Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – Fourth Quarter 2016

2016 passed and today we want to present you with Top 5 Confluence add-ons appeared on the Atlassian Marketplace in the fourth quarter of the past year. We have reviewed over 30 add-ons released between October 1 and December 31 and selected the five add-ons that you may take advantage of.

We’d like to remind that this is a regular series of blog posts, so you can look through add-ons featured in the first, second, and third quarters and maybe find the solution tailored to your needs.

So the final list of add-ons includes the following:

• Atlas CRM for Confluence Cloud by Avisi B.V.
• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence Cloud by Nearsoft Inc
• Refined Theme for Confluence Cloud by RefinedWiki
• Responsive Tabs for Confluence Server by Kupper Software
• Knowledge Pathways for Confluence Server by ServiceRocket

Let’s see what features and capabilities of these add-ons you may like to use!

Atlas CRM

This solution will be ideal for mid-size companies and start-ups that are thinking about choosing some CRM solution for managing interactions with current and potential future customers.

Atlas CRM is a cross-platform add-on that allows you to keep the single CRM database in your Atlassian Cloud Ecosystem. This solution has migrated all its standard features from JIRA to Confluence.

After installation and initial setup you need to run the synchronization of contacts between Confluence and JIRA, and once this is done it’s time to start using CRM.

Within each space you get two additional sections – Contacts and Companies. The Companies section displays the list of companies registered in Atlas CRM. The add-on provides sufficient capabilities for managing companies, regulating the set of columns for display, performing bulk operations, adding new companies, or exporting the existing list to CSV.

While looking through the company details,you can link contacts to the specific company and specify their roles in it. Along with the company information there is a capability to view the JIRA issues and Confluence pages which this company is linked to. This way you can quickly navigate across all requests and discussions with your customers and find the information required at a particular moment.

The similar functionality is also available for contacts. You can perform different operations on them, specify the contact details, and link the contact to the company on the fly.

The add-on supports the native Confluence search engine so you can quickly look up for companies and contacts, as well as pages which they are linked to. This provides enough usability to keep all your CRM processes and interactions at hand.

In the add-on settings you can adjust the company and contact information templates, and enrich them with additional fields for tracking the relevant information.

You are able to import a bulk of contacts and companies into Atlas CRM by uploading a CSV file with them. Atlas CRM will run automatic synchronization of all the new companies and contacts between Confluence and JIRA. That’s why you will have the same set of information in both systems that you can use while working on pages or managing requests.

Pricing: The pricing for the add-on starts from $17/mo for 15 users and ends at $330/mo for 2000 users.

Agile Retrospectives

This add-ons allows you to remotely run agile retrospectives in Confluence Cloud after the sprint completion. This can be useful when your team work in different parts of the world, or some teammates cannot be present at the live retrospective due to circumstances.

So how does it work? All you need is to create a blank page, further add the Agile Retrospectives macro on the page and save it. Once this is done, share the page with all the involved teammates and that’s all!

When all the people open the page, they can launch the retrospective and share their impressions about the finished sprint. Your teammates cannot see responses of other teammates during the entry step as this information is blurred out. This is very useful as allows you to get unbiased results from your team and get the real, objective overview of weaknesses and strengths of each member.

Once everybody is ready, the moderator of the retrospective can transition it to the next step. Here, your team can group the similar impressions.

On the third step, each teammate can vote for specific ideas he or she likes. This way you can reveal the preferences of your colleagues and the problems they experience.

On the final step, every teammate of yours can provide some kind of feedback or ideas of how to improve the development process and cope with the found problems. Each idea can be assigned to a specific teammate as a task.

Once all suggestions are left, the moderator closes the retrospective. Afterwards the add-on generates an aggregated view of all reported positive and negative moments, and also shows the list of proposed actions.

With this tool you and your teammate can quickly resolve the found problems and improve the overall team performance and efficiency. If you get some ideas you can re-open the retrospective and update it as well.

Pricing: The price for 15 users starts at $15/mo and 2000 users will cost you $100/mo.

Refined Theme for Confluence Cloud

The popular theme add-on is now available for Confluence Cloud too. We want to point that this is the first theme for the Cloud platform that you can use as an alternative to the existing standard theme.

Despite the basic set of features provided in theme now, RefinedWiki team are actively working with Atlassian on adding more and more features that are already available in the Server version.

As of now, there are three pre-defined themes for you to choose:

• Blue
• City
• Mountain

In the add-on setup section, you can select the global theme and grant a permission to customize the space theme to the space administrators.

Then you can add light customizations into the existing theme templates, adjust the colors.of the menu items, configure the background look, optimize the content display layout, and update some other elements.

Once done, you can save these modifications. There is also a section with revisions, so any time you can roll back to the required version or restore the original variant.

The space editor allows you to adjust the layout of the space’s home page and add multiple modules for instant output of the relevant information.

Once you’re done with the space home page layout, you can save it and enjoy beauty of Refined Theme.

Pricing: The subscription fee for 15 users starts from $15/mo and 2000 users will cost you $400/mo.

Responsive Tabs

This solution allows you to add responsive tabs on your Confluence pages. Now you can add interactive elements that can improve the user experience and content readability.

All you need to do is to insert the parent Tabs group macro, and place the several Tab elements macros within it.

Once done, populate it with the text and media content you want. After saving the page, you will get several tabs which you can use to quickly switch between different information.

Additionally, you can configure the look of tabs on your page and select the appropriate colors that will nicely match your Confluence theme.

Pricing: The license for up to 250 users will cost only $10 and for all the other user tiers will be $20.

You can also try Handy Macros add-on that introduces a lot of interactive and time-saving elements on your Confluence pages.

Knowledge Pathways for Confluence

This solution was created to design the educational process tailored to the specific user groups and their actual level of knowledge of this or that area. Now you can use a much more comprehensive approach to education of new employees, starting on-boarding, running the re-training sessions, or perform the in-service education for your employees.

You get sufficient capabilities to quickly and easily create a training course on the basis of all knowledgebase articles and generic pages stored in your Confluence.

Just start with creation of a new pathway in some space of yours! All you need is to specify its name and the optional description, if needed.

While designing the pathway, enter several pages that will be used as steps in your training. You can quickly populate your pathway with the necessary information and share its link on some Confluence page or email it directly.

Each user who decides to start this or that pathway needs to enroll it. Once done, he or she can start browsing through the pathway. Having read or learnt the specific amount of information on each particular step, the trainee indicates the completion by clicking the Mark as done button.

The overall progress of passing through the steps of the pathway is indicated on the enrollment page.

With this add-on you can quickly and easily educate new employees and efficiently run the global education programs in your Confluence. As an addition for evaluating the level of new knowledge of your trainees, you can try Quizzes for Confluence.

Pricing: The price of Knowledge Pathways starts from $280 for 25 users, and the unlimited license will cost you $5600.

We at StiltSoft hope that 2017 will bring new and interesting solutions for Confluence that we will be happy to share with you!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave comments on this blog post or drop an email to tech-support@stiltsoft.com

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