Atlassian, Makers of JIRA & Confluence, Develop Mission Critical Atlassian.com with Magnolia CMS

In 2010, Atlassian realised that it had hit a wall: its mission critical website was ageing and becoming unmanageable. There was no way for Atlassian’s marketing team to rapidly create online campaigns and support the company’s growth by marketing an expanding product portfolio to an increasing number of new regions in multiple languages. Atlassian decided to start looking for a content management system.

Atlassian is a software company based in Sydney, Australia. Its most popular products are the issue tracker JIRA and the collaboration tool Confluence. Today, it has annual sales of $120 million, 21,000 customers and 500 employees in Sydney, San Francisco and Amsterdam.

The Challenge: Enable More Efficient Content Creation, Management and Site Development for Atlassian.com

Atlassian’s Interactive Marketing team is responsible for the company’s only sales channel - Atlassian.com. The team creates content and videos and is responsible for all marketing activities. Since there is no traditional sales team at Atlassian, these activities are mission critical.

Atlassian.com was over seven years old and had no content management system. Instead, the 1200 Web pages were generated by 2000 JavaServer Pages (JSP) files, a technology that allows developers to put dynamic functionality into HTML.

Content, layout and functionality were mixed up in the JSP files. As a consequence, the division of labor between developers, authors and designers was difficult, susceptible to errors and costly. Just to correct a spelling error, a copywriter had to go through a developer every time. A product release campaign would typically take two weeks to publish to the Web.

The Solution: An Agile and Easy-to-Use CMS

The issues with the corporate website led Atlassian to start evaluating content management systems. Because Atlassian has profound technology know-how in house, the marketing department didn't go through a long process of reviewing different vendors.

As a Developer focused company we're constantly preaching to Developers that they need to be more agile. So we were looking for something that brought that agility to the content management of the Website. Magnolia was recommended by a colleague and I found it really straightforward to get installed. Once it was on my laptop I just knew this was it. It was so easy and made sense to all our content editors and translators.

Mark Halvorson, Director of Interactive, Atlassian

The fact that Atlassian is a Java shop facilitated the decision on a more technical level. Magnolia fit into the existing architecture perfectly and also enabled integration with the following 3rd party products:

Optimizely (A/B testing)
Google Analytics
Clickdensity (analytics)
Google Custom Search Engine
Google Website Optimizer

Battle-testing Magnolia CMS

Although Magnolia CMS seemed like a natural choice to Atlassian, the company wanted to make sure that it met their expectations. Magnolia was therefore evaluated in two pilots.

As Atlassian were expanding into Europe, the first pilot project used Magnolia to set up multi-lingual Web pages. The CMS requirements were clear:

Support for internationalization and localization
Delegated authoring
Staging and QA
Rollback
Must fit into existing architecture
Separation between layout and content

Within three months Atlassian had delivered an internationalized version of Atlassian.com. By taking advantage of Magnolia CMS features like built-in translation and templating, Atlassian created 41 pages, encompassing 33 countries and 10 languages. You can still see the result of this pilot by visiting www.atlassian.com/local.

: Zoom; Atlassian Angry Nerds

However, even after the successful pilot, Atlassian’s IT staff were still worried about how Magnolia would scale. Atlassian decided to use Magnolia for a humorous “Angry Nerds” microsite, which went viral the same day it was released and attracted one million page views. Atlassian.com usually receives one million page views per month!

The Magnolia server (where the microsite was running) was able to deal with the traffic, while the main website on the old JSP needed emergency attention from sys admins to keep running due to the sudden spike in traffic.

The two pilot projects showed what could be done with an excellent CMS: serving high traffic, last minute changes even under heavy load, delegated authoring, easier translation, and a clear path from development to staging to production. This is when everyone at Atlassian realised that Magnolia was the perfect match.

Mark Halvorson, Director of Interactive, Atlassian

The Result: A Rebranded International Website and Boosted Marketing Agility

Moving to Magnolia CMS was a fresh start for Atlassian. The company used this opportunity to redesign, restructure and rebrand the entire Atlassian.com site.

The support we’ve received from Magnolia has been incredibly helpful and always fast to respond. For example, there was a critical incident before a launch where Magnolia went absolutely out of its way to help with a fix. We succeeded - Magnolia’s support was crucial at that moment in time.”

Mark Halvorson, Director of Interactive, Atlassian

: Zoom; Atlassian's global site in Magnolia CMS author view

Thanks to decoupling content from functionality and layout with Magnolia CMS, content editors can create quick, fantastic looking campaigns, publish content and notify translators via the workflow when there’s content to be translated, without any need for a developer.

Editors are not the only group at Atlassian whose work was made easier by Magnolia. Developers appreciate Magnolia CMS for its versatility and for how it allows them to pool resources. Magnolia helped Atlassian get things up and running very quickly and has nurtured efficient collaboration.

With Magnolia, content editors are not only able to edit copy in paragraphs, but also have the ability to create and customize rich interactive features. For example, if you have an interactive screenshot, with clickable and hoverable areas, editors can simply enter parameters themselves. Since this customization can be done without the aid of a javascript developer, it saves the Web development team time that can instead be used to implement more customizable features to provide a stunning website.

William Paoli, Web Developer Team Lead, Atlassian

With Magnolia CMS, Atlassian is able to utilize its website as an ever-evolving global marketing and sales channel for its growing business. Magnolia CMS has increased the interactive marketing team's agility significantly - just like Atlassian's tools make developers more agile.