I urge you to develop a standalone GUI executable (i.e. Swing) that can configure our servers, so we can handle all Confluence configuration without having to open a single .xml, .properties, or .out file. Things like connection strings, LDAP, license hash, logs, etc.

75% of the problems we've had with Confluence have involved some sort of config file issue, and it's been a complete nightmare to figure out which file does what. To make matters worse, even though we have a lot of Linux servers, people at my company have very little Java and Tomcat expertise (don't ask).

Ideally, between a nice install wizard and this standalone configuration GUI, I would never need to know a thing about Tomcat, Java, XML, etc. and would never need to fire up PuTTY or struggle with vi.

Having a separate GUI-based configuration program would also solve the "bootstrap" issue, where Confluence needs to be working in order to make certain changes to Confluence.

Atlassian could avoid a lot of support costs if you had a tool like this. A lot of the issues we've needed to contact Atlassian support for could have been avoided had we had an easy-to-use Microsoft-like config GUI. (Microsoft SQL Server is a particularly good example.)

If I get some time, maybe I can mock up a UI.

Thanks for listening,
Bill