confluence

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Confluence Page Status Management

January 16, 2024
#Case Study#Collaboration#How To#Project management#Confluence Tutorial#Reporting#Confluence
16 min

Today, Confluence is widely used by many diverse teams for seamless collaboration and documentation management. This highly customizable tool facilitates knowledge sharing, project management, and effective communication. So, let’s dive into the typical workday filled with working with Confluence Cloud and see how Confluence page status management can enhance it.

Product and Content Managers: Challenges, Tips, and Tricks

To start, meet Betty and James, colleagues and Confluence Cloud enthusiasts who love to discuss their work and challenges during the coffee breaks. Despite working in different departments (Content and Product Management), their Confluence work organization challenges are alike. They both strive to find better ways to communicate their work status to their colleagues or indicate when the piece is ready to see the world. Whether it is the latest release or K-Base article, Confluence Page Status opportunities can help in both cases. It turns out that taking coffee breaks with colleagues has its perks and this time, the benefit is the discovery of the Handy Page Status macro from Handy Macros for Confluence app, which can save the day in case of fear of writing blog posts and planning multiple releases.

This article covers tips and tricks on how to set expectations for viewers and collaborators and locate required data in a heartbeat while on the Confluence page. See what James and Betty have learned on their journey and what highlights they had on the way. From how to indicate the Confluence documentation status to putting the Confluence Page Status data in custom reports to filter and search by it – all covered in the reading below!

Learn the Basics: Confluence Page Status

First, what is Handy Page Status, and what value does it bring to the table to the Confluence Page Status? Let’s say ideas are notes, Confluence is a sheet of music that fellow collaborators and viewers can review, and the music symphony is ready for collaboration and feedback. How can we keep everyone on the same music sheet and signal that the symphony was born? The simple solution is to customize and incorporate page status management that best serves your company’s needs.

So, Confluence Page Status is a game-changer for teams and professionals who:

  • Need to incorporate straightforward, accessible, and reusable tools that ensure transparency and clarity of the workflows and their timelines.
  • Deliver dynamic work exposed to active feedback or used immediately as a reference (Betty’s Example: Latest How-To K-Base Article; James’ Example: Content of 1.3.20 app release version).
  • Want to get control of the workflow and its lifecycle and make sure that the feedback is given on the specific timeline of which everyone is aware (Betty’s Example: Page Status: Under Review James’ Example: Page Status: 1.3.20)

Learn About Advanced Status Management: Handy Page Status

With Handy Page Status, both Betty and James can go the distance and level up their Confluence Page Status experience, In addition to native functionality, this macro can:

  • Create status options that work best for your company process and reuse these status sets across pages for status consistency. James’ and Betty’s works are often parallel lines. Still, they benefit from each other’s Handy Page Statuses. James, assign each Confluence page with the bug report or feature request overview with the corresponding app version when it is planned to deliver them. Betty knows she needs the How-To Article in the blog ready precisely on the release date. All thanks to James’ Handy Page Status for Release. So she knows it’s safe to have the article in the ‘IN PROGRESS’ stage rather than ‘OPEN TO FEEDBACK.’
  • When making updates in one click, also see the update history.  The Handy Page Status history can help teams identify bottlenecks and encourage action. Maybe it’s time for another R’n’D session if the same bug fix has been postponed for three consecutive app versions. History also supports tracking time and seeing if Betty is in timing while changing her content from status to status.
  • Search and filter for specific page statuses and have a big picture of custom data in the form of the Handy Page Status Reports. Betty can create a custom report with a specific ‘READY FOR REVIEW’ status for selected spaces to signal feedback givers the article’s status before it goes live and public. James can review at a glance what will be released in version 1.3.20. It helps him decide whether the release can be locked, and the team can proceed with the following steps.

Boost Content Marketing and Product Management in Confluence

And now, here is an example solution. We will see how James and Betty put the Handy Page Status and Handy Page Status Report into practice. They immediately ace their daily workflows and relieve the pain that hits the nerve.

The solution only requires three easy steps:

  1. Сreate a new status set that reflects your needs.
  2. Have the time of your life assigning statuses to all relevant pages.
  3. Benefit from the Page Status Report to search and filter Confluence pages and have all the critical information ready at one glance.

Minimalistic Dark Mode Lovers – we’ve got you covered!

Minimalistic Dark Mode for Page Status Report

For those who live on the bright side, Handy Macros for Confluence has a variety of colors to choose from and play with!

Organize Confluence Page Status Data into Reports 

Those steps look easy enough. Still, they remain to be an effective tool for page status control. The Handy Macros for Confluence app has even more to offer, from Confluence dark mode support to multiple reporting criteria.

The data can be collected in a separate Handy Page Status report based on:

  • Confluence spaces where the status is set
  • Handy Page Status sets
  • Handy Page Status options
  • Confluence users who set the status
  • Handy Page Status dates

Handy Page Status report

Now it’s time to review how it goes on Confluence pages. We will see how you can track release versions and indicate content creation progress in Confluence Cloud.

Control App Releases: James’ Case

So, James keeps it simple with the release versions. Page Status is assigned to each feature/bug fix page, eventually forming a release. This way, users know when to expect the feature/bug fix to be delivered.

Workflow with Confluence Page Status

All the changes can be done directly in the mode. James and his team can always check for the dynamics if everyone has been waiting for the delivery for ages. James can view the history of the Page Status updates to validate the point or’ ages’ hypothesis in a few clicks. Sometimes, the path is straightforward; sometimes, it’s a bumpy road.All the changes can be done directly in the mode

With multiple Confluence pages actively and dynamically worked on, it is essential to silence the noise and focus on the priority task. James’ priority task is to lock the upcoming release 1.3.20.  He also needs to communicate critical release information to all relevant stakeholders. For that, he chooses appropriate space and a particular Handy Page Status; James can make the report author-specific and filter for status updates done only after a specific date. Let’s say one of the developers promised to confirm the app version on or after a particular date. The result can look like this and be customized and elaborated even further.

Page Status Report comes in HandyThe view-mode page status updates and the ability to craft a custom report in a matter of a few clicks and seconds has a lot of benefits. James and his collaborators can review the critical data at a glance and focus on the issues at hand. This saves the team a lot of time and enhances overall productivity, autonomy, and collaboration in their workflows.

Facilitate Content Writing: Betty’s Case

Writer’s block and fear of the blank space can be scary. Betty sees Handy Page Status as a game-changer (and a lifesaver). Often, the root cause of her writer’s block is that the feedback on the working piece is given well in advance while still being a work in progress. So, Betty invented her superheroes in the form of Handy Page Status to avoid the frustration associated with the feedback given well in advance by indicating clear expectations on the pages. And if you’re asking if she has a favorite page status, a ‘MESSY MIDDLE’ is Betty’s favorite.

Betty’s collaborators and readers love the new workflow as well. They know that while it is interesting to witness the process or see how the messy middle evolves, they’re invited to the party only when the ‘UNDER REVIEW’ and ‘READY’ page status is indicated.Facilitate Content Writing

Humble Drafts and Messy Middles are good, but those are also the ones that need a check-in or clean-up. How many of those does Betty have? What can be done about the ones in those states? And what if Betty needs to review her work only in a particular space after today? For this case, use the Handy Page Status report with the required search parameters.Handy Page Status Report data

With this solution and specific spaces for which Betty writes content, Betty can locate her not-so-work-in-progress items and see what can be done about them with just a few clicks. She is also having her superhero moment because now she needs to browse only through the Handy Page Status Report data vs. looking through her notes/manually exploring Confluence pages. Besides, her colleagues benefit a lot from the report. Everyone can see what’s new and ready to be read in the Blog space regularly without getting ‘content dupes’. Here the Last updated after field can help them with that even if they like only to read fresh blog updates each Friday.

Closure

Betty and James work in different departments, and their daily workflows are different, too. Still, they are impressed with the diversity and customization opportunities of Handy Page Status and Page Status Report functionalities. Moreover, Betty and James are eager to spread the word to the other teams who can benefit from incorporating the opportunities into different fields like project management or documentation review.

You can check out the Handy Page Status Management in action by trying it out in Confluence Cloud to see how you and your team can benefit from it. Feel free to check out Handy Macros for Confluence at the Atlassian Marketplace to see if this app can be a good fit for your needs and use cases.

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    How to Make Your Confluence Pages More Attractive

    January 10, 2024
    #How To#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence
    14 min

    Make your Confluence pages more attractive and add more interactivity to your content in Confluence Cloud for instant switching of statuses and dates in the view mode. Learn more.

    What is a good-looking and well-organized page? It mainly depends on the situation, but in general, you need to do some basic things to create an easy-to-read and content-oriented page in Confluence.

    Plan the page layout

    Having the relevant information is just one side of creating a high-performing page. The way you present this information to the reader is another thing.

    Crowded pages are tough to read. They can distract the reader and result in a bad user experience with your page.

    The Confluence page layout is an effective tool for page organization and ensuring the best visual impact. Use this native Confluence feature to add horizontal sections or vertical columns to your page. You can add and move sections up and down, change the number of columns, or remove sections whenever you need it. All your information remains on the page.

    Confluence page layout

    Replace default Confluence links with sight-capturing buttons

    Many Confluence pages require actions from the reader. A native Confluence link is difficult to notice, especially when readers scroll the page . Even with good structure and content organization, this call to action looks quite boring.

    links on Confluence page

    Highlight links that need more attention with clickable buttons in Confluence. Any Confluence user can create them on pages without advanced technical skills. As a result, a simple button will appear on a page.

    how to add button in Confluence

    We’ve covered this in detail in our other article, so you can refer to it if you’re interested.

    This solution is limited in functionality, though. Buttons can be only grey or blue. Once users click such a button, they always leave the current page and go to a new one.

    If you need more options for customization, you can try Handy Button from the Handy Macros for Confluence app. The same page looks much better after replacing the set of links with call-to-action buttons.

    button on Confluence page

    Organize your pages with panels

    Panels can greatly improve visual perception. They are great for the visual division of content blocks on one page. You can also use panels to make your pages look identical and keep them easy to read.

    Use the native Panel macro to create a customizable colored panel on a page. You can put panels anywhere on a page, including table cells and page layout sections. Additionally, select the required border, background, title, and text colors for your panels to correspond to your needs and fit your corporate style.

    panels in Confluence

    Create previews for pages

    Confluence has the Page Tree and the Children Display macros to list the pages for further reference. They can be a quick solution for creating an overview of the hierarchy of pages in a space.

    page tree and children display macro in Confluence

    Still, you can encounter many use cases when you need to create a clickable preview for children pages or list pages from different spaces on one Confluence page. Handy Cards can give you this flexibility. Use this macro from Handy Macros for Confluence to generate page previews from child pages, pages by labels, and any external pages.

    page preview in Confluence

    Adjust Handy Cards to your business needs and team workflow. With diverse setting options available, any user can create clickable cards on Confluence pages in a minute. Handy Cards can fit into any page because you can change their layout, width, number, and content on the fly. Consider adding images to your page previews on Handy Cards to make Confluence pages even more appealing.

    page preview with image in Confluence

    Enrich your page functionality with interactive elements

    Interactive elements are a good means for capturing attention and improving the user experience. They help you better organize page content and save time you spend on editing and interacting with a Confluence page.

    The choice of dynamic elements you may want to include mainly depends on your primary needs and use cases. Let’s look at the most common interactive elements. Most teams use them to enrich Confluence functionality and deliver more with less effort.

    Do you use statuses a lot in your Confluence? No big deal! Statuses bring consistency and transparency to all processes and workflows.

    Confluence has the Status macro, to add a colored lozenge with a status value on a page. You can choose a solid or light background color for your status and the text that appears inside the lozenge.

    how to add status in Confluence

    If you are still manually typing status values any time you need to add a new status or change the existing one, there’s a macro for that.

    Handy Status will save you up to four hours a week and bring your status management in Confluence to a new level. With Handy Status, you can create dropdowns on Confluence pages and use them without editing. Status switch becomes a breeze and saves your time for other tasks.

    dynamic status in Confluence

    Additionally, you can benefit from the Handy Status history. Just hover over the status to see the recent changes, including the time, the user, and the status value. Dynamic statuses can improve your team’s workflow.

    If you work with statuses a lot and have them distributed between multiple Confluence pages, it can be time-consuming to get an overview of all your project statuses at once. Browsing through pages one by one to get the information about statuses sounds frustrating. A ready-to-go solution is the ability to synchronize Handy Status with the page label. After doing this, you can create Content by Label reports or quickly locate all the pages with the same status. Labels are automatically updated on each status change, so you always have up-to-date data and can concentrate on other work.

    content by label report with status in Confluence

    You can include Handy Status in tables for quick bulk updates and filtration and track status progress across several Confluence pages with the Page Properties and the Page Properties Report macros. The Handy Status functionality makes it useful for teams of all sizes and industries.

    Another common item on a Confluence page is a date. You can insert it by typing // when editing a page. After that, a calendar appears, and you can pick up the desired date.

    add date in Confluence

    Changing the date on a Confluence page is a minor update, but it requires additional page editing. With long Confluence pages, switching to the edit mode requires much time.

    The solution to the problem is a date-picker that can be used when viewing a page. Handy Date makes it possible for you.

    change date in Confluence page view mode

    Try Handy Date and Handy Status together to create dynamic Confluence tables. They increase the team speed by two when working with data in Confluence.

    Want a pro tip here? You can create interactive dropdowns with Handy Status for any text content, not only statuses. Use it for company names, employees, locations, or other content and save even more time.

    dynamic Confluence table

    Combine them all and make your Confluence pages more attractive!

    Let’s do some magic on one useful but dull page using the elements described in this blog post:

    Confluence page before formatting

    Five minutes later, the page looks completely different:

    make your Confluence pages more attractive

    You can always adjust the look of your Confluence content and get more fun in the collaboration process with the help of Handy Macros for Confluence.

    Combine the tools from this post as you want to organize the content structure and tailor page design to company needs in your Confluence. Feel free to perform some experiments. Your readers will appreciate it!

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      How to Ace Employee Certification in Atlassian Confluence

      April 14, 2023
      #How To#Confluence#Learning Management
      10 min

      Today companies that invest in employee training open the door to new business opportunities and are more attractive to their potential workforce. These organizations need a way to check the level of skills, experience and expertise of their employees on a continuous basis. Some choose professional certification for that. While it is required for certain professions (doctors, pilots, emergency medical technicians, for example), many employers turn to professional certification voluntary. Why? Here are some of the reasons:

      1. Certified employees prove that they have what it takes to be effective making their employer feel more confident
      2. Personal sense of achievement fuels individual’s drive to work even better and harder
      3. Improved skills enable staff to undertake a greater variety of work
      4. Credibility boost in the eyes of company’s clients when its workers stay up-to-date on the hottest trends in their industry
      5. Successful certification may result in income and/or status increase both for the employee and the organization
      6. Companies need a way to identify knowledge gaps reducing potential risks, especially in critical areas such as safety
      7. We all love being rewarded, after all

      There are plenty professional certifications provided by professional societies and associations, as well as companies (such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Salesforce, etc.) interested in raising industry standards. In addition to going with third-party certifications, you can create your own internal ones. They are likely to have less credibility for clients compared to third-part certifications, but will be most relevant covering your unique processes, requirements and best practices.

      In this blog, we will tell you more about internal certification with and without training and will also highlight a way to check if your employees are ready to take a third-party certification.

      Employee certification in Confluence

      To prepare for internal or third-party certification you can:

      1. use a separate learning management system (LMS) to help employees engage with training content
      2. encourage your team to get ready on their own
      3. create training courses in Confluence

      If your company uses Atlassian Confluence, you can organize internal certification or set up preparation to a third-party professional certification using izi – LMS for Confluence – create certification training courses and/or certification quizzes (tests). You can make training and certification more appealing for your team because they will use the platform they already know. All you need to do is to populate your Confluence with the proper materials to train and educate your team.

      The izi LMS app offers various options to choose from when it comes to certification.

      Internal Certification with Prior Training

      Having all of the required information to get certified on hand in Confluence LMS will make everyone’s life a lot easier. This means that you can provide your employees with training and education right in Confluence.

      Your learning administrator can create a course with multiple modules divided by topics, time period, and more. The app also allows you to build self-check tests after each learning section to evaluate students’ knowledge. Or you can add only the final test every participant must take to complete the course and get certified. This way you can easily assess competences and skills of employees.

      Your employees can train online at their own pace learning the information in each module.

      The course administrator can easily check the results of all the participants.

      Internal Certification Test

      Regular internal certification tests help you confirm that the individual possesses the experience and skills to perform a specific job or uncovers the lack of knowledge about an organization’s products, services, policies, safety practices etc.

      For internal certification tests that don’t require prior training, you can create quizzes (tests) using various types of questions. Moreover, you can reuse questions from other Confluence quizzes on related topics.

      The izi LMS app allows you to easily enroll both Confluence users and people outside your system. This might be helpful when you need to certify people who are not working in your company.

      You can track the certification progress of your employees checking how each participant did and the score each person got.

      This way you can see the status of all their certifications and training requirements in one place.

      Readiness Check for Third-Party Certification

      As a manager, you need to keep an eye on anything that might impact the process of employee certification. So in case another company certifies your team members, it is better to check onsite if your employees are ready to get certified. This way you can save company’s time and money and certify only well-trained personnel.

      You can create quizzes to assess knowledge, competences and skills of the people who are going to obtain certification off-site. So all quiz participants must complete the quiz successfully to get a certification permit. Just set the pass target, the number of attempts and the time limit and then track the results.

      Take your employee certification to the next level

      Certifications act as benchmarks for employee competency and performance. Whether you’re assessing knowledge of your team or aiming to increase their skills, staying on top of certifications is a key part of running an effective workplace.

      Use izi – LMS for Confluence to make sure all of your employees are meeting industry standards. Constant certification in Confluence can help your team increase available skills, achieve their goals and tackle everyday challenges.

      You can check the sample training courses and try them either as a participant or as an administrator. You can also use our demo site to try out this app and discover its features with no need to install it.

      If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post.

      Try izi – LMS for Confluence for free

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        If You Use Confluence, Your New LMS Could Be Hiding in Plain Sight

        March 25, 2023
        #Confluence#Learning Management
        13 min

        A learning management system (LMS) can be a roadblock or a fast track to staff training, knowledge transfer and compliance, depending on the way it is used.

        There are plenty of forks in the road even before you select a system from the 800-plus options available, and that number continues to grow. You might choose a generic LMS or one niched for particular industries, channels, prospect use cases, budgets, and more. Then, you’ll need to assign your team and roles to project manage data migration from your legacy system (if that’s possible) and integrate the new LMS with how your company works. It could take a year to get to the implementation stage if you’re hosting the system on your premises or less for a hosted or cloud-based system.

        Are you getting a sense of one of the critical issues of adopting a new LMS?

        Time is the real cost of an LMS

        When your new LMS is live, think of the time wasted to get staff up to speed with the new interface before they’ve even started the real training. Some of your workers may even dig in their heels, saying they haven’t had a chance to get around it.

        That could be because they’ve actually run out of time, and they may not be lying.

        More than 1,100 times a day, the average employee switches between 35 job-critical applications, a Pegasystems Inc report has found. It surveyed 35 global companies across 11 industries. Staff using more than 30 applications each shift made 28% more errors than their peers who used fewer apps. The report says expanding this over the years sees days of lost time and much highly error-prone activity. In other words, if your staff switch systems less, they’ll make fewer errors and will be more productive.

        work in Confluence without switching

        It adds up.

        Over a year, employees’ idle time costs companies more than $100 billion a year just in the US, according to Harvard University researchers. Too much idle time means staff aren’t being productive and are at risk of becoming disengaged and demoralized with their work.

        Of course, the other costs of adopting an LMS include support, maintenance, creating content, and managing learning. Most vendors offer a per-user, per-month pricing model, and the price goes up if you opt for extra features.

        LMS for Confluence that comes to where your staff operate

        If you’re already using enterprise collaboration software such as Atlassian Confluence, your staff are no doubt comfortable whether they’re working face-to-face or remotely.

        So, why not bring your new LMS to Confluence, so they don’t have to learn a new system? After all, if they’re learning new content within Confluence, chances are they’ll already be switched on to collaborate.

        LMS for Confluence

        Studies show if you interact with others, ask questions and use what you’ve learned, you’ll remember 69% of the content in two days. That compares with just 28% if you learned solo.

        Nesting your learning portal within Confluence helps make your staff more efficient. An Association for Intelligent Information Management study found more than eight in 10 businesses said they wasted too much time searching for and recreating knowledge. In fact, US businesses waste three-quarters of a trillion dollars searching for content that already exists.

        Having your LMS sitting within Confluence means staff won’t have to switch to a separate system for learning, and you’ll save time on system integration. You’ll be able to keep tabs on certifications for your organization for legal compliance, too.

        Confluence as your LMS makes sense.

        There is an app that’s a Confluence learning management system, set up and ready to go for:

        • Pre-recruitment testing
        • Employee onboarding
        • E-learning
        • Creating quizzes from scratch
        • Developing courses
        • Checking product knowledge
        • Training and
        • Testing as well as certifications.

        It’s a Confluence app called izi – LMS for Confluence – it lets staff easily move from working on tasks to training and back without leaving Confluence. It’s just had a name change from Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence, by the way.

        izi - LMS for Confluence

        The back story

        Since going live in October 2015, this Confluence LMS has been harnessed by teams across the globe for staff training and more within Confluence. It’s particularly popular in the US, Germany, the UK, India, and the Russian Federation, according to Crunchbase. Most users are tech companies, but it’s also gaining traction in pharmaceutical, automotive, banking, insurance, and medical spheres.

        The multi-award-winning company behind izi – LMS for Confluence is Stiltsoft, which started operating in 2010. It offers 20-plus apps for Atlassian tools, including the popular Table Filter and Charts, also available from the Atlassian Marketplace. Stiltsoft has more than 7,000 customers in 80-plus countries. They include Netflix, Allianz, Symantec, Logitech, Tesla, Samsung, Dell, Mercedes-Benz, AT@T, and Walmart.

        Stiltsoft customers

        Stiltsoft has won Codegeist awards for best apps and, in 2021, was named an Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner. It’s also active in the Marketplace Bug Bounty Program.

        How this LMS for Confluence works for enterprises

        Here’s what’s on offer with this Atlassian Confluence app.

        For Confluence users, the interface of this LMS is already familiar. Simply enroll using Confluence users and groups that are already set up in Confluence. That means there’s no need to handle user management in this LMS.

        Once the app is on your Confluence dashboard, get started by choosing either the introduction to:

        Each section steps you through with lots of screenshots to help visualize the process. Add text, images, rich text, presentations, links, or videos to bring your content to life. You’ll have professionally designed blank templates as your canvass to begin creating.

        For example, when you build a course, you can create, add and organize modules, and enroll users or groups, even anonymous users, too. Once they begin, participants can use the My courses tab to see the learning portal to check which courses they’re enrolled in and track their progress.

        Learning portal in Atlassian Confluence

        As a creator, you’ll access a dashboard to create new courses and quizzes, as well as find those you’ve set up before. Creators can also be participants in courses others have built or even you’ve built yourself. Importantly, you’ll be able to check on who’s completed which course and who may need a nudge to keep learning.

        tracking course progress in Confluence

        One feature of izi – LMS for Confluence is the ability to create a quiz from anywhere in Confluence – just using the plus sign in the sidebar and selecting the Quiz blueprint. If you can’t find a feature you’d like, you can request it as well as share your feedback via a survey or an interview.

        So, whichever way you look at it through the kaleidoscope of time, choosing an LMS is a major move for any business. You could be just a few clicks away from moving e-learning to the next level for your staff.

        Try LMS for Confluence free

        You’ll find izi – LMS for Confluence in the Atlassian marketplace. izi is easy to download and try for free for 30 days, plus you can book a 30-minute demo to help you on your way to more seamless e-learning Confluence-style in your business.

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          Unlocking the Power of an LMS in Confluence for Efficient Employee Training

          March 14, 2023
          #Learning Management#Confluence
          9 min

          Employee training is an essential part of any business. It helps employees understand their roles, increase productivity, and stay current with industry trends.

          To maximize the effectiveness of employee education, many companies turn to modern solutions for learning management. Of course, choosing the right solution for top-notch training can be challenging.

          We think that one of the best ways to do this is to provide training tailored to each employee’s needs. As such, you can use the software that your team is familiar with, like Confluence. By adopting this approach, companies can reduce the time and resources they spend on training while also providing their staff with the tools they need to succeed.

          Let’s see how to elevate employee education by leveraging a learning management system in Confluence.

          Why use LMS in Confluence for employee training

          Confluence is a remote-friendly team workspace that allows users to create and share content, collaborate, and access various learning resources. You get a centralized platform for managing content, reducing the need for multiple third-party tools. Furthermore, Confluence allows users to easily structure content in a cohesive way, which helps accelerate the learning process.

          We bet that you already have a lot of information in your Confluence that training administrators can use for employee education. So turning your Confluence into a fully-fledged learning management system is a great idea. And it is possible with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence. This app requires minimal setup and makes Confluence more powerful and user-friendly, allowing companies to quickly get their courses up and running. And employees, in turn, get an interactive environment to engage in.

          Create courses in Confluence

          Setting up an LMS in Confluence is quick and easy. After installation of the app, creators and learners get immediate access to the Learning portal in Confluence.

          lms-in-confluence

          Learning administrators can create courses from the portal view or from anywhere in Confluence by clicking the Create button and using the Course template.

          One of the main advantages is that izi LMS allows reusing the existing content and separate Confluence pages as training blocks of the course. Administrators can edit content if required to ensure each training module has a clear objective and the course is well-structured and easy to follow.

          Populating training modules with images, videos, PDF files, and quizzes helps create engaging and interactive training materials. Moreover, administrators can update content for already enrolled course participants. In this case, employees receive the most up-to-date information when something has changed in the process covered in the course, or there is a new training module.

          Check for content updates

          To notify course participants about the necessity to finish the course, creators can set up automatic reminders for course participants.

          Course reminders

          Enjoy a smooth learning process

          Confluence users can browse the Learning catalog of available courses and self-enroll in the ones they find interesting. Also, they see their progress in the courses they are taking.

          My courses in Learning

          Learners see every course as a set of training modules they need to study carefully and complete one by one. Courses can contain quizzes that help assess user knowledge and understanding. This allows course administrators to rapidly identify gaps in knowledge to pay attention to and adjust courses accordingly. Questions can be of four different types:

          • single choice
          • multiple choice
          • true/false
          • free text

          Free text questions let participants share their thoughts on the question with the course creator, who then needs to review answers and mark them as correct or wrong.

          Free text review page

          Participants can self-enroll in quizzes with a link. This facilitates the task of inviting multiple users to a quiz without typing their names individually.

          Quiz self-enrollment link

          After course completion, participants get certificates they can download and share with their colleagues or on social media. It helps increase employees’ engagement and productivity.

          Course certificates for participants

          Read more about how to ace employee certification in Confluence with the help of courses.

          Track participants’ progress with reporting

          One of the most common challenges is ensuring employees are motivated to complete courses. To overcome this challenge, it’s crucial to track their progress and guarantee they are meeting the necessary objectives, as well as gain insights into where additional training may be needed.

          izi – LMS for Confluence lets course administrators track participants’ activity, assess their performance and generate reports both for courses and quizzes they take.

          For example, every course report shows statuses such as Not started, Started, and Completed. Moreover, hovering over the status, you can see the status change history. This feature provides course administrators with a birds-eye view of course progress among all the participants.

          Course history of status changes

          When it comes to quizzes, course creators can view answers participants gave while taking a quiz vs. correct answers.

          Take advantage of an LMS in Confluence

          With a suitable learning management system, businesses can ensure their employees receive the education and training they need to succeed. This approach benefits for both the company and its employees, as it allows them to manage their learning and development effectively.

          Whether you’re looking for a way to master employee onboarding, level up compliance training, or improve self-directed employee education, izi – LMS for Confluence has got you covered. It allows you to set up courses, track employee progress, and measure their performance on the fly right in Confluence, the software you already know and enjoy using.

          Try izi LMS for free and check how it can power up your training processes. The app is available for Confluence Cloud and Data Center.

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            #All #How To#AI#News#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence#Jira#Bitbucket#Case Study#Learning Management#Collaboration#Project management#Task Management#Document management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#monday

            Employee Performance Assessment and Training in Jira and Confluence

            January 25, 2023
            #How To#Learning Management#Reporting
            12 min

            Recent years have brought many new challenges that humankind did not expect. It has reshaped our vision and approaches towards life, communication, and, of course, work. We encountered problems that were unnoticeable when we were able to communicate with each other directly.

            More and more companies have proceeded to robust digitalization of their businesses. Unfortunately, all these transformations were performed so fast that not all people could quickly get used to these abrupt changes. After a while, teams noticed that their internal communication and team collaboration were not so efficient as before. The management teams got another problem with making the companies work when there is no peer-to-peer communication, and all the processes must run remotely.

            Companies have understood that they need to invest more into performance analytics, employee education, and training programs. Only these things can help them adjust their businesses to the changed circumstances and succeed in the new reality.

            Shaping the problem is half the solution

            Identifying the problem is a key to its solving. In most cases, we collect feedback about the work of our employees every quarter, which makes it almost impossible to track all the occurred issues and positive achievements. It is hard to recall all the good and bad moments that happened over a quarter. Some of our memories are polished, some are completely forgotten, some are replaced with our own hallucinations. As the result, we get some averaged assessments (or points of view) that may be far from reality.

            How can we make the gathering of feedback on individual performance an ongoing process? So all the time we can track the actual information with minimal bias.

            Realtime feedback collection in Jira Cloud

            What is the most convenient moment to collect feedback about the completed task? Of course, once the task was checked and closed by a person who requested its execution. Here you can take advantage of the Employee Performance Ratings app.

            For example, we have a development team that has started working remotely, and something has gone off course (smile) They cannot deliver within the expected timelines, and the quality of the implemented solution is not so good.  As a project manager, you need to identify the problems that do not allow your team to perform better. You can do this by identifying the metrics that can explicitly indicate whether your team performs well or has some issues to address.

            Identifying the metrics that indicate team performance

            Once this step is complete, all you need to do is create these metrics and enable their tracking for the project. Let’s say we want to track delivery speed, code quality, architecture and algorithms, code security, process adherence, and team collaboration. We save them as a metrics set and assign them to the project which our development team works with.

            Tracking delivery speed, code quality, architecture and algorithms, code security

            That’s done. Now you as a project manager or a team lead can proceed to the assessment of tasks in Jira. The performance evaluation process is pretty simple. You just need to put the score from 0 to 10 for each metric. While assessing a task, you need to pay attention to different factors, such as the difference between estimations and spent time, code smells, found security vulnerabilities, comments within pull requests, communication with teammates, and so on.

            Assessment of tasks in Jira

            Having assessed multiple tasks for the same person, you can check the individual progress over time and the overall trend. This way, you can quickly and easily elaborate a metric-specific development program for each teammate to increase the overall team performance and effectiveness.

            If your team is working on multiple projects or products, you can track the individual performance in each project, in particular, to better see what tasks inspire your teammates.

            Track the individual employee performance in each project

            Once you have collected sufficient performance analytics, you can see what things you need to improve within your team processes and how every teammate can contribute. In addition, you can compare the metric changes over time for individual teammates and continuously improve them if noticing any problems.

            In the next section, we will tell you how you can educate your development team and train employees with the learning management system (LMS) in Confluence Cloud.

            My team has some problems. What should I do next?

            Once you have found that your team does not perform as you expected, it’s time to help them by providing them with resources for self-education.

            Since many of us are working from home, it’s almost impossible to organize an onsite training. At the same time, sharing related books or articles is not the case either as you can’t track understanding of the material.

            Having a comprehensive e-learning solution can come in handy. Managers all over the world use different learning management systems for internal training. LMS not only helps managers stimulate their team’s self-development but also saves their time as well as automates the process of training.

            In this blog post, we’re describing solutions for Atlassian products, and we’d like to tell you how to turn your Confluence into an LMS.

            Team training right in Confluence

            izi – LMS for Confluence is a tool the can simplify employee training and improve your team’s performance in the short term. With this app, you can create courses, quizzes, and tests right in Confluence. Moreover, your team continues working with the tool they are familiar with, and you don’t need to configure anything to start since it works out of the box.

            create courses, quizzes, and tests right in Confluence

            Start from the Learning portal – a place where you can administer your courses and quizzes. Here you can also create training that will cover your team’s knowledge gaps. A familiar interface will help you build it from scratch like a shot.

            Enrich course pages with eye-catching pictures and educational videos to make content easier for understanding. You can also add PDF, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents.

            Engaging content in Confluence courses

            Reuse existing Confluence pages for your training to save your team time and effort. It can be worthwhile if you already have some useful content in your Confluence.

            When done with the course part, add a quiz for your teammates to test their knowledge. Adjust the quiz to your needs with plenty of settings, and don’t forget to include a few tricky questions (because life is a rollercoaster 🙂).

            add a quiz for your teammates to test their knowledge

            That’s it; your training is ready. It’s time to assign it to your team and wait for the results. Each course or quiz has a report where you can track your team’s progress. Analyzing the results, you can decide if they need another training session.

            track your team's progress in courses and quizzes

            Your teammates can track their performance themselves. On the Learning portal, they can find the list of all courses and quizzes they need to take and see their progress and results.

            Having an LMS in Confluence, you don’t need to learn how to use another software, integrate anything or spend time for complex configurations. The app gives you a perfect balance between a familiar interface and powerful features that can cover many use cases as onboarding, internal and external training, pre-employment testing, or employee certification.

            Track and improve your team’s efficiency

            Nurturing high-performing teams is always a challenge, especially when we see each other only during video meetings. Basing on the experience of the hundreds of teams, we believe that only constant analysis of your team’s performance and improvement of their skillset leads to successful product delivery.

            We hope that a combination of Employee Performance Ratings and izi – LMS for Confluence will help you deliver top-quality products and build a team with a strong knowledge of what they’re doing.

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