We’re happy to announce a great new program in conjunction with Atlassian that has a huge double benefit of helping small teams to get started with great software, and to help build libraries and schools for children in developing nations.

Today Atlassian announced that they are giving away 10-user starter licenses for almost all their products for just $10 each. The best part is that the $10 is being donated to the charity Room To Read, a charity dedicated to building libraries and schools for children in developing nations.

This is great for small teams who want to get started with the world-class JIRA bug tracker, or the Enterprise wiki Confluence.

To help out with the fund raising, Gliffy is also making the same offer for our Gliffy Confluence Plugin and Gliffy JIRA Plugin. That’s right, you can get running with Gliffy for just $10 for 10-Users on either JIRA or Confluence. Woo-hoo!

Learn how to get started here

Atlassian is once again putting on AtlasCamp, and we immediately signed up to attend as I had a great time at this event last year. If you’re a developer, and you love using Atlassian’s products like we do, this is a great opportunity to learn about how you can extend the functionality of these products.

There are a bunch of reasons why you might enjoy this small developer camp too:

• The entire Gliffy Development team will be there! If you’re a plugin developer, we’d be happy to share our tricks and tips we’ve learned that help make our plugins work well with Confluence and JIRA
• I’ll be doing a quick lightening talk discussing some of the business side of running a plugin business
• We’ll be giving out free Gliffy t-shirts!
• Atlassian development practices are really top notch. Last year, I learned a lot about how Atlassian does development, and this has helped inform our own best practices too.
• It’s fun! In addition to learning about the Atlassian plugin ecosystem, we played games, drank beer, and generally had a good time. This isn’t some giant conference where nobody knows your name…. since the event is limited to less than 100 people you’ll definitely get to meet most of the central figures in the Atlassian development ecosystem.
• Atlassian has been a rule-breaker in so many ways…. it’s great to get their perspective as to how Atlassian does development. This was a big take-away for me last year.

AtlasCamp is taking place on the rugged and beautiful California Pacific coast in Half Moon Bay (about an hour from San Francisco) from October 21st to October 23rd.

Announcing the Winner of the Golden Gliffy June 2009 Contest!

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the latest versions of the Confluence plugin and the Gliffy JIRA Plugin.
Not only are you now reaping the benefits through our revised Network Symbols, you had a little fun along the way.

Josh Krupka, of Burris Logistics, found the Golden Gliffy, contacted Gliffy and was randomly selected using Random.org to win the $500.

Thanks to everyone for playing and congratulations to Josh for winning!

The contest may be over, but don’t hesitate to download the new Gliffy Confluence Plugin and the Gliffy JIRA Plugin – a 45-day free trial will increase your productivity by integrating the drawing tool to accompany your Atlassian products. Contact us for an extension to your free trial.

In celebration of the 2.0 release of our Atlassian Plugins, we’re announcing a fun little contest where you can enter for a chance to win a $500 Amazon.com gift certificate.

Here’s how it works:

Simply install the 45 Day Free Trial of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence or the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA, locate the hidden Golden Gliffy symbol inside the Gliffy Editor, and then email us the code that shows up when you drop the Golden Gliffy onto the drawing stage. You’ll then be entered into a drawing for a chance to win the $500 gift certificate.

Hurry up and install those plugins! Codes must be received by June 19th, 2009.

Hot on the heals of the 1.5 release of our Confluence Plugin, and right around the time we expect to release our JIRA Plugin, I’ll be presenting both products at the Plugin of the Month Webinar hosted by Atlassian on January 28th.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Gliffy Plugins work with Atlassian products, this is a must attend event, and you should definitely register for the webinar today.

If you like this webinar, you’ll probably be interested in Atlassian’s other fine events coming up, too.

See you at the webinar!

Today we have released an improved version of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence, version 1.5.0.

We recommend this upgrade for all users of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. Download to upgrade your existing installation, or start a 45 day free trail today

The two major highlights of this release are the new BPMN Symbols, and French and German Translations

BPMN Symbol Library
With this release, Gliffy now enables you to create detailed Business Process Modeling Notation diagrams. Helpful in providing members of your team with a clear picture of your business processes, this symbol library includes events, activities, artifacts, gateways and swimlanes, as well as related connectors.

French and German Translations (Excludes Gliffy Client)

One of the things I learned at the recent Atlassian Developer Camp was that French and German are the only two additional languages that Confluence supports out of the box. As such, we’ve also added support for these two languages on the Confluence Integration side only. We have some major changes to the Gliffy Client that we’ll be working on in 2009 which will enable us to add language support there, too.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

In our never-ending quest to improve Gliffy, we’ve made over 30 bugfixes and improvements to the product in this release. Those previously not mentioned are included below:

• [GLIFFY-872] – Legacy Network Shapes have lost connection points
• [GLIFFY-871] – Symbol does not change with resizing: Network / Home Network / Server
• [GLIFFY-773] – Network Cloud shape is blurry when large, especially in expored images and svg
• [GLIFFY-659] – Flowchart multidocument image element has inconsistant colouring
• [GLIFFY-629] – Selection UI control for checkboxes and radio buttons should be a checkbox, not a drop down box.
• [GLIFFY-626] – Color picker for all UI symbols doesn’t function
• [GLIFFY-625] – Color Picker UI symbol doesn’t change color
• [GLIFFY-624] – Video player UI symbol should have a large ‘play’ button in the center (just like youtube does)
• [GLIFFY-623] – Vertical justification of text for ‘Image’ UI shape should be at the top of the shape (but not above it)
• [GLIFFY-621] – Color should be removed from UI symbols that have color
• [GLIFFY-620] – List Box UI symbol should have a scrollbar in it
• [GLIFFY-573] – Text Names for symbols in Symbol Palette left justifies when multiline
• [GLIFFY-452] – Danish characters look broken when Confluence encoding set to ISO-8859-1
• [GLIFFY-797] – Provide user feedback when diagram images fail to render due to out of memory issues
• [GLIFFY-839] – Javascript onclose check should not be applied after clicking return to confluence button
• [GLIFFY-840] – Admin action breadcrumbs are broken
• [GLIFFY-841] – Spaces in diagram name generate error when trying to export Confluence page as PDF
• [GLIFFY-880] – Document manager doesn’t work in Confluence plugin
• [GLIFFY-1018] – Closing tag for links appears to be incorrect.
• [GLIFFY-1024] – Make sure space names (categories) are xml encoded before being returned to the client
• [GLIFFY-1040] – Alignment parameters are broken
• [GLIFFY-1056] – Support Confluence character encoding setting other than UTF-8
• [GLIFFY-1070] – When editor is configured to open in own window, ‘Edit in Gliffy’ links on attachment pages don’t open editor in own window
• [GLIFFY-1023] – IE sets jpeg mime type to image/pjpg
• [GLIFFY-1003] – Edit in Gliffy link on Confluence attachment screen
• [GLIFFY-1041] – Add ‘edit in Gliffy’ links on attachment page
• [GLIFFY-639] – Make sure Confluence Plugin compiles with script limits setting set to max
• [GLIFFY-681] – Make sure we’re using PropertyManager.CHARACTER_ENCODING everyplace
• [GLIFFY-832] – Check for licenses that have been revoked in license manager
• [GLIFFY-876] – update revoked license list

We are proud to announce a significant update to Gliffy Online. This update includes the new BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) symbol library and account folder management. Other features include website login, an easier sign up and payment process, and no more 5 diagram limit for free accounts! We also did a major revamp of our server-side code that will give better performance, reliability, and scalability in the long run.

BPMN Symbol Library
Gliffy now allows you to create detailed Business Process Modeling Notation diagrams. These diagrams are helpful in getting stakeholders a clear picture of your business processes. This symbol library includes events, activities, artifacts, gateways and swimlanes, as well as the specific connectors. The multi-lane swimlane symbols have adjustable lanes and the pool headers auto-resize with text input. Most of the new BPMN symbols allow their line and fill color to be user-defined.






Folders for document organization

Due to popular demand by our users, the Document Manager now allows you to organize your Gliffy diagrams into folders. The folders will show in a familiar tree structure on the left hand side. Clicking a folder will list the diagrams in that folder to the right. Want to move a diagram to another folder? Just click and drag it to that folder. Note: If you were using our previous tagging system to organize documents, these tags will be converted to folders under the top level folder called “Account Documents”. Also, any documents that were collaborated with you will be located under “Shared Documents”. Refer to the issues below for more information on the inclusion of folders and the conversion from tags:

• http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-551
• http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-551

Folder Permissions

With the addition of folders for organizing diagrams, Gliffy Online also gives administrators of Premium accounts the ability to add and remove user access/permissions to specific folders in the account. This feature can be found in the Account Manager, accessible to admins from the Document Manager.

No more 5 diagram limit!

When you sign up for Gliffy, you now get a free 30-day trial of our Premium product. This allows you to create unlimited public and private diagrams during the trial period. When the trial period is over, you can still create unlimited public diagrams.

Website and Secure Login

We’ve also added the ability to login to the Gliffy Online application from anywhere on our website. What this allows you to do is use your browser or operating system features to remember the email and password for login. This way, you can now access the document manager with 1-click from the website.

Premium accounts can now login securely. Logging in securely means all data between Gliffy and our servers is encrypted using SSL. This feature is only available to Premium accounts. Please note, running Gliffy in secure mode can cause a decrease in performance, as passing data over a network using the https protocol is slower.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Legacy Network Shapes have lost connection points - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-872
• Symbol does not change with resizing: Network / Home Network / Server – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-871
• Network Cloud shape is blurry when large, especially in expored images and svg – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-773
• Flowchart multidocument image element has inconsistant colouring – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-659
• Selection UI control for checkboxes and radio buttons should be a checkbox, not a drop down box. – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-629
• Color picker for all UI symbols doesn’t function – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-626
• Color Picker UI symbol doesn’t change color – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-625
• Video player UI symbol should have a large ‘play’ button in the center (just like youtube does) – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-624
• Vertical justification of text for ‘Image’ UI shape should be at the top of the shape (but not above it) – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-623
• Color should be removed from UI symbols that have color – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-621
• List Box UI symbol should have a scrollbar in it – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-620
• An account containing exactly 10 users can’t purchase a 10 user account – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-584
• Text Names for symbols in Symbol Palette left justifies when multiline – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-573
• The label for the “login” button is moving towards left, when it is clicked more than once. – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-15

My hubby and I started Geocaching through our local state park system. We’re hooked! The downfall has been trying to explain our adventures to friends and families, so I came up with this nifty Gliffy Flowchart to explain the process:

We’ve found that Geocaching is an active way to explore our community and places we travel.
I shared this Gliffy Flowchart using the Gliffy Collaboration features. This made it easy for people with computers of all types to easily see the diagram. I’m hoping I can get my family, friends and neighbors hooked too!

Whenever I find myself using Gliffy for my own personal use, and discover again how cool it is, I like to share. Earlier this year, I used our Floorplan shapes to create the layout of our wedding and shared it with our photographer, videographer, and musicians. This was to give them a good idea of specific locations at the site and what they looked like. Recently, I’ve been planning a golfing road trip to western Oregon with some friends. I wanted to show them we could hit 7 varying courses in a 6 to 7 day trip.

I decided to use Gliffy to overlay proposed golf course locations on a map of western Oregon. I first uploaded an image of a map, then pointed out the courses on the map by their city locales, and adding where they would fall in line in order of days. To help get everyone fired up, I also included images of the courses next to their information. Below is a snippet of the complete map available here:

As I shared this with some of my friends, a few of them added some alternate courses on the map with images. One of the courses that a friend found looked spectacular, so it took place of one I had picked. True collaboration at work!

The other information I’ve added are website links, prices, and contact information. I’ll also be adding hotel information and places to eat. A bonus is that once we take our trip, I can just print out this one document and bring it on the road. I won’t need to shuffle around a lot of papers and maps to find the information we need. And we can continue to drool over the images of these amazing golf courses while driving (Gliffy does not promote drooling and driving). The challenge now is finding time to all take a week off, but until then, we can continue to update this diagram.

So the next time your planning a trip with family or friends, try using Gliffy.

With rising gas prices and Earth Day a few weeks ago, a recent CNN Money article, caught our eye. We created a Gliffy flow chart to really bring the point home.

Join the movement Green Slow Moving Vehicle Movement or read how driving slower affects the the San Francisco Bay Area commute.