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Introducing a New Standard in Content Collaboration
Confluence 4.0 is here! After more than a year of development, and many more years of listening to your feedback, Atlassian is stoked to deliver you Confluence 4.0 – the fastest, richest, most intuitive collaboration experience ever.
Brillantly Simple Editor
The new editor in Confluence 4.0 is brilliantly simple, intuitive, and yet still packed with powerful features. A new streamlined toolbar puts new users at ease with familiar editing operations exactly where they’re expected. A single editor makes for a more reliable experience for your users and saved work that looks exactly like what was crafted in the editor. What you see is really what you get.
Intelligent and Lightning Fast
While new users will feel at home with the new editor, power users will thrive on innovative new features like Autoformatting. In the blink of an eye, Confluence converts wiki markup to rich text as you type; careful, you might miss it! They’ll love the performance improvements we’ve made to Autocomplete, putting links, images, media, and hundreds of powerful macros a couple of keystrokes away. Not to mention all the new keyboard shortcuts we’ve added to give them a faster editing experience than ever before. Now you can even copy and paste images directly from other web pages
Familiarly Social
Confluence 4.0 takes team collaboration to the next level. Just like Twitter and Facebook, it’s easy to bring others into the conversations taking place in Confluence with @mentions. Whether you’re editing a page, replying to a comment or publishing a blog post, it’s never been easier to foster team collaboration around your content in Confluence.
Hundreds of New Features
This post barely scratches the surface of Confluence 4.0. Take an interactive tour and learn about all the new features now!
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The Future of Communication…
Atlassian’s biggest product release ever is just days away. After more than a year of development, and many more years of listening to your feedback, Confluence 4.0 will deliver the fastest, richest, most intuitive content collaboration experience, ever. Confluence 4.0 takes team collaboration to a whole new level with greatly enhanced social features. It’s never been easier to bring your team in on the important conversations in Confluence.
To celebrate this monumental release Atlassian thought it was fitting to take you on a little journey that they like to call Communication Through the Ages…
Take a look, find the easter egg, and stay tuned for Confluence 4.0, the future of online content collaboration.
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JIRA 4.4 Released: Manage Workflow & Projects with ease
JIRA 4.4 is full of new features and improvements to simplify work and increase productivity. The interfaces have designed to make it faster and easier to find the information you need and make changes to your projects quickly.
Activity Streams
The Activity Stream has had a makeover. As well as looking prettier, it now lets you vote, start watching or comment on an issue with a single click
Workflow Designer
The built-in visual workflow designer makes editing workflow fast, simple, and fun! Check out the video to see the visual workflow designer in action.
New administration interface
The new project-centric admin interface makes it easy to see which fields, screens, permissions, and notifications are associated with a particular project, so even new administrators can make any changes needed quickly.
It’s the first day of release, and we have heard administrators telling us that they are going to upgrade to 4.4 because they think the new screens can help them and their end-users.
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The challenges of bug reporting during new system rollout
One of success factors in rolling out new IT systems is to make sure that bugs are identified and fixed quickly to minimise the impact to the business.
However there are a few key challenges to doing that
- users are frustrated
- on reporting the bugs and explaining it to the IT team
- their feedback are not acknowledged
- the IT team spends a lot of time
- understanding what the bug reported is about
- gathering additional details for them to identify the bug
- the bugs raised are not tracked and fixes
- the programmer forgot to log the bug from the phone calls/emails
- a lot of time is spent on clarifying the bugs instead of fixing them
That’s why I was impressed by a company whose IT department took the initiative to insert a “Give feedback” link under their help menu for all their systems. By clicking on it, a window will pop up for the user to key in his idea/bug report. And then the feedback will be emailed back to the system administrator.
According to them, they wanted to help the end-users to give feedback to them to improve the system.
Atlassian’s Bonfire gave me an idea to refine this bug reporting process for web-based applications
- User identifies a bug
- User click the button on their browser
- A snapshot of the current screen is taken
- User marks out the error and key in a short description of their feedback
- When the user click on the send button, the bug is logged directly to the bug-tracker
- The system details and the time of error are also captured automatically
- The bug will appear in the activity stream of their IT team’s dashboard
- The IT manager will be able to have the latest statistics and status on the bug reported via JIRA
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- users are frustrated
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A wiki CRM for small companies
Smaller companies are sometimes caught in a dilemma – whether to invest in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Our recommendation as such…
Scenario: You currently use spreadsheets as your Contact Manager.
Consider moving it onto a wiki as it can offer very useful features:
- consistent format thru page templates
- searchable even into attached external docs
- dashboard reports e.g. sales pipeline, salesperson activity log
Scenario: You plan to use a sophisticated CRM within 6 months.
Consider a full-fledged CRM software with all the fancy features (below) built-in and deployable out-of-the-box.
- Integration to accounting/customer ledger
- Email blasting with subscription analytics
- Online customer self-service with order tracking
So before you are ready for a fully integrated CRM software, you can always rely on your wiki to manage and retain important “intelligence” on your leads, prospects, clients and even business competition.
Knowing your prospects: Who they are? What their needs are? Will certainly help increase chances in closing the deal. Find out more on Akeles Opportunity Management plugin.
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When to create a new space in Confluence
In my last post, I wrote about the Akeles Space Lister Extension which can be used when there are many spaces created within Confluence. Another possible way is to avoid creating unnecessary spaces in Confluence. All Confluence administrators should have a checklist on when to create a new space in Confluence.
Spaces in Confluence are similar to folders in Windows. Each space has its independent set of permissions which allows space administrators to set who can view/edit/comment/attach/delete/export content within the space. Users can also search content specifically within the space or syndicate information with macros and the space keys.Therefore it is very tempting for users to ask for new spaces when there are new information to be shared.
The assessment criteria for a new space can be summarized under the 3 groups:
- Purpose
- Members
- Usage
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Another way to see your Confluence spaces
With the extensive usage of Confluence, an issue we faced is the long list of spaces on the dashboard.
Beside a longer loading time, the long list also affects the layout of the dashboard. It is also more difficult to search for spaces.Luckily, with the SpeakEasy extension, it is very easy to change the look and feel. We tried and developed the Akeles Space Lister Extension.
Do let us know about your opinions. We will appreciate if you can vote for this entry at the Atlassian Codegeist. You can also check out other interesting plugins for Confluence/JIRA.
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Confluence 3.5 Released: Stronger JIRA Integration
Have you ever wanted to create JIRA issues from the Confluence Editor? What about being able to quickly insert recently viewed issues to generate ad-hoc reports in Confluence? Well, thanks to Confluence 3.5, now you can!
A new ‘Insert JIRA Issue’ dialog lets you to
- create new issues,
- insert recently viewed issues,
- and search for existing issues to embed in Confluence pages.
One possible useful scenario for this feature is tracking the action items for meeting minutes. With this new feature, there is no more need to dig up all the meeting minutes to see if the action items are completed.
Check out the short video below to see the features in action.
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Atlassian on CNBC Power Lunch
Atlassian, the maker of Confluence & JIRA was featured recently on the CNBC – US National TV for a short interview.
[vodpod id=Groupvideo.8600103&w=450&h=325&fv=]It’s an amazing feat that a company started by 2 university graduates with a $10k credit card loan has grown into a company with 225 employees worldwide and 59 million revenue in FY2010.
Kudos to Mike & Scott and the Atlassian Team 🙂
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Publishing a knowledge Base Article with a wiki workflow
Last month, I shared a blogpost (How to enable active collaboration with your wiki) to share the benefits of using workflows together with wiki.
Recently, Roberto from Comalatech, the creators of Adhoc Workflows plugin for Confluence has also contributed a guest post too. In his post, he shared how people can use workflows to streamline the process of publishing Frequently Asked Questions into a knowledge base.
For details, check out Wiki Workflows: Publishing a Knowledge Base Article
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