About Sander Brienen

Senior engineer and Atlassian specialist at Avisi, Arnhem, the Netherlands.

Document XML Schemas in Confluence, the Easy Way!

Documenting an XML Schema Definition (XSD) can be a tiring process. You first load a file in an XSD viewing tool like XMLSpy, you then make screenshots of the areas of the definition you want to display and finally, you paste them into your documentation. Of course you have to repeat the entire process whenever the file changes in any way.

Avisi prides itself on being a cutting edge development organization so we felt strongly we needed to find a solution to this problem. Since we use Confluence as our documentation platform we chose to build a Confluence plugin: the XSD Viewer for Confluence.

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Agile Enterprise Architecture

Last november I attended the very interesting LAC conference (the Dutch conference on enterprise architecture). The theme this year was “The Open Architect”.

Looking back at the conference and the different talks, one can clearly see that agile principles have been infiltrating the enterprise architecture world. Here are a few examples…

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Managing your software inventory

At Avisi we are using Scrum more and more on our development teams. And just now I ran into this interesting blog post on software inventory. Typical Scrum activities are organizing the backlog or planning a sprint. These are exactly the activities that are dealing with the inventory of a Scrum team. With the new GreenHopper 6, managing your inventory becomes an easy task.

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Confluence for the Enterprise

Atlassian is aligning its licensing scheme for Confluence with the one for Jira. Jira Enterprise was introduced February 2012, adding support for large enterprises to the standard Jira offering. Now Confluence is also available in an enterprise license, adding 24×7 personalized support and more to Confluence. This new offering will change the pricing of Confluence drastically. So now is the time to upgrade your Confluence license to have another year of support and updates for legacy prices!

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Join our breakfast, meet our experts!

Last april we held our very first breakfast meetup. It was a thorough introduction to Atlassian, Jira and Confluence during a tasty breakfast. Attendees were enthusiastic, apparently learned something and we all had a very interesting discussion afterwards.

So we decided to repeat the experience!

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Atlassian Stash – new product, first experience

Stash Logo
On may 1st 2012, Atlassian released a new product called Stash. Stash is a Git repository manager. People that know Atlassian would say “Hey, isn’t it the same as FishEye?”. Well no, it’s not the same. FishEye is for looking at ALL of your source code, in any source repository. Stash is a repository manager for Git only. So how is it different then?

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Techday Play framework

We’re holding another one of our monthly “Techday” events this week. We organize techdays because we like to stay sharp and have some fun in the process (Check out our previous blog post about why we do techdays).

This month’s techday is on thursday april 26th in our Avisi offices in Arnhem. This time about the Play framework. Want to join the fun?

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Remote Apps for Atlassian OnDemand

Since Atlassian released their OnDemand platform, customers have been asking for more plugins to be made available there. Until now, only 7 plugins are offered on the new platform.

The current approach of in-VM plugins incurs a very high cost in development, QA, and support time. This is due to tight coupling and increased security and stability risks.

The Atlassian Remote Apps project aims to bring the benefit of third-party extensibility to OnDemand by dramatically lowering the costs and risks related to third-party code.

We investigated the possibilities to setup a remote app for enabling Numbered Headings for OnDemand. Here are our findings…

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Come have breakfast, with our Atlassian Experts!

Want a smarter, quicker and more efficient organization?
Let our Experts introduce you to the Atlassian software suite.

We’re holding a free breakfast on April 26th, 9 to 10 AM.

Register on our Meetup page.

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