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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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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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How to enable active collaboration with your wiki
What a wiki cannot do
Being a Confluence wiki user for several years, I have experienced the following difficulties:
- I have to email people after posting pages/comments to get their acknowledgement/approval/comments
- I got difficulty tracking which pages/comments that I need to reply after a few days elapsed
There is a lot of extra work duplicated between the wiki and emails. And when people conveniently reply to the email instead of posting to the page. The collaboration and knowledge leaves the wiki back into the emails.
As such, I observed that a lot of wikis are mostly used for passive collaboration like knowledge bases, FAQs and intranets.
However, Ad Hoc Workflows plugin for Confluence patches the gap and enables Confluence with the capabilities of:
- assigning of tasks
- defining workflows
How we use it
I will share one of the scenarios on how we use the Ad Hoc Workflows plugin to collaborative actively.
- After each meeting, one of us will draft the meeting minutes into our wiki
- Upon the completion of the draft, the author will assign the attendees a task to review the minutes
- We will receive an email notification to inform us of the task with a link to the wiki page
- Likewise, we can also see a list of our outstanding tasks on the dashboard for follow-up
- We will go to the wiki page to make minor changes or post comments
- Once everything is ok, we will mark the task as completed
- The wiki page is then marked as approved once everyone has completed their reviewing tasks
Another example
It can also support more sophisticated workflows as shown in the video below.
For more information, check out Ad hoc Workflows’ official website
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A piece of great news to start the year
Atlassian Confluence was chosen by Elearning! Magazine to be the “Best Social Learning Tool“.
Here’s what some of the voters said:
- “It can be done from an IT enterprise system”
- “It provides excellent integration with LMS”
As a side effect of collaboration within the enterprise, Confluence is a large knowledge-base that can be tapped upon to enable social learning and reuse of knowledge & experiences. The knowledge continues to grow and yet up-to-date because it is so easy to add and search knowledge in Confluence.
Congratulations to Atlassian for this deserving awards.
For more, please visit Elearning to read about Confluence and all the winners.
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Theme Builder and Community Bubbles plugins for Confluence are going for free
Good news for the Confluence user community. Adaptavist has announced that they are giving out their Theme Builder and Community Bubbles plugins for free.
We will also be able to share with our customers on the great benefits of these 2 tools. Thank you, Adaptavist
For more information, check out Adaptavist’s announcement
About
Theme Builder allows users to customize the design and navigation of their Confluence wiki.
About
Community Bubbles is an addon to add forums and community features to the Confluence wiki
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Launch of Confluence 3.0
Confluence 3.0 has just been launched yesterday with many new features and improvements over the previous version:
- Now users can tap on the power of the macros easily without learning the makeup language with the macro browser
- They can find out more about their coworkers and discover experts with enhanced user profiles
- They can connect with their coworkers with Status Update (Twitter for your enterprise) and activities stream within their network.
Check out the video for a quick overview of what’s new!
[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2656857&w=425&h=350&fv=]more about "Confluence – 3.0 Overview video", posted with vodpodFor more details, you can check out Atlassian’s official announcement on Confluence 3.0
And here is how the community has reacted to Confluence 3.0’s launch.
Gil Yehuda, a former Forrester Analyst:
I found though both formal and informal surveys that Confluence lives at or near the top of the list of Enterprise Wikis when I speak to large enterprises. I can’t quote the formal data, but I can share the following anecdote: Many times I’ll ask a crowd how many people use wikis in their organization, then I’ll ask how many of those installations are Confluence. Typically about half of those who say they are using a wiki will keep their hands up.
Many large enterprises, like Accenture or Sun, have sanctioned Confluence as their IT approved wiki standard. Customers frequently use Atlassian’s Universal Wiki Converter to migrate other wikis to Confluence.
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Confluence Mail Utilities 1.3 released
We have released the latest version of the Confluence Mail Utilities. Version 1.3 provides compatibility to Confluence 2.10.X.
For those who are new, Confluence Mail Utilities is a set of utilities to facilitate users to contribute content directly to Confluence via emails.
With this plugin, it removes the hassle to set up multiple email accounts to archive the emails in different spaces.
It also allows users to post blog entries directly from their emails without the need to log into Confluence. This will also encourage people to contribute information into Confluence without additional steps to copy and paste the information from their emails to Confluence.
For more detailed information on the Confluence Mail Utilities, check out Confluence Plugin Library.
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Introduction to Confluence and Jira
One of our clients have requested for some slides for him to view before the presentation. I thought it will be good to share with everyone on what Confluence and Jira is about.
p.s: It is a bit wordy since it is more meant for reading than presentation
Introduction to Confluence
Introduction to JIRA
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