confluence

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How Bright Solutions GmbH Runs Internal Learning in Confluence with izi LMS app

May 24, 2019
#Confluence#Case Study#Learning Management
4 min

This plugin is a great tool to organize and measure all our internal learning. It helped us to identify quickly based on quiz results which people need additional education. Thanks a lot for this great tool and your support!

Bright Solutions GmbH

Our client Bright Solutions GmbH is a German full-service digital agency offering hybrid teams (mix of local and virtual teams) for various projects including Web, App, Cloud, Drupal and Java development. Their Project Operations team uses izi LMS – for Confluence for internal learning – onboarding of new people, teaching new processes and knowledge sharing.

Evaluate Readiness after Onboarding

The company prepared quizzes for new hires, which helps to determine how successful their onboarding was. Quiz questions cover all the important areas of a new job and processes screening the level of employee readiness. With quiz results, a manager decides if a person can start their work or needs further education.

quiz in Confluence

Check Understanding of New Processes

When the team changes major processes, they create learning material and quizzes for all the engaged employees to study and complete. It is important to make sure everyone is aware of a change and is all set for adjustments. Just like with onboarding, quiz results are used for tracking who passed (demonstrated ability to operate in a new way) and failed (needs to go through learning material one more time with focus on certain aspects).

Sharing Knowledge and Experience with Colleagues

Knowledge sharing is another facet of internal learning in Bright Solutions GmbH. When team members discover new things or have individual learning, the team creates survey-like quizzes to find out if others already faced similar problems. If so, they work out some learning materials and make them available for everyone.

This approach lets an employee find out if their experience and findings are of interest before actually spending time on creating content for knowledge transfer.

Try LMS in Confluence for Your Internal Learning

Bright Solutions GmbH uses an app to add learning management functions into Confluence. The team creates learning material and quizzes in Confluence to be certain new people successfully complete their onboarding, educate employees about changes in key processes, and carry out an exchange of team and individual knowledge.

The company is about to extend their usage of the app and start creating courses for these use cases and more.

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    Document Management in Atlassian Confluence

    February 21, 2019
    #Document management#How To#Confluence
    5 min

    Atlassian Confluence is known as one of the best team-collaboration platforms on the enterprise market. Structured organization of pages, as well as real-time collaboration on content, allow people to instantly streamline their ideas, discuss updates with colleagues, and adjust solutions on the fly.

    Having such powerful tools and great features, Confluence has one major flaw. It is the retention of documents and attachments in the application. There is no centralized interface to keep attachments. When you start a new project, you deal with hundreds of files and project artifacts that are created throughout the project life cycle. The main problem is that every new document can be attached to the inappropriate page. After some time, this leads to fragmentation of attachments across spaces, and it becomes more and more difficult to find the necessary file.

    Centralized Storage for Documents and Files

    The Smart Attachments for Confluence app allows you to forget about file fragmentation and improve the document searchability in Confluence. This tool allows you to have a space storage for keeping project documents and files in one place and in the structure you want.

    This gives you sufficient tools for document management and control in Confluence. First of all, you can upload multiple folders with documents and files into the space storage. The app will automatically re-create the structure of folders in the target space storage and save documents under the corresponding folders. This way you can quickly move all your project files from your Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box account to Confluence where all your colleagues can instantly see and use them.

    uploading structure of folders and files in Confluence

    Embedding Folders and Documents into Confluence pages

    To collaborate on documents, you can embed distinct files and entire folders into Confluence pages. All you need to do is to copy the embed code and paste it on the page. After saving the page, Confluence will render a document or folder on the page.

    attachments in Confluence

    When embedding folders, you can freely navigate within this folder and its sub-folders without leaving a Confluence page.

    Reviewing and Editing Documents

    Embedding documents into Confluence pages allows you and your colleagues to collaborate on documents, discuss updates and changes in them, as well as edit them with the Atlassian Companion app.

    While reviewing files, you can add notes on documents pages and images. This way you can request a series of modifications in the document from your colleague.

    reviewing and saving documents in Confluence

    These modifications can be added into the document on the fly through the Atlassian Companion app. This way you can keep the entire history of modifications in the document, as the Smart Attachments app will preserve the document revisions in the space storage.

    Document Control in Confluence

    Document management in Confluence can be a simple and easy task with Smart Attachments for Confluence. Get rid of file fragmentation and locate your project files always in one place.

    Start a free trial of Smart Attachments for Confluence

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      Year in Review: The Most-Read Blog Posts of 2018

      December 28, 2018
      #News
      11 min

      2018 is almost over – so it’s high time for us to look back and review the most popular topics of the year highlighted in our blog. This is the last blog post of the year and we do hope that over the past 12 months you’ve learned something new and interesting from the articles we posted every week.

      You can check the five most-read articles of 2017 that caught your attention more than any others last year. So what were the most popular posts of 2018? Here is the list of the topics that trended in our blog:

      1. Collaboration on Backlog With External Users in Jira
      2. 9 Confluence Best Practices Your Users Should Know
      3. Calendar of Atlassian Events 2018
      4. How to Create Education Courses Right in Confluence
      5. 5 New Confluence Apps to Level Up Your Productivity – Fourth Quarter 2017

      1. Collaboration on Backlog With External Users in Jira

      The blog post about how to give external users visibility into your work stream in Jira leads the list of the most-read articles of this year. We described various ways you can use to collaborate on projects with your customers, partners or colleagues that do not have an account in Jira. Making each customer a Jira user is not a very scalable solution.

      So what to choose from?

      custommer support portal Jira

      Each solution has its pros and cons, so it’s up to you to decide which of the suggested options to choose.

      2. 9 Confluence Best Practices Your Users Should Know

      The guest blog post written by Balkis Khouni, an Atlassian certified consultant at Valiantys, takes the second place in our chart. Confluence is a useful team collaboration tool with an intuitive interface, but a good place to start is with the nine best practices for effective communication and information sharing outlined by Valiantys.

      Here is a brief overview of the nine Confluence best practices suggested by Valiantys:

      1. Identify the list of spaces you need to create
      2. Take the time to define your page structure
      3. Use page templates
      4. Increase productivity by using Confluence macros
      5. Organize your attachments
      6. Avoid redundant content
      7. Label your content
      8. Grant permissions wisely
      9. Train Confluence users to adopt best practices

      3. Calendar of Atlassian Events 2018

      This year we created the calendar of Atlassian events to help our users get organized because sometimes it can be hard to find all the events hosted by Atlassian vendors in one place. For example, in 2018 Atlassian announced the first-ever world tour of Atlassian team both in Europe and USA. We have great news for you because they will repeat this success in 2019 introducing the enterprise edition of the tour.

      Moreover, Atlassian users can always find something interesting participating in local Atlassian events organized by such vendors as catWorkX, Meta-INF, DEISER, eazyBI, Valiantys.

      Atlassian events

      We will definitely make a list of the upcoming Atlassian events of 2019. So stay tuned not to miss important events of Atlassian ecosystem.

      4. How to Create Education Courses Right in Confluence

      The next blog post looks at one of the most efficient ways to create education courses in Confluence. It describes the handy features of Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence.

      This app allows you create training courses, various quizzes for you employees and customers providing them with the opportunity to take courses in Confluence at their own pace from the comfort of their own desk using the UI they are familiar with.

      You can populate your course with YouTube videos, images, PDF files, and more to keep it interesting and hold everybody’s attention. The best thing is that you can educate your team members or participants who are not Confluence users.

      5. 5 New Confluence Apps to Level Up Your Productivity – Fourth Quarter 2017

      The fifth place goes to our digest article listing new apps for Confluence that appeared on the Atlassian Marketplace in the fourth quarter of 2017. Here are some details of how these apps work.

      That’s it, these are our five most popular blogs of this year.

      The StiltSoft team wants to thank you for reading our articles, sharing and subscribing. Please, let us know more about the topics you want to find in our blog. Please, feel free to comment below.

      We wish you all the best in 2019. Have a healthy and prosperous New Year!

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        Self-Directed Employee Education in Confluence That Really Works

        November 29, 2018
        #Confluence#Learning Management
        8 min

        The greatest products and services require the best team behind them, otherwise, it can be difficult to operate the business successfully. But even if you’ve hired the best, it is important to maintain the level of their skills paying attention to their training, development, and motivation. Employees that are constantly learning and improving expertise in their profession can stay at the top of the game.

        Traditionally, most workplaces carry out the majority of learning and development through various training courses, workshops, and seminars with a teacher or instructor. These days, less traditional methods of knowledge sharing gain in popularity – we are talking about self-directed education (SDE) when people develop their skills at their own pace.

        Of course, self-directed education can be challenging, but at the same time, it allows employees to choose the learning style that best suits them on an individual level and helps them plan their time properly. SDE gives employees the freedom to choose the way they want to study when it fits in their working schedule:

        • They can choose to study in a quiet room or in a shared space.
        • They can choose to work with a partner or independently.
        • They can choose what they want to learn searching for the appropriate training course.

        Encouraging SDE in Confluence gives your employees the opportunity to take courses at their convenience building the education program themselves with the help of the courses a learning administrator created in Confluence. This freedom of choice allows employees to maintain a balance between feeling comfortable and trying new things.

        In this blog post, you will discover how to build the foundation of successful self-directed employee training that will provide your team with lasting results. We will show you how to turn your Confluence into an LMS where you can store courses and quizzes to train or educate your team, employees, or customers with the help of izi – LMS for Confluence.

        Turning Confluence into Learning Management System

        Previously, we told you how to create education courses right in Confluence. As a learning administrator, you can create a training course using videos, GIFs, images, PDF files, and more to diversify the content. The app allows you to populate courses with useful training modules and tricky quizzes. You can even reuse materials from other courses or take advantage of your existing Confluence pages’ content.

        So once you have created a new training course, you need to fine-tune it and make it accessible for your team. Now you can easily categorize your course, upload the featured image that illustrates the main idea of the course, briefly describe it, and add it to the Learning catalog (available in the Confluence header menu).

        turn Confluence into learning management system

        Now users can access the Learning catalog with one click, browse through all the categories, and self-enroll into the course they want to take.

        Self-Directed Employee Education in Confluence

        Moreover, you can track all the courses you were enrolled in. You can access the list of your active courses by clicking your profile picture and choosing the Courses tab. This way you can continue from where you stopped last time or review the information you already know.

        Course administrators can choose who can see a new course in the Learning catalog: no one (by default), anyone, only logged-in users, or selected Confluence user groups.

        LMS in Confluence

        A learning administrator can easily monitor and evaluate the results of all the participants:

        • check their progress looking through the modules they completed
        • view their answers to the embedded quizzes quickly switching between users
        • create custom course reports based on their needs

        take a quiz in Confluence

        Create your first training course in Confluence

        Remember that your employees are an investment in your business. So it is important to support them and help them enhance their skills.

        Try izi – LMS for Confluence for free to keep your team up to date with relevant skills and offer new hires a smooth and simple onboarding. This app will help you contribute to building a learning culture in your company providing your employees with limitless training opportunities right in Confluence.

        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.

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          Is Something Wrong with Permissions? Switch User!

          November 6, 2018
          #How To#Confluence
          6 min

          Confluence is a handy tool for team collaboration due to its flexible system of permissions and restrictions which can be applied to every piece of your content.

          We’ve already covered some life-hacks related to the settings of permission management in Confluence in our recent blog posts:

          Today we start a new blog post series featuring the most useful Confluence apps that help you master your Confluence permission and security management skills. We’ll cover some of the top apps from the Atlassian Marketplace.

          In this blog post, you will learn about the SU for Confluence app that helps administrators quickly troubleshoot issues their users have. Check out why this app may come in handy for your Confluence instance.

          Common issue

          As a system or Confluence administrator you deal with a lot of issues your users report:

          • restricted access to some Confluence pages;
          • error messages during some operations;
          • problems with Confluence macros, and more.

          Moreover, sometimes users can’t explain what exactly is wrong.

          Besides different user issues, a significant part of the administrator job is to create new user accounts or update somebody’s permissions. You are always check if everything is configured in a proper way.

          You can’t deny that it is always better to see the issue yourself, fix it and verify that everything works just fine after your manipulations. But here comes the problem: you need to log in to a user account constantly. It appears to be time consuming and rather annoying. Besides you need to ask for a user password. Obviously, it isn’t good for the security policy. Of course, you may reset a user password but it’ll prevent him or her from using Confluence until everything is done.

          For such cases we recommend you to use the SU for Confluence app from The Plugin People. It allows you to quickly access account of any Confluence user and effectively troubleshoot their problems with no need to log out. You can just see everything as the user does but you don’t need to ask for or reset a user password.

          Let’s see how it works.

          The SU for Confluence app

          The name of the app reminds us of the UNIX or Linux Switch User command with a similar function. And it is not a coincidence.

          You can easily trigger the SU inline dialog:

          • Use the g+u shortcut on any page and choose the required user.

          • Open the administration console and click the SU button in the Users tab.

          • Enter the SU mode in the user details tab.

          By default only system administrator can switch user accounts. But you can grant access to Confluence administrator and specify other user groups that need the SU permission. Make sure to grant permissions to the trusted and competent users.

          Sometimes it can happen that one user can see more content (spaces or pages) while he or she is taking on the identity of another user. But, of course, anyone with the SU capability (even Confluence administrators) can’t switch to the account of system administrator. If you have several Confluence administrators, they can easily switch to each other’s accounts as they share the same level of permissions.

          The SU for Confluence app also allows you to find out who and when switched to this or that user.

          Time to learn more!

          This blog post is only the tip of the iceberg called Permission and Security Management in Confluence. For more details about internal Confluence settings and additional apps to empower Confluence permission management, we suggest you taking our free ‘Advanced Permission and Security Management in Atlassian Confluence’ training course! This course will be useful for novice Confluence administrators and power users who want to get a promotion and become Confluence administrators themselves.

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            Hidden Anonyms and Oblivious Admins in Atlassian Confluence

            October 23, 2018
            #How To#Confluence
            6 min

            Confluence is an all-in-one collaboration hub that a lot of companies all over the world consider a must-have tool for teamwork. Confluence allows you to create and edit documents, share plans, use task lists, form your own knowledge base for the teammates and customers. Confluence is also a perfect place for discussions, reviews, and feedback.

            So we continue our blog post series that can help you gain the insight about the inner workings of Confluence administration. This blog post as well as the posts listed below will be useful both for novice Confluence administrators and power users who want to become administrators themselves.

            Today we will show you some Confluence magic. We are ready to perform a trick with anonymous users in Confluence.

            Tricky issue

            Assume you are a new Confluence administrator and your first task is to understand why some users can view and comment the spaces they do not have access to.

            Your colleague, Molly Gibney, works in the HR department of your company and has no access to the Sweet Factory space. But the managers were surprised to find a lot of her comments in this space.

            First and foremost, you have to check how this issue looks like in the space your colleagues are talking about.

            confluence restrictions

            As you can see, Molly Gibney can easily comment the pages in the Sweet Factory space.

            Your second thought is that the previous administrator has accidentally added Molly to an inappropriate user group. You know that your company’s managers and engineers use this space for their current projects. So you navigate to the User Management tab.

            confluence restrictions

            But everything seems okay there: Molly Gibney belongs to the ‘confluence-users’ and ‘hr’ groups.

            The next idea is that the problem is somewhere at the space level. Maybe there was a mistake while allocating group and individual permissions for the ‘Sweet Factory’ space.

            confluence restrictions

            You open the space tools tab and see that all the permissions for the groups and individual users are allocated correctly.

            Now you have the last thing to check. If Molly has the System administrator permission at the global level, then everything is clear.

            confluence restrictions

            You happily navigate to the Global Permissions to find out that Molly Gibney has no individual permissions. And she is definitely not a member of the ‘confluence-administrators’ group (you’ve already checked it).

            What is it then? Magic?

            Unravelling the mystery

            If you think that the situation described above is a ‘bug’ and you need to contact Atlassian support, it is not the case. It is a so-called trick with anonymous users. If you disable anonymous access in Global Permissions but leave public access to the space enabled, anonymous users will not access the space but logged-in users without proper permissions will.

            If you check the previous screenshot with the Global Permissions tab once more, you’ll see that anonymous access is disabled globally. But if you return to the Space Permissions tab, you’ll see the following picture.

            space permissions in Confluence

            So all you need to do to solve the problem is to disable anonymous access at the space level.

            We illustrated the concept of anonymous access in Confluence for you to have a better understanding of how this works.

            anonymous access in Confluence

            Time to learn even more!

            We showed you only a small part of what you can do in Confluence. To broaden your knowledge, check out our brand new (and free!) ‘Advanced Permission and Security Management in Atlassian Confluence’ training course for Confluence administrators.

            This training course highlights the best practices and useful tricks of Confluence permission and security management. You will learn how to get started using tools that Confluence offers out of the box and discover the most popular apps that will help you power up your Confluence.

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