Guest post by Vadim Rutkevich
This is a guest post from StiltSoft company, a team of Atlassian Experts and avid fans of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket from Belarus. StiltSoft is the Atlassian Verified vendor that develops Smart Attachments for Jira, Table Filter for Confluence, Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket, and other add-ons. This blog post will highlight the capabilities of Handy Macros add-on for enhancing user experience in Confluence with addition of new interactive elements.
Atlassian Confluence has deserved the fame of the best team collaboration platform. The superb set of content editing tools, real-time content update, a rich variety of macros, and system expandability with third-party add-ons – all these are factors of its popularity among teams of all sizes and specializations.
But perfection knows no limits, so there is always room to optimize the user experience in Confluence and increase efficiency of individuals in editing or delivering vital information to end users. Today we are going to highlight features of Handy Macros add-on from StiltSoft team. This add-on bundles a set of macros and interactive enhancements that simplify the way of updating information and completing generic tasks in Confluence.
Interactive Statuses for Realtime Task Update
No matter how powerful Confluence is, its glory sometimes goes dim when execution of some routine tasks requires additional actions from the user. If you get tired of changing statuses, you can take advantage of interactive statuses supplied within Handy Macros add-on.
Just create a set of statuses and insert the corresponding macro on the page. Then you can quickly update them in the page view mode or view the history of changes when hovering over the specific status.
When using a pre-defined global set of statuses is not sufficient, every user can duplicate it, adjust to his actual needs, and further use as a personal status set.
Reminders and On-the-Fly Date Update in Tasks
While planning activities in Confluence, all of us take use of native task lists. Everything goes smoothly until the moment you need to postpone some task or set a new due date. And here starts the traditional workflow – edit the page, update the due date, save the page. This has a negative impact on your productivity, especially if you are a project manager or a department manager.
For this situation, Handy Macros provides dynamic date pickers that seamlessly integrate with native Confluence functionality and which you can use for setting due dates on the fly. Now you can completely forget about the old workflow and get used to a new way of picking dates while viewing pages.
To set a task is easy, but to complete it on time is always a challenge. For this situation you can try the Handy Reminder macro. This tool allows you to set up one-time or regular reminders that will automatically send notifications to you or your teammates due to the defined scheme.
Now you will not miss the actual tasks and will never fall behind the schedule.
Aggregated Page Differences
For those ones who extensively produce, edit, or review text content in Confluence, StiltSoft team delivers the Handy Page Diff function. Activation of this option allows you forget about the native comparison of page differences within the page history.
Now you can get the aggregated view of all changes made on the page since your last visit to it. Instead of getting the fragmented change log for a page, you can view everything at once. Just click the button on the page toolbar and view all modifications on the page. When done, you can acknowledge them, so upon the next return you will see only the recent changes.
Interactive Video Carousels and Image Galleries
Sometimes you may like to capture the viewers' attention and focus it on the specific visual information on the page. So here you can apply the Handy Carousel macro. Just insert several images or YouTube videos and select the appropriate view - interactive gallery, carousel, or slider. Use it for targeting video tutorials, event announcements, or anything you want.
More Interactivity on Confluence Pages
Handy Macros add-on from StiltSoft team allows you to realize the full potential of Confluence in handling the routine tasks and presenting the media information. The supplied tools provide you with great interactive elements and global augmentations that simplify user experience when working on content of any type.
Don't waste time and start a free trial of Handy Macros!
