Today we released the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence and Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.3. This update addresses various bug fixes and improvements.

As per user request, we’ve reintegrated the Document Manager back into the Confluence Plugin. This will allow customers to copy certain portions of diagrams into other diagrams.

We also put the Print feature back in. This allows you to Print directly from the editor, not just to PDF.

Below is a complete list of fixes and improvements:

Bug

• [GLIFFY-2213] – ERD connectors are rendered incorrectly in the editor
• [GLIFFY-2218] – Ellipse or Circle in Classic Basic Shapes drop shadow gets cut off
• [GLIFFY-2329] – Grouping not being remembered across saves
• [GLIFFY-2367] – Some Shapes have a shape boundary, while others don't
• [GLIFFY-2374] – Control characters are getting into the Gliffy XML
• [GLIFFY-2375] – Hyperlinks are not aligned with text
• [GLIFFY-2496] – BPMN Group Symbol should be sent to back when dropped
• [GLIFFY-2435] – Drop shadow of Round, Classic shapes are flat at the bottom.
• [GLIFFY-2439] – Line of the Annotation BPMN shape does not show in SVG Export
• [GLIFFY-2449] – Print to PDF 1 page results in multipage Document
• [GLIFFY-2451] – Flash Error When Double-clicking 'new document'
• [GLIFFY-2498] – Text on Line is Not Centered (When Curved Line is Made Straight)
• [GLIFFY-2558] – Adjusting Line Text Font size doesn't always re-center/format text
• [GLIFFY-2564] – Installation Success but ERROR on configuration
• [GLIFFY-2567] – Copy and paste a line with a long line of text, copied line initially looks wrapped.
• [GLIFFY-1900] – Text area looses focus when it shouldn't

Improvement

• [GLIFFY-2534] – Re-integrate the Document Manager back into Confluence
• [GLIFFY-802] – Create a Shortcut for editing text for objects
• [GLIFFY-2469] – Text Tool Defaults in Flowchart Template Result in "White"/Invisislbe Text
• [GLIFFY-2465] – Need Higher Quality Print/Export, specifically line or text based vs. a graphic image

New Feature

• [GLIFFY-565] – Access Tools via Keyboard Shortcuts (Arrow, Hand tool, Line Tool, Connector, Text Tool)

Download the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0.3

Download the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.3

This is the first part in a series of blog posts about how Gliffy is pushing to be environmentally sustainable wherever we can. The following is a guest post from Matthew E. Porter who is the CEO of Contegix, our hosting partner, who found a way to make our server hosting carbon neutral. Thank you Matthew!

Great partners and customers do more than just refer other potential customers and pay their bills. They provide honest feedback, challenge you, and help make you to be better than you were the day before. Contegix has the fortunate situation of having great partners and customers who amaze us and do this everyday. Gliffy and a few others are some that have been pushing our sustainability goals.

By the very nature of our business, we consume a large amount of power and do so from different sources. Our data centers have multiple power feeds and utilize diesel generators in case of complete power loss from utilities. In order to ensure operational status and efficiency, the generators need to be tested on a regular basis which amounts to consuming diesel fuel.

We already take steps to minimize our carbon footprints, such as using low voltage CPUs, recycling all materials, and reimbursing employees for mass transit. In addition, it’s more efficient, and thus, arguable more sustainable to utilize large data centers, such as ours, rather than each company building small scale server room. Yet, we wanted to start experimenting with the next step in this effort, and Gliffy was happy to help.

Enter Carbonfund.org. Carbonfund.org allows individual and companies to offset their carbon footprint by purchasing credits to invest in projects that reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. This is especially useful for companies like Contegix where we are very limited in our ability to reduce.

There are a few points that make Carbonfund.org unique. It is a 501(c)(3) charitable, non-profit organization dedicated to fighting global warming. As part of their commitment, they work directly with certification bodies to ensure the quality of their offsets. More importantly, they provide transparency in terms of their finances and their offset projects, including education.

Using Carbonfund.org, we wanted to offset the entire footprint of Gliffy’s managed hosted internet infrastructure at Contegix. This would include all aspects and resources of the service. Some of these are dedicated solely to Gliffy. Many others, such as core border routers and the switching fabric, are used by all customers. In addition, we had to compensate for the managed service portion of Gliffy’s infrastrucutre. In essences, this meant assigning a percentage of our people’s carbon footprint to the delivery of their service. This included everyone – from engineer to office staff to management, to the

The online calculator made the dedicated server infrastructure trivial to determine; however, assigning values for the shared infrastructure and people required calculating the usage on a per customer level. In reality, it uses many of the same work we perform (and all businesses probably should be performing) around measuring, managing, and forecasting growth and profitability for shared resources. This is added to the specific measurable environmental footprint data, such as average distance of employees from Contegix and facility sizes. These numbers were proportionally assigned to the Gliffy as a customer.

Carbon sources related to Gliffy.com server hosting

Factoring in the shared infrastructure and people carbon footprints ended up being the most important part. The dedicated infrastructure accounted for 39.2% of the carbon footprint. This left the remainder – a significant portion – for the shared. It also helped point us to where the best chances for natural reduction, rather than merely offsetting, are.

Over the next 6 months, we will begin rolling this out to our existing customer base as an option for their hosting. New infrastructure and customers can start doing this now. If your organization is interested in a carbon offset hosting solution or wants to discuss in-depth how we offset Gliffy’s footprint, we would be more than happy to help you with this goal! Contact us.

Matthew E. Porter
CEO, Contegix

Gliffy is looking for an awesome client side software developer who is interested in working on our highly interactive web based diagram editor with some other very smart and creative developers. We’re a bootstrapped, profitable software company with a focus on bringing great experiences to customers. Benefits include (but are not limited to) a company credit card, and we’ll even pay your phone bill for you!

Know someone awesome who we should talk to? Refer us and you’ll get a $1000 referral bonus.

Learn more here:

http://www.gliffy.com/jobs/

Thx!

-chris

The Gliffy August 2010 Newsletter it out!

It’s been a big month for us with Gliffy’s successful leap into the Google App Marketplace. We’re not resting on our laurels, though. This month our newsletter highlights some funny templates we’ve added to Gliffy, our new Drawing Guides tool, a SWSX proposal, and job openings at Gliffy. Read all about it.

We’ve just released an update to Gliffy Online, coinciding with the release of Starcraft 2. This release contains numerous tweaks and fixes to our systems. We did manage to sprinkle in a few new features, too. Here are a few of the highlights of this release:

• Fixed the rendering of ERD line endings
• Fixed flat edges on Basic and Flowchart Classic skin shapes that had no border
• Grouping of certain shapes not remembered across saves
• Link maps are now exact in published diagrams
• Moved ad banner so it doesn’t block text properties
• Added a few new templates and improved others
• BPMN Annotation line does not disappear now in SVG export
• Added a shortcut, F2, to automatically edit text on an object
• Folder list in document manager disappearing
• Added border around Account Images to better see smaller uploaded images
• Fixed a few issues around saving when someone had logged into another instance of Gliffy

Click here to see a full list of issues resolved in this release.

Happy drawing and long live Terrans!

Today we released the 3.0.2 version of the Gliffy Plugins for Confluence and JIRA. This release was to fix an issue where certain installations were not allowing some of our symbol libraries (like Venn symbols) to be loaded.

GLIFFY-2421: Venn Diagram cannot be rendered

Download the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0.2

Download the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.2

Background

Back in 2005 when Clint, myself, and the other founders of Gliffy were contemplating what sort of product we wanted to build for our little startup, we generally focused on one central idea. We believed that most desktop software would be moving onto the web, and by leveraging our unique experience of building rich web applications, we could be a significant part of that movement.

When Google announced the Google Apps Marketplace earlier this year, a huge advancement in this movement was made. The barriers to getting small businesses on board with the web based software movement had been reduced dramatically, and we knew that it was important to integrate with this exciting new delivery platform to help fulfill our original vision.

Let’s back up for a moment… what is Google Apps? Google Apps is a Google product where by Google will host your organization’s email in one place, AND all the members of your organization can also get access to the other Google Apps such as spreadsheets, presentations, and more. At Gliffy, for example, we use Google Apps for our email (via Gmail), and it saves us the hassle of having to run our own mail server. With Gmail at the center of this experience, Google Apps becomes a natural portal for launching into other web based applications.

The Google Apps Marketplace is a one stop shop that lists additional web based applications, created by third party vendors, who integrate with Google Apps. Gliffy is now one of those web based applications that works with Google Apps!

How to add Gliffy to your Google Apps Domain

Here’s how it works:

If you use Google Apps, and you are an administrator of your Google Apps domain, you can add Gliffy to your Google Apps by clicking on this button:

Click on the “Add it now” button on the Gliffy Listing page. From there, you can either create a new Gliffy account to link to your Google Apps Domain, or link an existing Gliffy account to your Google Apps Domain. After you’ve set everything up, make sure you enabled Gliffy in your Google Apps Management Dashboard or already did so in the setup process. Finally, make sure to refresh your Gmail browser window, and you should see Gliffy show up under the “more” menu. You can now log into Gliffy and create diagrams straight from your Google Apps without logging into Gliffy! Here is a great video that explains this process in more detail.

This is just the beginning. There are many great integration points with Google that we plan to leverage in the future. If you have some specific ideas about how we could integrate better with Google, or have any other feedback, please let us know!

If you like Gliffy, please write a review!

If you like what you see, please write a positive review about Gliffy on the Gliffy Google Apps Marketplace Listing Page. Thanks!

Today we’re releasing the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0.1 and Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.1. The purpose of this release is to fix a few nagging bugs with the 3.0.0 version. Highlights of this release are:

• Printing (Exporting) to PDF - When you print a diagram, it now prints to PDF. This allows us better consistency of the printing output across Browsers, Operating Systems and Flash player versions. This feature is located in the file menu.
• Snap using the SHIFT key – Stretching or moving a shape will now snap in 5px increments. This in conjunction with the Drawing guides should help overall sizing and alignment in a diagram
• Templates open to the correct symbol library - When you open a template that uses a specific skin or style, the skin or style will open by default in the symbol library

For a complete list of features and bug fixes, follow the links below:

Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0.1
Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.1

Starting at approximately 2:20PM PDT on Sunday June 20th, the Gliffy.com website came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

A DDoS attack is when the bad guys use many many hacked computers to send arbitrary requests at our servers.

This in turn overwhelms our servers which can’t handle the massive amount of traffic. These are very difficult attacks to defend against because of the distributed nature of the attack.

In the last 24 hours, our network engineers have been working to disrupt this attack. It took us a while to find a solution, but we believe we are now adequately protected from the attack. We have contingency plans in place in the event that the attack resumes with more vigor.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our users. We probably could have been better prepared to deal with this particular issue, and we are learning from this event so that we can prevent such attacks in the future. This type of attack did not involve our servers being hacked, so your data continues to be safe and secure.

To stay up to date about the very latest in regards to the Gliffy.com website status, please subscribe to our @gliffy twitter account.

Update 11:23AM PST: We are still seeing the site come up and down. We have contingency plans in place in the event that we are unable to successfully deflect the attack with our current methods. We’re keeping the specifics to ourselves since it’s likely the attackers are reading this, but we want our users to know we are continuing to work on a solution.

Update 03:01PM PST: The site is much more stable right now, however we are still experiencing some problems. We’re posting more frequent updates to our @gliffy twitter account, so please check in there for the most up to date information.

Update 05:14PM PST: Our confidence is increasing that we have a solid handle on this now. We’ve consulted with various experts on the topic, and we have contingency plans in place in the event that the attack overwhelms us again. Please follow our @gliffy twitter account, to stay informed about the latest.

The Atlassian Summit 2010 is here! It’s one of our favorite times of the year for many reasons, one being it means we’ve got a big release just for you. Introducing the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0 for Atlassian Confluence and the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0 for Atlassian JIRA. Version 3.0 includes exciting new features such as new symbols, templates, line tool improvements, and drawing guides.

New Symbols

Yes, it’s been a while since we’ve added new symbols, but we’ve made some vast upgrades in our architecture that will allow us to put out beautiful new symbols more often. The first batch includes Venn diagram shapes and Sitemap shapes. Venn diagrams are perfect for showing relationships between things:

The new Venn shapes

Want to show your CEO how your companies initiatives will be presented throughout the new website you are building? Use Gliffy’s hot new Site Map shapes to impress. Site-maps are an integral part of web-site design that shows how a site is accessed and organized:

The new Site Map shapes

Finally, we’ve also added new fresh skins for our Basic and Flowchart shapes that will add sparkle to your diagrams. You can still use our classic skins too, located via the dropdown under each respective tab on the left hand side of Gliffy.

The new Fresh skin for Flowchart shapes

Templates
By popular demand, we’re proud to introduce templates to the plugins. When you add a diagram to a Confluence page or JIRA issue, you are immediately given the option to create a type of diagram based from a template provided by us (i.e. flowchart, floor plan, UML, etc.), or a template from your existing design (Confluence only). You can also use a template that can be stored on your computer using our new Import/Export Gliffy XML feature. This is very useful if you want to take a diagram you did in Gliffy Online and use it in Confluence or JIRA. Note to Confluence users: we have removed the Document Manager since it’s purpose previously was for copying an existing diagram to create a new diagram. The Template Manager now does this in a more elegant fashion.

The Template Manager showing a UML template

Line Tool Improvements
We’ve also made some big improvements to our connector line tool. You can now add curved lines, quadratic bezier curves to be exact. Plus, we’ve added a new arrow type that can be accessed via the line ends property drop-down. You can also create lines that have a fill color and a border color. To do this, select a line, make the width of the line 3px or more (third selection on line width drop down or lower), and select a fill color. Viola! To change the border color, select a line color for that line.

Curved lines

Drawing Guides
Finally, we’ve added drawing guides. To turn the drawing guides on, click anywhere on the visible page and you will see a “drawing guides” checkbox under the document properties. Check it to turn the guides on. When you drag a shape on the visible page, guides will show for different alignments. A red line will show when a shape is aligned to the center of another shape, and a green line will show when an edge is aligned to the edge of another shape. The drawing guides have replaced snap-to-grid.

Aligning shapes by center

Aligning shapes by left edge

Chris put together this nice video to show you some of our new features in action:

New features in action in Confluence
To see a complete list of bug fixes and other improvements, click below:

• Gliffy Plugin for Confluence – 3.0
• Gliffy Plugin for JIRA – 3.0

The updated plugins are available immediately on their respective download pages:

• Confluence Plugin
• JIRA Plugin

The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0 works on Confluence 2.9 and above and the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA works on JIRA 3.13 and above.

If you have any suggestions or issues with Gliffy, please don’t hesitate to contact us!