Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – First Quarter 2015

New add-ons for Atlassian products are constantly coming out on the Marketplace. It’s rather hard to keep up and not to miss anything useful that’s been recently introduced by Atlassian vendors. Just like you, our StiltSoft team tries to stay up-to-date with new releases and additions. We appreciate your time and are loving to share our knowledge and work. Therefore, here comes the series of posts ‘Top New Add-ons for Atlassian Products’, in which I’ll be telling you about some of the best add-ons that have appeared on the Marketplace for Confluence, JIRA and Stash since the beginning of 2015.

Today’s post highlights top 5 new add-ons for Confluence:

• Easy Forms for Confluence by Artemis Software
• Lively Blog Posts by Scandio GmbH
• Staffing Timeline by Transition Technologies S.A
• Homepage Redirect Add-on by bitvoodoo ag
• Baselines for Confluence by OBSS

I’m going to cover the problems the add-ons intend to solve, possible benefits for you and pricing. I won’t be judgmental, as being new on the market, it’s obvious that the plugins are only at the beginning of their journey and require some time to become glossy and rich in functionality.

1. Easy Forms for Confluence

Easy Forms for Confluence allows you to easily create and insert forms on your Confluence pages. It comes with two macros. The Easy Form macro is for adding and editing forms. And the Easy Form Report macro provides a dynamic report with submission results, which can be exported in XML, JSON, CSV or XLS.

Some other handy features:

• Adding and rearranging form fields by drag&drop.
• Restricting editing forms via setting Confluence page permissions.
• E-mail and workbox notifications about form submissions.
• Allowing single or multiple submissions per user.

Pricing: Easy Forms for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 120$ for 25 users; 220$ for 50 users; 400$ for 100 users.  Try it

2. Lively Blog Posts

Lively Blog Posts provides you with the macro you can use to display a blog posts feed on a Confluence page and dashboard. In addition to the functionality similar to the native Confluence Blog Posts Macro, this add-on offers some unique features:

• Adding a teaser image. To select a teaser image, label it with “teaser” in the image properties panel or in page attachments.
• Displaying highlighted posts at the top of the feed. To highlight a post, label it with ‘important’.
• Setting the teaser text length.
• Including the Lively Blog Posts macro on the Confluence dashboard by configuring the add-on settings in Confluence administration.

Pricing: Lively Blog Posts is available for Server instances and is free. Try it

3. Staffing Timeline

Staffing Timeline is a tool for planning resource allocation across different projects. To get started, insert the Staffing Timeline macro on a Confluence page and go through simple configuration. Basically, you just add your project names and users, associate them, specify working hours of each person and global non-working days. Once done and saved, you get an illustrative chart with a timeline.

Being minimalistic, Staffing Timeline provides all the basic features you might need without any excesses. Plus, it’s rather flexible, easy to use and informative:

• You get to switch between project and user views.
• It’s very convenient to navigate the timeline by dragging.
• The timeline can be zoomed in or out.
• You can view the change history.

Pricing: Staffing Timeline is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 15$ for 25 users; 20$ for 50 users; 50$ for 100 users. Try it

4. Homepage Redirect Add-on

Homepage Redirect Add-on makes it possible for Confluence administrators to set different homepages for different user groups. When one Confluence instance is used by multiple teams and diverse customer groups with unique needs and values, it’s convenient and user-friendly to redirect individual Confluence users to a homepage tailored especially for their user group.

A space homepage, a blog post or a Confluence page can be used as the redirect destination. All you’ve got to do is map your user groups and homepages in the Homepage Redirect section of Confluence administration.

Pricing: Homepage Redirect Add-on is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 20$ for 25 users; 50$ for 50 users; 80$ for 100 users. Try it

5. Baselines for Confluence

Baselines for Confluence allows you to create baseline sets of all Confluence pages within one space at a particular point in time. Confluence core Page History is not always enough, since it only provides you with a means to view the history of one specific page. And in this case, if you need to see several pages the way they were a week ago, you should look for the right version of each page. With Baselines for Confluence, you save a collection of links to documents versions that correspond to a specific moment in time. So you can go back to a certain baseline and see all space pages versions of that time.

Among other benefits:

• Setting user groups that can view and edit Baselines.
• Selecting documents based on keywords. If you provide a keyword in the “What did you change?” field when saving pages, you can use that keyword while creating a baseline. The latest document version of each document with the given keyword in its change description will be included in the baseline.

You should pay attention to the fact that currently there’s no connection between links in a baseline set. That means you are supposed to follow each link separately to see the relevant older versions of your documents. As well, if a page or its version is deleted from the space, that document version will not be accessible in the baseline set.

Pricing: Baselines for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 100$ for 25 users; 150$ for 50 users; 250$ for 100 users. Try it

Hopefully, some of the add-ons from today’s overview turn out to be something you can use to facilitate and improve your collaboration in Confluence.