundant content
  7. Label your content
  8. Grant permissions wisely
  9. Train Confluence users to adopt best practices

3. Calendar of Atlassian Events 2018

This year we created the calendar of Atlassian events to help our users get organized because sometimes it can be hard to find all the events hosted by Atlassian vendors in one place. For example, in 2018 Atlassian announced the first-ever world tour of Atlassian team both in Europe and USA. We have great news for you because they will repeat this success in 2019 introducing the enterprise edition of the tour.

Moreover, Atlassian users can always find something interesting participating in local Atlassian events organized by such vendors as catWorkX, Meta-INF, DEISEReazyBIValiantys.

Atlassian events

We will definitely make a list of the upcoming Atlassian events of 2019. So stay tuned not to miss important events of Atlassian ecosystem.

4. How to Create Education Courses Right in Confluence

The next blog post looks at one of the most efficient ways to create education courses in Confluence. It describes the handy features of Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence.

This app allows you create training courses, various quizzes for you employees and customers providing them with the opportunity to take courses in Confluence at their own pace from the comfort of their own desk using the UI they are familiar with.

You can populate your course with YouTube videos, images, PDF files, and more to keep it interesting and hold everybody’s attention. The best thing is that you can educate your team members or participants who are not Confluence users.

5. 5 New Confluence Apps to Level Up Your Productivity – Fourth Quarter 2017

The fifth place goes to our digest article listing new apps for Confluence that appeared on the Atlassian Marketplace in the fourth quarter of 2017. Here are some details of how these apps work.

That’s it, these are our five most popular blogs of this year.

The StiltSoft team wants to thank you for reading our articles, sharing and subscribing. Please, let us know more about the topics you want to find in our blog. Please, feel free to comment below.

We wish you all the best in 2019. Have a healthy and prosperous New Year!

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StiltSoft Atlassian Day 2018

November 23, 2018
#News
7 min

Last year, almost 70 Belarusian users visited our first StiltSoft Atlassian Day to learn more about Atlassian and its products. Last Thursday, we were thrilled to host a group of enthusiastic and like-minded people for our second StiltSoft Atlassian Day. This time almost 100 people joined us in Minsk to discover the latest best-of-breed solutions Atlassian offers its users.

StiltSoft is the only certified Atlassian Solution Partner and Atlassian Platinum Top Vendor in Belarus. Our primary focus is app development. However, we also do our best to build solid relationships with Atlassian users in our country and create a community to help people share their experience and find solutions to their challenges. So our mission is to equip the attendees of our events with the skills and knowledge they need to be confident and effective users of Atlassian products. Of course, hosting a live event is a great way to do this and it so worth all the effort!

There’s nothing like the energy of people meeting face to face. So we wanted to break the ice at the start and help our attendees make great conversations and new connections during the first hour of our event. Everyone could join one of the three tables to chat with the members of our team: Atlassian Admins, Atlassian Users, Atlassian Power Users. The participants asked us questions, told their table members about how they work with Atlassian products and described the challenges they face at work.

This networking hour helped our attendees relax a bit, grab some pizza and have a chat about things that matter to them. It was also very helpful for us and we will definitely use the information we get from all the people to make our future events more useful highlighting the topics Belarusian users are interested in most.

Meanwhile, our product owners had a great opportunity to get feedback about our apps from people who have never used them before. We have chosen our best sellers Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket, Table Filter and Charts for Confluence, Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence, and, our brand new app, Smart Attachments for Confluence. It was a great experience for us because we had a chance to get some helpful insights and see our products through the eyes of other people.

We started our event with a short introduction of our company to show the attendees what has changed over the past year:

  • We became Atlassian Platinum Top Vendor
  • The StiltSoft team welcomed 6 new people
  • We released 4 brand new apps for Confluence
  • The most popular apps of ours are available for Data Center
  • More and more customers all over the globe trust StiltSoft
  • Now Belarusian users can share their knowledge in AUG Minsk

We also prepared three user-friendly presentations to show the participants how Atlassian products help other companies boost their productivity.

Gonchik Tsymzhitov, an Atlassian Administrator at Itiviti, showed us how their company synchronizes their documentation with Confluence installations of their clients using Bamboo and Bitbucket.

Maxim Kuzmich, a StiltSoft co-founder, demonstrated the attendees useful hacks and tricks that can help you create appealing and more digestible Confluence pages using native Confluence macros.

Vadim Mustyatsa, a Practitioner Agile Analyst & Architect at Alfa-Bank and a co-leader of AUG Minsk, was our last invited speaker. He talked about how their organization uses Atlassian products. Vadim showed us that every large company has its own way of implementing Atlassian products at an enterprise scale.

We got a lot of in-person feedback from the attendees who approached us after the event. Overall, the feedback we received was positive. Most people said they would come back when we announce our next conference. (smile)

Many thanks to all our speakers who prepared interesting topics and shared their thoughts with the audience and to all the people who attended the event! We also want to thank our team who encouraged the participants smile and feel comfortable during our StiltSoft Atlassian Day. It was great that everyone was on the same page that helped us create a warm and friendly atmosphere.

StiltSoft Atlassian Day is a fun and rewarding journey for our team and now we have a ton of ideas for the next event!

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    Upcoming Atlassian Events: We’d Love to Meet You!

    May 4, 2018
    #News
    6 min

    Our company is always eager to participate in different events organized by Atlassian and Atlassian Solution Partners. We like the special atmosphere of these events because the participants can learn more about the latest trends in the Atlassian ecosystem, share their knowledge about the best practices, find solutions to their challenges, and just have fun together.

    So take a look at the places where we will be glad to meet you this summer!

    Budapest, Hungary: Meta-Inf Atlassian Day, June 6-7

    Budapest is the first stop in our summer tour.

    Meta-Inf Atlassian Day is the biggest Atlassian event organized in Hungary by Meta-Inf. Last year we also became a part of this great conference.
    This June, the organizers want to showcase how Atlassian can help teams grow with the help of various case studies and success stories.

    Our team together with Adaptivist, Comalatech, Deviniti, SoftwarePlant, and TEMPO will educate attendees through effective practice based on workshops and present the capabilities of our apps to the participants.

    Our presentation on 7th June

    Our business analyst Katerina Kolina will show the participants how our Awesome Graphs app helps analyze the process of code development and review in Bitbucket.

    From this talk you will learn what insights the Awesome Graphs app can give you about your work in Bitbucket projects and repositories. You will see how graphs and reports can help you track activity, progress and visualize history of a project. You will also hear about ways to analyze individual performance of each developer and the whole team from different perspectives. And you will get tools for monitoring your code review process and finding weak spots in it.

    Welcome to our workshop on 7th June

    We will also run a workshop ‘Build training courses for employee and customer education in Confluence with Quizzes app’ at 14:15-15:30 on 7th June.

    In this workshop you will learn how to use Confluence for creating education courses with the help of the Quizzes for Confluence app. You will briefly hear about the benefits of using training courses to upskill employees and educate customers on your products followed by a step-by-step guide on how to get started – create, manage and take courses in Confluence without using third party applications.

    This will be helpful for those who would like to use Confluence for learning management.

    So don’t hesitate, get a ticket and join us.

    Hamburg, Germany: catworkx Midsummer Day, June 20-21

    catWorkX, the Atlassian Expert and Verified vendor, are organizing catWorkX Midsummer Day the fifth time in a row. Last year we enjoyed the atmosphere of CMSD.

    Welcome to the best practice session on 20th June

    One day prior to the event, the catworkx team will organize the exclusive best practice sessions with app vendors from the Atlassian Ecosystem that we strongly recommend you to visit.

    We will show the participants how to build training courses for employee and customer education in Confluence with the help of our Quizzes for Confluence app at 17:30–18:30 on 20th June.

    Our presentation on 21th June

    Our business analyst and product owner of the Talk – Advanced Inline Comments, Katerina Kolina, will show the attendees a handy way to facilitate interaction between all the team members in Confluence during her presentation ‘Powerful Inline Comments in Confluence with the Talk app’.

    You have a great chance to meet more than 20 Atlassian vendors in one place!

    Schedule a meeting with us!

    Now you know where we will be this June. So come and talk to us. We will more than happy to meet you!

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    StiltSoft Participation in Jira Day 2018 in Warsaw

    March 16, 2018
    #News
    4 min

    Jira Day became the first conference in our events calendar of 2018. Jira Day is the largest conference in Poland dedicated to exploring Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket). It is a great opportunity for Atlassian Partners from European countries come together and tell the attendees more about our solutions for Atlassian tools. Jira Day gathered around 300 participants this time.

    StiltSoft together with Meta-Inf, DEISER, RefinedWiki, Riada, K15t Software, SoftwarePlant, celix Solutions, Tempo, Communardo, catworkx GmbH, eazyBI, and ALM Works became the part of Jira Day 2018 this week. So we’ve just came back from this two-day conference in a great mood and want to share our impressions with our readers.

    Now Deviniti!

    The announcement of the new name of InTENSO became one of the main news of the first day. Now the company is called Deviniti. This word is a combination of two words that describe the current vision of this Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner better than ever: development and infinity.

    Devinity not only provides their customers with useful IT solutions but also helps their customers to succeed with the help of their products.

    Being a part of Atlassian Community

    All Atlassian Partners were interviewed by the Deviniti team. Nobody actually expected some tricky questions asked by Dzmitry from Deviniti. For example, do you remember your first Jira ticket? 🙂

    While we were thinking about how Atlassian products changed the world, the attendees met the brightest representatives of the Polish IT community who shared their expertise on the main stage and showed how Atlassian products help them in their work.

    Also during the first day we had a great chance to meet our current customers and talk to all the participants who came to our stand. We were so glad to meet new people and tell them about the advantages of our apps.

    At the end of the first day all the participants went to a cool networking party that took place in The View bar. It was a nice place where everybody could relax, chat a bit, and have some fun.

    Workshops from Atlassian Partners

    The second day was a day of workshops. All Atlassian Partners shared their best practices of using Jira and Confluence and presented some real-life use cases.

    Vadim Rutkevich, a business analyst at StiltSoft, ran a workshop on project management and analysis in Atlassian Confluence. We had a full house and once again want to thank all of the participants for coming and being so active during the workshop.

    We wanted the attendees to find the best way to manage their project-related data in Confluence. Everyone had a chance to see how our Table Filter and Charts app can solve the suggested challenges in real time.

    We want to thank the Deviniti team for a wonderful conference – it was really great and so well organized.

    We really enjoyed the time spent with the participants and our colleagues!

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