Easy Steps to Amplify Employee Training in Atlassian Confluence

November 10, 2022
#Document management#How To#Confluence#Learning Management
11 min

Luckily, employee training is no longer limited to classroom learning with cluttered PowerPoint slides and handouts with endless paragraphs of text. Nowadays, when training content is more accessible than ever before, both employers and employees have higher expectations of employee education. Companies are looking for solutions that can help their teams learn and retain information effectively and remotely. Trainees are looking for well-structured courses with interactive and engaging content they can access in one place.

We will show you how companies that focus their attention on continuous employee training can benefit from using Confluence along with izi – LMS for Confluence and Smart Attachments. A bundle of these solutions powers up Confluence helping its users create effective training courses and manage learning or educational materials with ease.

Below are some steps that can help any organization provide its employees with education courses tailored to their needs.

Step 1: Populating space storage with training content

Document management is of the utmost importance when it comes to retaining training materials. Course administrators need to work with multiple files and documents to create engaging training content and deliver clear messages on a given topic to each worker.

With the help of the Smart Attachments for Confluence app, course administrators can benefit from using a centralized file storage in every Confluence space aggregating the informational modules for courses. This solution helps them instantly create a clear hierarchy of educational resources adding separate folders for different courses, topics, or learning modules. They can rapidly re-use these materials in any training course or on Confluence pages.

training content in Confluence

Course administrators can keep their files in Confluence with no need to use any other file-sharing services. They can also edit files right in Confluence with the help of the Atlassian Companion app keeping the entire history of document changes in the space storage.

For more tips on how to better work with files and documents in Confluence, check our blog post on document management.

Step 2: Creating a new training course

izi – LMS for Confluence allows course administrators to create new courses from scratch. They can divide the program of the course into multiple topics and populate them with the required learning modules and quizzes. They can also reuse existing materials, quizzes, and tests from other training courses or add any Confluence page that contains important information to the course.

To facilitate the interaction between the course modules and the learner, the administrator creates engaging content. Having an LMS in Confluence, they can easily combine text with YouTube videos, images, PDF files, and more.

training course in Confluence

They can add more modules and sections, swiftly reorganize or rename them, or delete the ones they don’t need.

employee training in Confluence

The next step is to create even more effective training materials and add more useful information for self-study.

Step 3: Embedding additional training content into course modules

Adult learners are self-directed and goal-oriented. This means that any course creator needs to focus on what’s important for the employees and be short and concise so that the learners can quickly refer to and recall the information. So it can be useful to put the employees in control of the learning process and provide them with additional resources they may need to dive deeper into the topic.

The Smart Attachments for Confluence app helps course administrators avoid endless texts and embed files and folders into the course modules right from the space storage. This way students can access this information in one module and easily navigate through directories with materials finding resources to enrich their knowledge.

embed files and folders in Confluence

When the course is ready, a learning administrator needs to share it with the employees.

Step 4: Enrolling participants

Even the employees without a Confluence account can take advantage of the training course created with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence. Course administrators can effortlessly add Confluence users and emails of their colleagues to the list of course participants.

enroll course participants

Moreover, they can add the course to the Learning catalog (available in the Confluence header menu). This means that all Confluence users can find this course in the Learning section and easily self-enroll.

learning catalog in Confluence

Step 5: Tracking results

Course administrators can access all the required information to evaluate the employees’ progress. They can check the average time the participants need to complete each module and view the completion rate per module to get some insights. They can also get detailed information about the progress of every participant.

tracking course results in Confuence

Moreover, you can create customizable reports about all the courses on one page. Learn more about how to create course reports and check course results on the fly in this blog post.

Use Confluence as LMS for employee training

Whether you want to boost your employees’ motivation, check their level of skills, or create a smooth onboarding process for new hires — you need the right platform and tools to ensure your staff training is a success.

Confluence might be an ideal solution for effective interactive employee training if you use it along with izi – LMS for Confluence and Smart Attachments for Confluence.

If you’re ready to dig in, discover how to encourage self-directed learning in Confluence and ace employee certification helping your employees learn at their own pace.

If you want to discover more about how to turn Confluence into an LMS for effective employee training, let’s chat about how to get through it in the comments below or you can just drop an e-mail at info@stiltsoft.com.

Here’s Why Your Confluence Instance Is Disorganized

April 22, 2021
#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence
10 min

Are you having trouble managing your content in Confluence? Is it difficult for users to search for a specific page or attachment? Do your teams have a hard time staying on top of important information? Or maybe your Confluence user adoption is at an all-time low?

Then your Confluence may be disorganized.

A lot of admins struggle to keep their Confluence organized, especially when the volume of content increases. With more information to manage, attachments to keep track of, wikis to groom, and a larger user base to administrate, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed.

You may not know where to start reorganizing and decluttering your instance, but identifying the reasons it’s disorganized in the first place is a great first step. From then onwards, it’s all about implementing the best practices and charting a Confluence management strategy that supports your business needs.

Continue reading to find out the causes of a messy Confluence and the most effective way to detangle the mess.

Cause #1: Inefficient space management

Confluence space structure says a lot about an organization. Without a clear structure, you will have a hard time arranging content and also make it difficult for users to navigate the wiki.

confluence space with no page structure

Setting up a lot of spaces without any form of categorization isn’t practical. It can crowd your wiki, reduce the searchability of content, and prevent users from staying on top of critical information.

On another note, spaces that store outdated information could mislead users looking for the latest updates. So, what can you do?

Structure spaces based on your needs

Start by structuring spaces around people and/or work. You can set a space for each team – development, finance, sales, content, marketing, HR, etc. Then, make sure to categorize your spaces using labels. Consistency in labeling must be prioritized here since you have to add them manually. Use the page tree feature to compartmentalize content and information into relevant sections like knowledge base, team calendars, and team OKRs.

If collaboration is more central for your teams, you can create project- or product-based spaces instead. For example, backend developers, who typically work alongside frontend developers, requirement engineers, and product managers, can operate more efficiently and communicate effectively when all the relevant information for a project is in one space.

Next, use Confluence’s analytics to help you identify unused spaces across your wiki – spaces that are least viewed or not used on a daily basis. Archive spaces that are no longer relevant to improve the navigability of content, enable teams to stay on top of critical and new information, and help establish a robust wiki.

archive Confluence spaces you do not use

Cause #2: Inconsistent labels and lack of metadata

When the use of labels is inconsistent, pages, blog posts, and attachments can end up drowning in the sea of content. Even worse, poor labeling causes search results to be irrelevant and inaccurate.

To avoid problems, avoid manual labeling. Having a clear, documented labeling convention can help. But it’s not a perfect system, and you’ll likely end up having to review regularly to address typos and other inconsistencies. Additionally, you’ll need to routinely update the labeling convention as the range of content grows.

The entire process is tedious because Confluence lacks effective metadata management capabilities. Labels are the closest thing to metadata that the platform offers, and even so, they are still unstructured metadata.

Leverage metadata management capabilities

Instead of settling for error-prone labeling practices, you can leverage metadata management capabilities instead. The most effective way to improve searchability, categorization, and organization of content is by using metadata – Forbes has highlighted this as well.

metadata consistency in Confluence

In your mission to tidy up your Confluence, metadata can help you:

  • make global metadata changes to swiftly remove label typos from content, which will then help deliver accurate search results
  • create predefined metadata fields to help users quickly find information by searching for relevant keywords
  • use said predefined metadata fields to pull critical information from a page and display them using Confluence macros
  • prevent users from entering page labels that are inconsistent, incorrect, or typo-filled.

Metadata for Confluence is an app that you can leverage to achieve the goals above and more. By managing your metadata, you can rest assured knowing that your Confluence will remain organized no matter how vast your instance becomes.

overviews based on metadata in Confluence

Cause #3: Undefined page structure

You have a Confluence space for a project in the making, so keeping comprehensive documentation is vital – how do you go about arranging information?

Are you using page hierarchy to categorize it into relevant topics and/or units of work? Is there a clear flow of information from the meeting notes to the quality assurance test? If a new user visits the space, will they get the latest information on the project?

If your answers are mostly “No,” then you don’t have a defined page structure across your spaces.

On the other hand, how do you ensure that all content contributors follow the standard structure of information display? Imagine if you have a set of product requirement pages with a clear format and structure – but when a new contributor comes along, the structure is no longer maintained. What happens then?

Use templates and macros to organize content

Firstly, coming up with a rough idea of how you want to structure your page tree in a space can tremendously improve organization. To do this successfully, you have to consider a few things; the objectives of the space, the longevity and types of content, and the flow of information.

For individual pages, the information structure can actually be maintained – all you have to do is use page blueprints; templates that come with macros, formatting, and sample content. You can customize them according to your organizational needs.

You can also benefit from predefined metadata fields here; you can pull important information from a page and have it displayed in the page overview using macros. This will help users see what’s under a parent page without going into every other page in the hierarchy. The page tree feature will also help you compartmentalize content and information into relevant sections like knowledge base, monthly reports, etc.

If you need to manage documents and attachments in Confluence, try Smart Attachments for Confluence. The app improves how you organize attachments in Confluence, keeping your project documents and files organized the way you want. You can:

  • quickly download your existing folders with files into the space storage
  • embed documents or folders into the content of your Confluence pages
  • collaborate on project assets right in Confluence.

Instead of searching for specific files through numerous Confluence pages, you can rapidly find them in your space storage along with their revisions. Make document management in Confluence a breeze with the help of this solution.

Tidying up your Confluence space

A disorganized Confluence can be a reminder of how vast your instance is becoming. To sustain a bigger Confluence, you need to scale your content management capabilities. That includes leveraging metadata, acknowledging all the platform’s features and limitations, and understanding where you fall short. Only then can an action plan be formed.

To get more insights on how to make your Confluence instance more powerful, check out the Making Magic with Metadata ebook. You can also read about nine Confluence best practices your users should know.

Connecting Sharepoint and Atlassian Confluence together

February 18, 2021
#Confluence#How To
6 min

Did you know that switching between different systems and apps is not only annoying but costs businesses hundreds of billions of dollars annually due to wasted time? Enabling users to immediately find the information they are looking for is crucial to empower efficient teamwork.

Let us imagine you want to create an overview of an upcoming marketing campaign in your Confluence. Having all information and documents available on this specific page helps all employees, from marketing to sales, to get what they’re searching for with ease. But how do you accomplish such a comprehensive overview?

SharePoint Connector for Confluence

Communardo’s SharePoint Connector for Confluence is here to help! By integrating Confluence and SharePoint, you enable a seamless work experience and get the best out of both worlds. The app makes it possible to easily embed SharePoint content into Confluence.

Using the SharePoint document macro, you can either embed full-views or links of SharePoint documents as simple as posting the document URL. In case you got many files to share, you can even choose to embed a whole SharePoint document library. Now your colleagues can easily edit documents without the need to navigate to SharePoint first.

The SharePoint Connector for Confluence is available for all Atlassian hosting options (Cloud, Data Center, Server), as well as SharePoint Online (as part of Microsoft 365/Office 365) and on Premise (2016, 2019).

» Start my free trial of SharePoint Connector for Confluence

Smart Attachments for Confluence

If once you decide to finally migrate your document library from Sharepoint to Confluence, the Smart Attachments for Confluence app is the first option to consider. It integrates with Confluence and allows you to create local file storages within your Confluence spaces.

For those of you who migrate from Sharepoint, you can just drop all your existing folders with files and internal folder structure, and the app will recreate this structure from scratch. So that you can preserve all your folder structures and files as you have them in your Sharepoint.

You can perform all the basic operations on folders and documents, keep document revisions, manage labels, or move them between folders of yours. What stands this app from others is that it closely integrates with Confluence itself, so as a result, you can preview all the files and documents, edit them with Atlassian Companion, embed them into Confluence pages, and, of course, comment on them. This greatly simplifies the end-user experience and reduces the number of context switches, which leads to better productivity of your team.

By default, the file storage is available to all Confluence users, and the availability of specific features is regulated by space permissions, so you needn’t adjust anything in your access control policies and go as is. The app also lets you perform non-trivial tasks, such as:

  • lock a specific document against edits while you are editing or reviewing it
  • restrict access to folders with sensitive information
  • share a folder with documents with some external users who do not have regular access to your Confluence, for example, when sharing assets with your customers.

To minimize the necessity to constantly switch to the file storage, you can embed specific folder structures into Confluence pages. This way, you can instantly view, edit, and upload documents from your Confluence pages without losing your current page context or interrupting your activities.

» Start my free trial of Smart Attachments for Confluence

Bring Sharepoint capabilities into Confluence

It is no longer a problem to show Sharepoint content in Confluence. As of now, you can consider two options:

Which option to choose? Try both options and then decide which better fits your needs. Have any questions? Leave your comment and we will reply to you shortly.

Choosing the Right LMS for Your Team

February 9, 2021
#Confluence#Learning Management
14 min

Today, when coronavirus puts a spotlight on remote working, a lot of companies show interest in eLearning. If your organization wants to build a remote learning environment, it’s crucial to find a user-focused solution that will not only correspond to the company’s business needs but will help you create top-notch training for the team, partners, and customers.

Remote-friendly companies of all sizes use different software to manage their tasks, communicate, and structure their work, including Confluence. Confluence is a shared workspace that allows teams to create, discuss, and share content. You can power up this software with different apps depending on your needs. For example, it can work as a learning management system.

Since we want you to have your options open, we’ll feature both Confluence apps and standalone tools that can help you create and deliver training courses:

Here is a brief summary of all the solutions we will describe in detail.

So if you are looking for more opportunities to improve your employee training, let’s learn a bit more about how you can deliver and track your online learning.

Google Classroom

This free solution can be a perfect match for those who already use other Google Workspace products. You need a Google Workspace account to create and manage content. The great thing is that you can use any existing Google document as a training material without fuss, be it a Google Sheet, Slide, or Form.

The Classroom helps you make the most of G Suit products when it comes to interaction between teachers and students. For example, you can perform face-to-face training with the help of integration with Google Hangouts and create quizzes using Google Forms.

The familiar and easy-to-use interface lets you start working without any problems. Just note that you need to create accounts in Google Workspace to access all the capabilities of Google Classroom.

It’s difficult to name the Classroom a full-fledged LMS since you can’t create courses or get extensive reporting on your students’ results. However, it’s a powerful platform for interaction between students and educators where they can share materials and stay in touch from school/university, from home, or on the move.

The Classroom is free to use.

izi – LMS for Confluence

Having an LMS in Confluence enables unlimited opportunities for eLearning right in Confluence. You can create courses and quizzes right after its installation. The great news for Confluence admins is that it works out of the box.

izi LMS app allows you to repurpose Confluence content and use existing pages for your training courses. It’s especially handy if you use Confluence as a knowledge base and have many pages with important information. You can structure this useful content as training modules, chunking all the information into digestible bites to ensure that users pass the course step by step.

If you need to perform a knowledge check or pre-employment testing, you can take advantage of quizzes right in Confluence. It’s a good idea to add quizzes to courses to reinforce the knowledge acquired by participants. Moreover, this app lets you reuse existing quizzes or just use them separately.

The Learning portal is one click away from the Confluence menu bar, it provides users with a bird’s eye view of their training progress and allows them to quickly access courses and quizzes. Learners do not need to switch between Confluence and a third-party LMS, they can find all the materials right in Confluence.

You can share courses and quizzes with existing Confluence users or people outside your Confluence. You do not need to pay extra for course participants without Confluence accounts. Course administrators have reports for tracking participants’ progress and course completion.

izi LMS is available for Confluence Cloud, Data Center, and Server. Your team will rapidly get a handle on how to create and take courses and quizzes because they already are familiar with the user interface in Confluence.

You can check the capabilities of the LMS in Confluence during a free 30-day trial.

Gilly – LMS app for Confluence

Another app that can power up your Confluence with courses is Gilly – LMS app for Confluence. This multifunctional solution is an integration of EduBrite LMS with Confluence. It helps you turn Confluence into LMS with the help of macros. You do not need to create accounts for your Confluence users because they automatically get EduBrite accounts when they start a course.

This app meets practically all of your training needs ranging from a robust knowledge base you can build to certification programs you can create by yourself.

Gilly is a free app that requires integration with EduBrite. This means that you will need a paid EduBrite account. Before using the app in Confluence, your Confluence administrator needs to perform additional configuration of the Gilly app. Only after that, you can create courses in EduBrite. Then you need to add them to your learning dashboard in Confluence.

Courses can contain multiple modules with several sections you can navigate with the help of buttons on the screen.

his app is available for Confluence Cloud, Server, and Data Center. You can check its capabilities during a free 14-day trial.

LearnUpon

Probably this solution has every possible feature you can think of when we speak about learning management systems. For example, it provides integration with Zapier and other tools to help users connect their LMS with CRM, webinar software, payment gateway, and more. Moreover, you can even sell courses and training created with the help of LearnUpon.

You can find many use cases described in the LearnUpon blog and discover a lot about how to adjust your existing processes to online classes and courses.

With LearnUpon, users can access a dashboard with the essential information about their courses, achievements, and live sessions.

You can create remote training and onsite classes in a blink of an eye. This app allows you to take advantage of gamification elements to better motivate and engage your teammates in the learning process.

This solution has no integration with Confluence. It has even more capabilities than a user needs, so it’s a good idea to give this app a fair 7-day free trial before you decide to purchase it.

How to choose your LMS

Obviously, your choice of the right LMS for your team will depend on your requirements and use cases.

For Confluence users:

  • izi – LMS for Confluence is for teams that want to work and learn without switching between different tools using Confluence. With this app, you can take advantage of existing Confluence content and reuse it for your courses. You will save your team time and effort because the UI of the app will be familiar to Confluence users.
  • Gilly – LMS app for Confluence can be a good fit for you if you are already using EduBrite and your company starts using Confluence. You can also choose this app if you do not want to mix your existing Confluence documentation with training materials. In this case, you can store courses right in EduBrite.

For those looking for standalone solutions:

  • If you need software that will help you keep in touch with your students and perform remote training, Google Classroom can work for you. It can also be useful for small teams with a low budget.
  • You can take advantage of LearnUpon since this learning management system is tailored to the needs of companies that want to level up their learning process.

Confluence Cloud for Product Teams Webinar

January 18, 2021
#News#Confluence#How To
2 min

Atlassian Confluence is a leading collaboration platform for teams of any size and specialization. More and more companies are revealing the potential of Confluence Cloud and are engaging teams to collaborate more efficiently between each other.

Unfortunately, the learning path for some teams becomes quite tricky due to the lack of time and a variety of macros available in Confluence Cloud. So they are using just the editor with the minimal set of functionality.

Anyway, not every team can reveal the potential and hidden capabilities of Confluence Cloud at once. It usually takes from 6 to 12 months before the team adjusts all the page templates, establishes the structure of their spaces, and elaborates the requirements for content management within them.

To accelerate this process, we have prepared the webinar to outline all the essential steps and action items you need to take to build a dream space for your coolest product team.

During the webinar you will learn how to do the following:

  1. create the product team dashboard
  2. manage product documentation
  3. collect customer feedback
  4. plan new versions
  5. track meetings, decisions, tasks, and requirements
  6. manage weekly status reports
  7. … and many more

Start browsing through the Confluence Cloud documentation and then book your seat while they are still available. We have compressed and revamped all the best approaches to manage and organize content in spaces and design the space which you will love.

Related posts

Two-Minute How-To: Exporting Tables in Confluence Cloud

December 17, 2020
#How To#Confluence Tutorial#Confluence
3 min

In this short blog post, we’ll tell you why Confluence users have to export their reports and how to do it as effectively as possible.

How to export Confluence tables for further processing

Sometimes you may need to pass your Confluence tables to some other data processing programs. The easiest way is to use the Table Filter macro and its Export to CSV feature.

Now you can upload the result .csv file to any database you want.

How to share Confluence reports with your customers

You may also need to share your reports with your customers. The problem is that they don’t have access to your corporate Confluence instance. But a specific part of your report needs their review, so they somehow need to read it.

You can use the Table Filter macro for this task. Just set the required filters in the view page mode and export your table in the .pdf format.

As you can see in the screenshot, you export the filtered table (not the original one), so your customers won’t see irrelevant and sensitive data. Besides, they won’t be able to make accidental changes to the report and compromise your company.

How to share Confluence tables with your partners

If you want to send your report to your partners, you can use the Table Filter macro as well. Filter your table, hide unnecessary columns to make the report readable, and use the Export to Word feature.

The result table will be clear and easy to navigate. Your partners will be able to make any changes they need and combine your data with their own in the joint Word document.

In this post, we’ve shown the filtering, hiding, and exporting options using the quick inline filtration (or live filtration, as you may call it). You can read how to enable this feature in our previous Two-Minute How-to blog post about filtering tables in Confluence Cloud.

Try Table Filter and Charts for Confluence Cloud for free