The coolest of the cool new Confluence features Atlassian announced, in our opinion, is the digital whiteboard functionality for brainstorming. As you brainstorm, you can add stickies, stickers, stamps, and shapes to a whiteboard accessible by your team. When you’re done coming up with ideas, you can actually turn the stickies into Jira Cloud issues and Confluence pages with just a click. How cool is that?
On the flip side, you can also bring your Jira issues into a whiteboard to visualize them, allowing you and your team to show relationships between them. You can also use Smartlinks to bring in content from other 3rd-party tools like Figma and Loom. Last but certainly not least, you can use bulk actions to assign all of the action items resulting from your team's brainstorming session, and can assign them to someone on the team or add them to a sprint.
Databases are an awesome new way to organize information in Confluence. They’re essentially structured, dynamic tables where you can keep track of information, which is the organizing part. But what’s really cool about them, is that you can reference a cell, row, or column anywhere in Confluence, and it automatically syncs with the latest information in the database. How cool is that?
If you're familiar with Orderly Databases by K15t, Atlassian acquired it, and they’re embedding it into Confluence as native functionality. Databases is also not in beta yet, but it will be soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
How many times have you wanted to collaborate in a Confluence page with someone who isn’t a Confluence user? Or maybe just share a Confluence page so they can read it? So. Many. Times! Atlassian has introduced some new functionality that lets you do just that, and we think it’s pretty brilliant!
First, if you want to collaborate with someone who is not a Confluence user, whether they are inside or outside of your organization, you can add them as a guest to a specific page, and they can work in it as needed, although not with full access. You can learn more about the ins-and-outs of this here, keeping in mind that it is currently in beta.
Second, you can share a view-only version of a Confluence page with people outside your organization using public links. There’s also a setting for allowing or disallowing this functionality so things that need to be kept internal don’t inadvertently get broadcast.
Third, you can now embed Confluence pages in third party tools like Teams and InVision, and actually edit them there. No more logging in and out of multiple tools in the middle of meetings, thank goodness.
For number four, we’ll start with a question. Have you ever pasted a screenshot of a webpage into Confluence? How about a chat message? Not super effective, right? Atlassian has purchased an app called Hypothesis, and they’re embedding it in Confluence, so now you can actually comment directly on the webpage.
If you tuned into the Team 23 keynote, you probably recall hearing about Atlassian Intelligence, as it made a pretty big splash. Atlassian Intelligence is a set of AI-powered capabilities that will soon be showing up across the entire Atlassian platform of products, including in Confluence.
You’ll be able to ask questions, and it will search Confluence for answers, it will summarize meeting notes and pull out decisions that were made and tasks that need to be done, and it will even write first drafts of documents for you.
You can sign up for early access to Atlassian Intelligence here
Atlassian Analytics is an incredibly powerful new solution for visualizing and analyzing data across the entire Atlassian Platform. In Confluence, you’ll be able to capture data about how your spaces and pages are being used, then use that information to optimize the way you use Confluence and even make better, more informed business decisions.
Atlassian Analytics is generally available as with Atlassian Cloud Enterprise.
To learn more about how you can use Atlassian Analytics to get insights into how people are using Confluence Spaces and Pages, go here.
You know all those time-consuming, boring tasks that take a ton of your time like sending people reminders about uncompleted tasks and archiving old or inactive content? Yeah, you don’t have to do that anymore. With Confluence automation, you can create automation rules that trigger under certain conditions and do all that stuff for you, so you can focus on the things that actually need your human input. Ain’t robots grand?
Confluence automation comes with a library of pre-configured rules, but you can build your own, too. Automation is available for all Cloud Premium and Cloud Enterprise users.
You can learn more about how to automate the mundane away here.
Learn more about the new features and functionality in Confluence.