At first sight, Atlassian's software lineup doesn't seem too remarkable. A bug-tracker, a wiki, and a few other developer tools. Most of this stuff isn't revolutionary, and they have some a-list blogger competitors . But when you dig a little deeper, it's one of the few 'enterprise' companies to successfully use ideas from web 2.0 and open source in their product.

If you use the Adobe bug-tracking and development forums for Flash/Flex product lines, you'll hardly notice that it's running Atlassian. But when you submit a bug to their tracker, you start to notice that the process is almost unique for a large company. Most of the time, within a couple hours of submitting a bug, an Adobe test manager will triage the report. If there's actually something wrong, they'll assign it to an engineer. A lot of the time, bugs are punted or deferred - but they are never ignored, and the submitter is directly involved with the engineering team. It's a similar process in the forums - when you post a question, chances are that it'll be answered by real Adobe engineers.

There's still lots of process involved, and probably even more behind the scenes, but I don't know of too many other companies that take the community into account. It probably makes Adobe engineers and testers feel more accountable for their bugs because everything is public. If you're not fixing the bug, bloggers can easily rant about it. The community can vote on the important issues. There's just lots more transparency.

Of course, this process isn't perfect, but it's much better than other large companies. Microsoft, for instance, still relies primarily on Usenet for collaboration with their customers (to their credit, they have also taken up blogging ).

Adobe seems to be one of the only companies to really embrace open-source methodologies for product development. Ant it seems to be working for them. Flex is being embraced by developers, partly because there's a lot more sense of involvement and transparency. Many of the features for Flex 4 (the next version) have already been implemented by the community -- holy crap!

Software like Atlassian is changing the game - it's giving companies many advantages of open source, and it's doing this in a simple way - just by making some of the development process open to the public.