CustomWare forms strategic partnerships with the fastest-growing enterprise software companies, and we are pleased to announce a new partnership with Zendesk. CustomWare is Zendesk's first full service consulting and training partner, offering the only Zendesk accredited training courses.

Zendesk is the proven cloud-based help desk software that is the fastest way to enable great customer service in rapidly growing companies. Zendesk is so easy to use, it's loved by support teams and their customers worldwide. More than 10,000 organizations including Adobe, MSNBC, Sony, OpenTable and Groupon, trust Zendesk with their most valuable asset: their customers.

Zendesk's rapid growth has steered them towards companies like CustomWare for delivery of professional services to their customer base. While Zendesk focuses on offering an outstanding help desk product, CustomWare can focus on delighting Zendesk customers in the same way we've done for many years. Our partnership with Zendesk covers a number of areas of service, including training, implementation best practices, integration and migration.

Training - Leveraging our experience running the Atlassian training department for the past 5 years, we have developed a strategic relationship with Zendesk to assist with the development of their official training materials, and to take the offering to their customers.

Implementation Best Practices - As a professional services provider, CustomWare assists companies worldwide with implementation of their software products, taking advantage of best practices and our experience in the field. Having the right partner is often critical to ensuring a successful implementation, so CustomWare aims to develop early but long-term professional services relationships with customers of Zendesk.

Integration - We're currently working on an improved integration between JIRA and Zendesk, and we're also looking forward to assisting Zendesk with other integration projects as the demands of their customer base expands.

Migration - CustomWare have successfully managed migration projects for some of the world's largest companies with high volumes of data. We understand the importance of data integrity during this process, so we're developing a range of out-of-the-box products to make the migration process more streamlined.

CustomWare are also very pleased to be using the Zendesk product as our own help desk solution, and look forward to continuing to develop the relationship with Zendesk as we service their customers and ours.

The Golden Ticket?

It's that time of year again when we are all preparing for Summit. As many people would know, the Atlassian Summit was sold out even before the early bird special expired - almost as fast as Apple's WWDC!

As platinum sponsor, we get assigned some tickets and we also purchase a few extra for our team.
Our marketing team have managed to free one ticket up and we'd like to offer it out to the community. To enter the draw for this ticket, simply fill out the form for the Golden Ticket.

We'll draw the winner this friday, so be sure to signup at http://bit.ly/SummitGoldenTicket

The CustomWare Palo Alto office will be the home of the next Atlassian User Group for residents and visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area. This will also be the semi-official launch of the new CustomWare office in Midtown Palo Alto, and a great opportunity for our partners and customers to meet the members of our growing team and to see our famous thunderdome.

The event will be held on April 28, 2011 at 3:30 PM, and further information can be found on the official event page. Please be sure to RSVP, because we have limited seats and would like to provide goodies for all attendees!

One of the highlights of the April User Group will be a presentation by Stafford Vaughan, who is a member of the CustomWare team and an Atlassian JIRA enthusiast. The topic is "Measuring Customer Satisfaction using JIRA". We'll also be running birds-of-a-feather sessions, which are a unique opportunity to pick the minds of like-minded Atlassian users.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Atlassian are a company with a core value of "Open company, no bulls$#t", so when they tell us that a new product version is their "biggest release ever", we tend to believe them. But it wasn't until we spent some time with the Confluence team recently, that we realized that Confluence 3.5 really is the biggest release ever.

I'll tell you why.

Because we're excited about the brand new sharing features. And the content embedding features. And (because this one is close to CustomWare's heart), the integration features with JIRA.

Share Button

This one is really cool. Have you ever been working on a page in Confluence, and needed some feedback on it? Most of us have been in this situation, because Confluence is a collaboration tool. With the new "Share" button, you can very quickly and easily email another user for feedback, with a link directly to the page.

There are also other really need sharing features, like Space Categories, and auto-watching for pages (it's a little like Facebook) and a feature to watch new space blogs.

Drag-and-Drop Support for HTML5 Browsers

Technology moves. When Atlassian announced the new drag-and-drop features in earlier Confluence versions they used Google Gears, but the unfortunate reality is that the Google Gears project was canned by Google. Atlassian responded quickly, and within a couple of product releases have delivered exactly the same product functionality using HTML5, which is the latest standard in web development. The list of browsers that already support HTML5 include Firefox, Safari and Chrome, and Internet Explorer will be supporting it with their upcoming IE9 release.

Tighter Integration with JIRA

Have you ever been in a situation where you were editing a page in Confluence and needed to quickly create a JIRA issue, but didn't want to jump between the two applications? Well with Confluence 3.5, you can create new JIRA issues from directly within Confluence, and then refer to the issue (with a handy note about the status!) on your Confluence page.

There are also a lot more cool features in Confluence 3.5, which you can read all about in the official release blog from Atlassian.

If you need to upgrade or renew your licences, you can contact our team and we'd love to discuss how we can help.

In just 3 months time, the InterContinental hotel in San Francisco is going to be filled with Atlassian customers, every one keen to find out the latest on JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper, Bamboo, and all their other great tools. The CustomWare team have been involved since day 1 not only with Atlassian, but with their Summit event. Which is the reason that we're so proud to be named the Platinum sponsor of Summit 2011.

The Summit event is happening on June 6, 7 and 8 this year, and details of the agenda can be found on the Summit website. We'll also keep you updated on Twitter and Facebook as major announcements are made.

The rockstars of the CustomWare team will be delivering the training sessions on the first day, so come and say hi and hit us with your questions. We'll also be wandering the halls during the Summit events wearing the usual popular CustomWare t-shirts. This year it will be something new, but we'll be announcing that closer to the date as well!

If you join us at Summit this year you'll be amongst 550 other brilliant people with a real enthusiasm for the Atlassian products, so we do very sincerely hope to see you.

Oh and I almost forgot - contact us if you'd like to find out how to get a 10% discount on your registration!

-CustomWare Events Team

Since 2001, we've been running the training departments for leading technology companies around the world. Our services span from instructor led delivery, through to complete outsource, running the books and developing the materials.

After setting up in the USA, the next stage to our plan was to complement our services with other offerings and we designed a platform to leverage our expertise and experience in the education area. Education for many technology vendors is a hard area to focus on - between Sales and Product development, education usually doesn't get the attention it deserves, and our customers realize this and use our services to ensure that their customers are delighted. To date, we've taught over 10,000 students world wide!

Just as we were about to implement the platform, we began working closely with a lead training firm in the Bay Area - Marakana. After sharing our vision for what we wanted, Marakana had a platform, named Spark, that performed many of the functionalities we want- after some discussion and formalities, we acquired the product from them and rebranded it to TrainingRocket. We will continue to work closely with Marakana, and in fact they will become one of our first customers of the platform.

We had the Marakana team in our offices in Sydney and some of our engineers from Sydney across to the Marakana office to ensure a strong transition - we've been working on this for months. Customers will now receive support from our team spreading the globe.

TrainingRocket has been in production for close to 4 years, running the education and university programs for many vendors, such as Alfresco, Mulesoft and others - there are many success stories, we we're encouraged when we spoke to the customers:

"Choosing TrainingRocket was a no-brainer for us - we got up and running quickly and could focus immediately on growing our training business and satisfying our customers."

— Ed Dubrawski, VP of Services at MuleSoft Inc

We're super-excited by this new offering, and find it a perfect complement to our existing services and offerings and we are working with the existing customers to help define a solid road-map for the product.

If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas - we'd love to hear them!

The Rocket has launched!

-the CustomWare team!

CustomWare will be attending Dreamforce 2010 between 6-9 December at the Moscone Center, San Francisco. For 3 days, more than 20,000 leaders & users will gather in San Francisco for this 8th annual user and developer conference.

We will be sending our guys Laurie, Angus, Jeff, Rob and Stafford. Besides networking with our customers, it helps us keep in touch with the latest in the CRM market and new innovations.

Since 2007, we have been developing and providing our customers with quality Salesforce.com to JIRA and Salesforce.com to Confluence connectors. We are looking forward to meeting our customers and partners so please say hi if you see us there!

- the CustomWare family

Kuala Lumpur Atlassian Group, Nov 10 2010

On the 10th of Nov, CustomWare ran the first ever Kuala Lumpur Atlassian User Group at our office in Plaza Sentral, Kuala Lumpur. We were happy to have guests from Skali Web Services, Tm, Malakoff, Yell Research and many more.

The 2 hour user group kicked off with some awesome presentations like using Google gadgets  & SQL Macro in Confluence. Andrew Rallings, the speaker from Atlassian also chipped in with a great talk on Atlassian support, and its support robot Hercules and some of its related plans in the future.

Like your favorite Java User Group, Agile User Group, or Open Source User Group, an AUG is there to network, learn from peers and have some fun.

It was remarkable to get to know our Atlassian customers and understand how they use Confluence & JIRA in their organisations. Set in a classroom style learning group,CustomWare ate, drank and even had ice cream with our customers. After the presentations, we then proceeded into in-depth discussions on future topics, Atlassian product road maps and how CustomWare would be ready to help. To find out more on CustomWare's Atlassian services please here

It's yet another great milestone to achieve and we look forward to hosting the next one soon. Watch this space!

Aligning with CustomWare's community and social focus, our training team helped Earth Hour Global and WWF-Australia again this year by providing Confluence training.

We ran a refresher Confluence Fundamentals course and extended Earth Hour's Confluence knowledge with the Confluence Administrators course. Earth Hour are heavy users of Confluence and CustomWare's Open Source Plugins, including Scaffolding and Reporting.

"We are incredibly grateful to CustomWare for providing Confluence Fundamentals and Confluence Administrator training to the Earth Hour Global and WWF-Australia teams. We're very excited about the new features of Confluence 3.3, and look forward to using these to improve our communication and collaboration efforts and outcomes across 128 countries & regions, spanning seven continents in 38 different languages. The training has been highly beneficial for our staff and will greatly enhance our conservation and campaigning efforts across Australia and the globe, and will help us achieve the end goal: for us all to live sustainably not just for Earth Hour but every hour."

-Kath Kissell, Director of Network Alliances, Earth Hour Global

To find out more about CustomWare's training offerings please visit our Atlassian Training page.

On October 8-10 this year, CustomWare will once again be sponsoring a booth at the Malaysia Career & Training Fair (MCTF). We're always excited to meet the enthusiastic attendees at this event, and this year is particularly important for us as we open our new KL office and are seeking people to join our team.

Since 2002, MCTF has attracted over half a million graduates and experienced professionals, filling out thousands of positions in hundreds of participating companies.

So please come and visit us at Booth 281 to drop your resume, speak to our friendly people, and participate in our Twitter competition.

If you're interested in knowing more, watch this video to find out what it's like to work at CustomWare Malaysia or read the careers section on our website for a list of open positions!

As we continue to drive business growth into Malaysia and the United States, we're proud to be recognised again by the Australian Institute of Export for our outstanding contribution.

The Premier's NSW Export Awards is an annual program which aims to recognise excellence in the export of goods and service by NSW business. The Awards acknowledge the important contribution of businesses to the economy through job creation and increased prosperity for the community and for the state.

This is the second time that CustomWare has been finalists in this category of award, and is recognized alongside Atlassian, Clarity, Ideas International, Integrated Research and Stoneglass Industries.

The winners of the 2010 NSW Export Awards will be announced on 28th October 2010 at a ceremony in Sydney.

Since 2008 when AtlasCamp first started, the CustomWare development team has been involved in the action. This year the event will be held at Half Moon Bay near San Francisco. CustomWare will be sending 3 team members from our San Francisco office (Rob Castaneda, Jeff Frick and Stafford Vaughan), 2 from Sydney (David Vittor and Oeyvind Eliassen) and David Chui from our Kuala Lumpur office.

We've found AtlasCamp to be a cornerstone of our efforts to get involved with the Atlassian development community, and a great opportunity to find out what's new and exciting. Similar to the annual Atlassian Summit, it's also great to put faces to names.

To find out further information, go on over to www.atlascamp.com. We hope to see you there!

-The Geeks of CustomWare

Thanks everyone! We had a great response to our in-booth survey at the Atlassian Summit. 382 of you took the time to give us feedback on your IT priorities, and we'd like to share the top 5 list with you.

Here's what you told us were your top 5 IT priorities for 2010/11:

(for all the details, download our whitepaper)


Given the venue and audience, there's no surprise about the top 3 issues. But it's interesting to see that security is still a top 5 issue. Providing security that gives users the confidence to share high-value business content is one of the keys to driving adoption in collaborative organizations. Particularly as mobile devices continue to proliferate and as the cloud becomes the preferred platform for your IT services, this will become more of an issue.

In CustomWare's experience, taking the time up front to properly structure and set up your Atlassian system is the best way to ensure performance, uptime, and proper securing of your Atlassian infrastructure.

Great collaborative systems, such as Atlassian's JIRA and Confluence, become an integral part of a business very quickly, and any downtime can critically impact your business. CustomWare's Support Packages and Health Checks allow your team to stay one step ahead so any unforeseen problems can be resolved before they happen.

In parallel with the Atlassian Summit survey, we also ran a web-based survey looking at the same issues. The web participants' top 5 issues were identical, although they ranked virtualization above security as their number 4 priority.

If you'd like to see the detailed results from the web survey and get CustomWare's thoughts on the evolution of the connectivity and integration market, please download our 2010 Connectivity and Integration Trends whitepaper.

26th July 2010, Monday

CustomWare is pleased to announce that it has moved its delivery office in Malaysia, resulting in a working office space which is 3 times as big, better infrastructure, larger pantry and even have added a games room with a Nintendo Wii to boot! We're proud of our new offices and our new infrastructure lays a solid foundation for more solid growth for our company.

Our new address is three times larger and is at Plaza Sentral Block 3B, located in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Known as a business hub without any borders, Plaza Sentral has the occupancy of world class muliti-nationals as tenants.

We were honoured to have His Excellency Mr. Miles Kupa, the Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia officiating our event on Monday morning, the 26th of July 2010. Co -hosted by our CEO and founder Mr. Rob Castaneda, the event was covered by guests from the media, which include The Star , Bernama and Berita Harian Online . We also put together a short video.

Some previous CustomWare employees and current customers also attended and everyone had a good time.

Our team worldwide has worked hard, and times like these we can pause to celebrate for a few hours. We're now proud to have laid a solid foundation for our future growth without any external funding and to also have fun along the way. - Rob Castaneda

New Location, same great services

The Malaysian operation assists CustomWare's Australian & US Offices to service customers around the world. It provides architecture, consulting, development, implementation and support services.

CustomWare's Location

CustomWare's new office address is Suite 3B- 3A-3, Level 3A, Block 3B, Plaza Sentral, Jalan Stesen Sentral 5, KL sentral, 50470  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved, including Mr. Miles Kupa, and of course all of our team at CustomWare for making this event an unforgettable one.

The future looks bright, to infinity and beyond!