confluence

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

Case Study: How BMW AG Uses Talk for Atlassian Confluence

October 16, 2018
#Collaboration#Case Study
6 min

BMW Group relies heavily on enterprise-ready, robust and mature software to fulfill highest quality standards. Creating comprehensive technical documentation for our worldwide retailer organisation is a very important part to support all business processes aiming for an extraordinary customer experience.

Adding Talk to our Confluence instance is a giant step forward in achieving a smooth and frictionless review within the authoring process.

Michael Merwald

BMW AG, our customer, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of automobiles and motorcycles (BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce brands). This global company operates 30 production and assembly facilities in 14 countries worldwide. Being one of the oldest carmakers in the industry, BMW AG manufactures sophisticated vehicles and sets trends in production technology.

Integrated Service Process Initiative (ISPI Next) is a multi-department project of BMW AG that unites more than 300 employees. Development of all service deliverables for the worldwide BMW Group retail organisation and third parties, e.g. hardware, software, processes, support, training and documentation is the main objective of this project.

The ISPI Next team uses Atlassian Confluence to create, distribute, upgrade, and review all corresponding technical documentation. The team of the project decided to power up Confluence with the Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app to improve collaboration between authors and reviewers of the content they create.

Collaborative authoring

The authoring community of the project can easily access the comments created with the help of the Talk app while editing and revising their text. All discussions are available both in the view and edit modes that helps the team facilitate their work on the content.

discussion in Confluence in page edit mode

 

The capability to work with comments during collaborative text editing allows them to point out relevant documentation parts among each other to edit or extend those towards a comprehensive body of knowledge.

Ensuring high quality documentation

During creation of their technical documentation, the ISPI Next team relies on peer review to enhance documentation quality upfront. Talk enables them to do so including their specific requirements meeting the BMW Group Quality Goals.

They can prioritize comments to help their colleagues tackle the talks by priority and focus on what matters for the team at the moment.

high priority discussion in Confluence

 

This useful feature helps them improve their review process and structure their work with Confluence content. Now all the team members can quickly look through all the talks to find the ones that require immediate attention.

Reporting

To support the release cycles of ISPI Next, the team uses the Talk Report to manage the scope of review comments and get a detailed report of which improvements found their way into documentation.

The project manager and also teams can easily get an overview of all the comments within a space to clearly identify what is done and what needs action at the moment.

overview of all the comments within a Confluence space

This way the Talk report helps the document responsible people locate the talks without mentions and make sure that the comments assigned to their team members will be resolved as soon as possible.

Challenges and benefits

The Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app makes reviewing technical documentation a breeze for the ISPI Next team of BMW AG. This solution allows them to easily:

  • Add and review comments both while viewing and editing the content;
  • Prioritize discussions to draw their colleagues’ attention to the urgent issues;
  • View all the list of all comments (open and resolved) within a space.

This solution helps the ISPI Next team and other Talk users save time and effort while working on their content in Confluence.

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    Tricky Restrictions or Useful Tips For a Novice Confluence Administrator

    October 9, 2018
    #How To#Confluence
    7 min

    Confluence is a wiki software that has proved to be one of the leading solutions for team collaboration on the market. Often used by technical teams, this powerful tool allows you to create product documentation, share tech specs, create various task lists, and engage your colleagues in active discussions of your content. Moreover, Confluence integrates tightly with other Atlassian products to gear up your business process to an advanced level.

    We continue our blog post series related to some tricky and non-obvious moments of Confluence permission management. We have already showed you what to do if you are a newbie and eager to master Confluence as well as revealed some tricky but useful tips:

    In this blog post, you will discover how to troubleshoot a common problem with page restrictions.

    Issue overview

    Assume you are a novice Confluence administrator in a large company. Your colleagues from the technical department complain they do not have access to the Bubble Gumball and Lollipops with Chewing Gum pages in the Sweet Factory space.

    space restrictions in Confluence

    You know that this space is a working place for the management department. But two month ago they worked on the project together with the engineers from the technical department and ‘opened’ several pages for them. At first everything was just fine but now these new pages of the Sweet Factory space are not visible to the engineers. You need to solve the problem.

    Solution

    In dealing with such cases it is important to move from the upper levels of the permission hierarchy to the lower ones: from global permissions to space permissions and, finally, page restrictions.

    At the global level we can see that the ‘confluence-users’ group has the ‘Can Use’ permission. We know that all company employees belong to this default group (including engineers). But this permission is about logging in to Confluence and not about access to the certain pages of a certain space. So let’s move further.

    space restrictions in Confluence

    At the space level we can see that the ‘engineers’ group has the ‘Can View’ permission. It allows you to access the entire space not separate Confluence pages. So it’s not our case.

    space restrictions in Confluence

    Our problem is related to page restrictions. Page restrictions help you lock any pages within a space. This means that you can easily choose groups and users that can view or edit the page. Unlisted groups or users won’t have such capability.

    And here is a tricky moment: view restrictions are inherited. If any group or user can’t see the certain page, make sure that there is no view restriction at a higher level of the page tree hierarchy.

    space restrictions in Confluence

    We have the following situation:

    • The managers created the pages Chocolate and Caramel and restricted access to them with the help of view restrictions.
    • The managers created the pages Gum and Jelly Beans without restrictions.
    • Soon the managers populated these branches with several child pages.

    Such pages as Bubble Gumball or Lollipops with Chewing Gum are related to the Gum project that remains available for the technical department. But the managers created them under the parent page called Caramel. They didn’t apply any restrictions and thought that these pages were accessible to everybody.

    But we can see that there are inherited view restrictions from the parent Caramel page.

    space restrictions in Confluence

    There are two simple ways to solve the problem:

    1. Remove restrictions from the parent Caramel page. But be aware that in this case the technical department will be able to access the Caramel and Lollipops pages as well.
    2. Move the Bubble Gumball and Lollipops with Chewing Gum pages to the non-restricted Gum branch.

    space restrictions in Confluence

    Time to learn more!

    You may think that everything about Confluence permissions is easy and understandable. And it is so if you read blog posts like this with short clear explanations and descriptive screen shots. But in real life, as a Confluence administrator, you’ll have to deal with a bunch of different issues simultaneously. Especially when your Confluence instance has hundreds of spaces with thousands of pages.

    Now you have a perfect way to successfully get started with Confluence – welcome to our free ‘Advanced Permission and Security Management in Atlassian Confluence’ training course!

    Our new training course is related to the permission management in Confluence. It will be useful for novice and active Confluence administrators, for Space administrators and power-users who want to become administrators themselves.

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      10X Your Performance in Confluence With 10 StiltSoft Apps

      August 22, 2018
      #Confluence
      15 min

      Atlassian Confluence is a content management software that lets you get more done keeping your work organized. This team collaboration platform helps you get an immediate access to the information you are looking for because everything you could possibly need to create great content is in one place. Confluence allows you to easily create, update, and share content with your colleagues making this solution ideal for teams of all sizes and specializations. But there’s always room for improvement, right?

      The Atlassian Marketplace offers almost 1,000 handy solutions to improve Confluence capabilities and take your team collaboration on project documents and files to the next level.

      In this post, we will highlight 10 useful apps from StiltSoft you can use to enhance your productivity, stay focused, and do the best work you can.

      For Confluence Server:

      For Confluence Server, Cloud and Data Center:

      Here’s how these apps can help you get most out of your Confluence.

      Effectively collaborate with your team

      Talk – Advanced Inline Comments

      You can easily add inline comments to your content in Confluence when you want to discuss a page or blog post with your team. However, native inline comments are available only in the view mode. Moreover, everyone who has access to the page will see the comments you add.

      Talk – Advanced Inline Comments helps you add more powerful inline comments anywhere on the page, both while editing and viewing the page content. You can also restrict access to specific talks for appropriate users or groups making your conversation private, prioritize discussions, and use the Talk report to have a bird’s eye view of all the discussions spread over multiple pages in the space.

      Try Talk – Advanced Inline Comments free

      Smart Attachments

      Sharing files and project documents in Confluence might be a challenging task. Have you ever thought about how to categorize and group your files in Confluence? We already did.

      The Smart Attachments app provides you with a new way to keep all you project files in the centralized space storage. Now you can create separate folders for the group of files, easily use the already uploaded documents, and quickly integrate them into your Confluence pages.

      Try Smart Attachments free

      Handy Macros

      If you want to make your content more appealing and interactive, you can try our Handy Macros app. It is a comprehensive set of ready-to-use tools for your Confluence site.

      You can create your own statuses and switch from one status to another on the fly right in the page view mode. Handy Macros also allows you to keep the track of your tasks and events with the Handy Page Diff macro, the Handy Reminder macro, the Handy Tasks macro, and the Handy Timestamp macro. This app helps you add attractive image and video carousels for capturing attention of visitors using the Handy Carousel macro, and more.

      Try Handy Macros free

      No Email Storm

      No Email Storm is an app that can be a life saver for those who forget to uncheck the Notify Watchers button when saving minor changes and bother your teammates with tons of notifications.

      After installation of this add-on, you will see the Update & Notify button next to the Update button instead of the Notify Watchers checkbox. This way you can click Update if you just want to save changes without notifying the page watcher, or click Update & Notify to share the information about what has been changed.

      Download No Email Storm free

      Turn your Confluence pages into something more

      Table Filter and Charts

      Table Filter and Charts is a must-have app that provides you with exceptional functionality of Confluence tables making them much more usable. Now you use flexible and powerful filters to easily find the required information relevant to your current goals. Moreover, you can get a comprehensive insight into your table data and transform it into a visually-readable format.

      With the help of the Table Filter macro you can quickly filter dates and number ranges, icons and images, and more. The Pivot Table macro allows you to summarize large sets of data and easily manipulate data series in the realtime mode using your source tables. When you use the Chart from Table macro, you can generate visual-appealing charts and graphs built from tables.

      Try Table Filter and Charts free

      Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence

      Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence helps you build quizzes, tests, and training courses on the fly right in Confluence. With the help of this app you can assess knowledge and skills of your job applicants, create tests for onboarding of new-hires, or set up training courses for employee training.

      You get a learning management tool that helps you design educational courses, entertaining and fun quizzes. You can track participants’ progress in quiz reports and get statistics on the easiest and the hardest questions. Moreover, you can share quizzes and training course with anyone by email.

      Try Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence free

      Save time on content creation

      Favorite Pages

      With the Favorite Pages app the pages you need are just a click away. This app provides you with a quick access to your top visited pages in Confluence. You can assign hotkeys to the pages you want to open ever quicker.

      This add-on allows you to open the inline list of your top visited and saved for later pages anytime you need it. By default the list of your top visited pages continuously updates. However, you can lock the pages you want to keep on the list.

      Try Favorite Pages free

      InPlace Editor

      InPlace Editor is a simple tool that makes editing large and complex pages quick and easy. This app shows the Edit icon next to the heading titles so you can switch to section editing right in the page view mode.

      You can set the global or space specific configuration of heading levels enabled for editing or allow inclusion of adjacent sections with headings of lower levels.

      This app also allows you to copy the link to a specific paragraph/heading within a page.

      Try InPlace Editor free

      Resume

      You can try all these Confluence apps for free to choose the ones that suit your needs best. They are designed to help you communicate better with your team, get things done more efficiently, create appealing content, and boost your overall productivity in Confluence

      To get more information about our solutions for Atlassian products you are more than welcome to check out all our apps on the Atlassian Marketplace.

      If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post below. Tell us more about your favorite Confluence apps.

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        The ‘izi – LMS for Confluence’ App Came to Cloud

        August 9, 2018
        #Learning Management
        3 min

        We brought one more of our apps for Atlassian Confluence into Cloud – izi – LMS for Confluence.

        The Server version of the Confluence LMS app has been available on the Atlassian Marketplace for almost three years. It is now a solid product that turns Confluence into a learning management system. The Server app allows you to create tests for checking knowledge, skills, and understanding; as well as training courses for employee and customer education.

        We’ve recently released the Cloud version of izi – LMS app. Now Cloud users can also extend their Confluence to organize education and learning inside the wiki.

        With izi – LMS for Confluence you can:

        • create courses and assign them both to Confluence and non-Confluence users
        • create stand-alone quizzes or make them a part of your course
        • access the Learning portal – one-stop-shop for training management
        • track participants’ progress over the training and export the results to CSV

        Compared to the Server edition, the Cloud app has limited functionality. However, we are doing our best to make the Cloud version of our app even more powerful, taking into account the feedback from our customers.

        Read more about how your team can turn your Confluence into a standalone learning management system and power up employee training:

        Try izi – LMS for Confluence Cloud (For free)

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          A Useful Hack to Quickly Make Your Confluence Space Read-Only

          August 18, 2017
          #Confluence#How To
          5 min

          Confluence became today’s way to keep your information all in one place, share ideas, and take decisions together with your team. It is getting more and more popular among modern enterprises all over the world. The more team members in your company use it, the more profit you receive. Because Confluence facilitates collaboration and knowledge sharing across the entire organization.

          Companies use Confluence for different purposes. The most popular are:

          • Intranet site – to collaborate on the projects within the company;
          • Extranet site – to use it as a public documentation portal to share information with the customers.

          We have already written a blog post about how to start your successful Confluence experience. This time we want to show you an easy way to make your space read-only for your colleagues without changing the global permissions. Let’s see what we are talking about.

          Permissions in Confluence

          Confluence offers three-level permissions structure that allows you to choose the actions users can perform:

          • Global Permissions refer to the actions in Confluence at a site level;
          • Space Permissions determine your actions in the particular space;
          • Page Restrictions allow you to control who can view and edit your page in Confluence.

          Confluence system administrator can edit the global permissions: grant permissions to individual users, user groups, or even to anonymous users. Note that if your system administrator opens viewing to anonymous users, you lose the ability to choose who you want to share your content with.

          space permissions in Confluence

          We will show you the way a space administrator can set up a read-only access for the space using the anonymous access in the space permissions when the anonymous access in the global permissions is turned off. But first let’s see the usual way to limit access to a space for Confluence users.

          How administrators usually do it

          For example, we have a space called ‘Internal Rules and Regulations’. We need to set up the following permissions:

          • all employees from different Confluence groups can view the space;
          • the ‘top-management’ group and system administrator can view and edit this space.

          All Confluence users are added to the ‘confluence-users’ group by default and have access to all spaces. By default they can view and edit information in spaces.

          In our case the system administrator deleted a standard ‘confluence-users’ group because he uses the external user directory to manage Confluence users. For that reason we have different user groups for all departments of the company.

          So we need to add each user group to the space permissions. We go to the space directory, choose our space called ‘Internal Rules and Regulations’, open the space permissions, and manually add all the groups to the space permissions.

          space restrictions in Confluence

          It wasn’t difficult but a bit tiresome. The good news is that we know a quicker way to fulfill this task.

          An alternative approach to make your space read-only

          We will change only the space permissions without editing the global permissions.

          We go to the space permissions, add only the ‘top-managers’ group, and turn on the view permission for anonymous users. Anonymous users outside the company can’t view this space because global anonymous ‘Use Confluence’ permission is turned off.

          anonymous access Confluence

          We receive the same effect like in the first example. All licensed Confluence users except the ‘top-managers’ group have a read-only access to this space.

          It is an alternative way to manage your space permission in one click with no need to edit global permissions. It helps you to avoid mistakes and quickly show your space to all users without making a mess in the permission set. To prevent the leak of your data, make sure that the anonymous access in the global permissions is turned off.

          To stay tuned, subscribe for email notifications about new posts in our blog (enter your email in the ‘Newsletter’ section on the sidebar).

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

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            Atlassian Certification: Steps to Get Certified

            July 12, 2017
            #How To#News
            1 min

            StiltSoft has successfully passed Atlassian certification this year. We have confirmed our Atlassian Solution Partner status (former Atlassian Experts status). It was an interesting and, of course, challenging experience we want to share.

            If you are an experienced Atlassian administrator, it is high time to move to a new level and become an Atlassian Certified Administrator (ACP). This formal assessment from Atlassian confirms your skills and helps you join the elite group of Atlassian professionals.

            We have already studied this topic down to the very last detail. We will tell you why every Atlassian administrator should get certified in 2017.

            This blog post will highlight the key aspects of the Atlassian certification process.

            Continue reading “Atlassian Certification: Steps to Get Certified”

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