In this post you will discover more about the evolution of K15t software, some big topics they're currently focusing on in the app space, and a rare (not not funny!) photo of founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar in the early days of Atlassian.
The K15t story began in 2002 when two young tech guys from Sydney started a software company to disrupt Bugzilla, king of the bug trackers.
Mike and Scott looking excited about the future!
BUG TRACKING' -> ISSUE MANAGEMENT
K15t founder, Stefan Kleineikenscheidt was fresh out of University and helping his company find a good bug tracker. Through some vigorous googling, a colleague of his fortuitously stumbled upon Jira. That's when they were noted that Atlassian had rebranded 'bug tracking' at 'issue tracking.' From that moment on, Jira was widely used and well loved on Stefan's team.
JIRA 1.4 just released: The Atlassian website in 2002
Soon, Stefan took note of the disparity between users love for Jira and their love (or lack of) the software that his current company built. As a young software developer, this kind of negative sentiment was waring. After two more roles and seven years in corporate IT, Stefan became jaded and accepted that his feelings were standard what with the "limited resources," or "changing requirements," etc. that haunted his day-to-day.
ESCAPE FROM THE IT DEPARTMENT
Aside from resigning to a life of dissatisfaction, there was only one other option that Stefan found viable: To build software of his own! And software that people would actually want to use. Funnily enough, Stefan actually considered applying for a job at Atlassian in Sydney, but stopped short because his partner had just started an exciting job in Germany. So, looking towards a company that he himself loved, he started developing a Confluence add-on as a side project. This add-on would later become the Scroll Exporter for Confluence, an app meant to help people use Confluence for documentation and content management.
Fun fact: Stefan named the product "Scroll" after the format used by some of the first content managers in history: monks who recorded the knowledge and traditions of humanity on scrolls.
A while later, Stefan met his co-founder, Tobias, who brought energy and expertise to the project. Together, they founded K15t Software in 2009/2010. They eventually became Atlassian Experts in May 2010 and would grow to become Enterprise and Platinum Experts sometime later. Today, they continue to be a Platinum Solution Partner with most of their customers located in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
"We called it K15t Software because when we presented our Scroll Exporter for the first time at an Atlassian User Group, they insisted on a company name. We didn't have one, but since Stefan had started the project, we decided to call ourselves K15t (an abbreviation of Stefan's lengthy last name – Kleineikenscheidt) & Friends, which was later turned into K15t Software."
– Tobias Anstett
Flash forward to K15t today!
Now that you've enjoyed the story of how K15t's got its start, check out some of the big topics they're currently focusing on in the App space.
- Scroll Documents: This is the newest member of our 'Scroll' family of apps which brings document management functionality to Confluence. It allows users to track changes, compare versions and milestones, and better manage multi-page content as a tree of pages.
- Help Centers: K15t has had a lot of interest in how they built their own K15t Help Center, which is based entirely on Confluence using Scroll Viewport (fun fact: it's what Atlassian uses for their documentation too)! They're in the process of building a new app to help users easily turn their documentation spaces into something similar. There's nothing to show quite yet but they will be releasing a beta in the near future!
- Backbone: K15t's lone Jira app helps break down departmental and organizational borders by syncing Jira issue data like fields, comments, and attachments.
- Consistently improving our core family of apps: K15t is always working on improvements to their apps that help people get the most out of Confluence – from helping people export Confluence content in a variety of formats (Scroll PDF Exporter, Scroll Office, Scroll HTML Exporter, etc.) to their content management and documentation apps (Scroll Versions, Translations, Acrolinx Connector, etc.)
Thanks, K15t Team! If you have questions for K15t, please leave them in the comment's section below.
