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Efficient Communication in Confluence

June 27, 2014

#Collaboration#Confluence

10 min

Communication has always been an essential part of the human life. The main result and objective of communication is exchange of information. Information is one of the main factors that stimulates human evolution and drives the mankind further. Information is one of the most precious things in our digital world, because when you have information you can conquer the entire world.

In this blog post, we will review the existing solutions that can help you to exchange messages with your colleagues in real time.

Today we will review handy tools for communication in Atlassian’s world of Confluence. Confluence has become a very popular platform for documentation management and quick communication and collaboration between different teams, for example, developers and technical writers. Confluence comes with a built-in system of comments that looks quite inefficient when you need real-time communication with your peers. You can use external communication applications, such as Skype, ICQ, P2P agents and so on. But all the time you need to switch between them and Confluence, which becomes rather distracting as a result.

You can also use the Atlassian’s native chat service – HipChat, which allows you to communicate with your teammates and colleagues in group chats and video chats.

Confluence Chat

Confluence Chat is a comfy solution that allows you to easily communicate with Confluence users in the dedicated chat dashboards. The main dashboard displays users that are currently logged in and who you can chat with now. Once you start conversation with a user – a separate dashboard opens at the footer of the page. You can open several dashboards for simultaneous communication with each user at a time. Once a new message comes from your peer, you will hear the corresponding sound, which can be disabled.

The dashboard with the chat works both when you view pages and edit them, the latter option can be disabled if you want. You can always view the chat history in your profile. Chat history can be viewed for the past day, week, month and year, you can also view the entire history if required.

You can define your status or collapse the dashboard if no longer needed. The add-on allows you to restrict usage of chat to the appropriate user groups and set space restrictions. If you do not work with Confluence for some time, your chat account is shown as ‘Away’.

The add-on is free, but, unfortunately, it does not support group chart, so it is more suitable for private conversations rather than team collaboration. Interface of the add-on is intuitive so it will not take more than several minutes to get around it and start using. It is an ideal solution for quick chat within small teams.

Pros

Free
Realtime chat
Intuitive Interface
Chat history
Sound notifications
Configuration options
Chat dashboard in view and edit modes

Cons

Impossibility to create a group chat
Impossibility to share files via chat

Wikistrat Private Messaging

Wikistrat Private Messaging is an enhanced version of built-in message sharing system available in Confluence. It deploys some sort of message exchange system, which resembles the usual email technology. Each user gets a box for incoming messages with indication of the recently received messages.

The user can quickly send messages to the appropriate user by clicking the icon on the toolbar. Once you receive a message from your peer, you get a notification on the toolbar. You can quickly open it and send a response. The add-on also allows you to view the entire list of peers who you already talked to. So then you can select the person you want to communicate with and send some message to him or her.

You can also view the overall chat history with the selected user or start a new converstion with other users.

Pros

Intuitive Interface
Realtime chat and individual messages
Chat history
Visual notifications

Cons

Impossibility to create a group chat
Impossibility to share files via chat
Paid add-on

Talk – Inline Comments for Confluence

Talk – Inline Comments for Confluence is not a chat engine in its essence, it is like a powerful commenting tool for quick team collaboration. Instead of realtime communication, it provides you with another way of interaction with your teammates. Talk gives you freedom to comment any text snippet on your Confluence pages and then discuss it with your teammates.

So it is an ideal solution for editors and technical writers and also for other people who work actively with documentation. The add-on allows you to put special placeholders while editing or viewing page contents, and then you can quickly add comments or requests, mention users, use wiki markup for styling and highlighting.

You can add talks while viewing or editing your pages, the talk appears on the page and your colleagues can instanty post replies or add comments.

The add-on also allows you to restrict access to some talks for the appropriate colleagues of yours. So you can discuss some things on the page with the narrow group of people or even add personal notes or remarks for yourself. Even the space administrator will not be able to view such talks.

You can always disable insertion of talks in the view mode by pressing the hotkey or selecting the corresponding option. You can also collapse the sidebar with talks when you need more room on the page. In the upcoming release the add-on will receive functionality of real-time talk update, so you wll get immediate talk updates when viewing Confluence pages. You can vote for this feature in our Feedback system.

Pros

Excellent inline comment tool
Intuitive Interface
Talk history
Adding talks in view and edit modes
Workbox and email notifications
Viewing restrictions
Wiki markup support and user mentions

Cons

Non-realtime communication tool
Impossibility to attach files
Paid add-on

Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel Tricks: Adding Info to the Page Header and Footer

March 25, 2014

#How To#Confluence

5 min

Edit long Confluence pages by parts with InPlace Editor. Check the demo and try for free.

If you ever wondered how to share some important info with all Confluence users, here’s the answer – try using headers and footers. You can rest assured that a message added to the header will be read by everyone who opens Confluence. And keeping stuff like useful links in the footer is more productive than searching for it in Confluence or in bookmarks.

Follow the steps below to try this out. Please, note that we assume that you’re using the standard theme on Confluence 5.4. Other themes have their own ways of customizing headers and footers. And the code we provide here can be slightly different for other Confluence versions.

Ok, let’s say we want to make some global warning for everyone working with Confluence. To do that, we need to go to Confluence Admin – Look&Feel – Custom HTML and add something like this to the At beginning of the BODY section:

<div>
    <p>
        <span></span>
        <strong>Hey guys!</strong>
    </p>
    <p>Confluence is going to be down from 4pm.</p>
</div>

Save the changes and see how it looks like in Confluence:

If you want to make the message look different from this example, you can choose various message styles in Atlassian AUI.

Being a less prominent part of a pafe than the header, the footer can, however, contain important info you want always be at hand, for example, a privacy policy or help links. Although Atlassian provides some recommendations on changing footers, they involve editing Confluence files and system restarting.

We’d suggest an easier way to change the footer. Again, in Confluence Admin – Look&Feel – Custom HTML, add the code for the Privacy Policy and Support links (lines 4 and 5) to the At end of the BODY section:

<script type="text/javascript">
AJS.toInit(function ($) {
    AJS.$("div#footer .footer-body").prepend("<ul id='footer-custom-links'/>");
    AJS.$("ul#footer-custom-links").append("<li class='noprint'><a href='https://stiltsoft.com'>Privacy Policy</a></li>",
                                           "<li class='noprint'><a href='https://stiltsoft.desk.com/customer/portal/emails/new'>Support</a></li>");
});
</script>

And your footer will look like this:

Please, note that according to the Atlassian EULA you can’t remove the Powered by Atlassian Confluence line from the footer. So be careful about this when experimenting.

For other our posts about Confluence customization, see here. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay tuned for future hints and tricks.

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Three Ways to Deal With Long Pages in Atlassian Confluence

March 18, 2014

#Confluence

6 min

Making changes to Confluence pages is a pretty straightforward task thanks to a user-friendly Atlassian Confluence editor. However, as implied by this highly voted feature request, many people find it annoying to edit really long pages.

As pages get more complex, scrolling back and forth and hunting for the part you want to edit can be pretty tiresome. Moreover, if someone else is editing the same page simultaneously with you, you’ll have to deal with resolving editing conflicts.

The general idea of solving this problem is to divide a page into several parts and edit them separately. In this post we’ll show some tools that can help you tackle this issue by so called sectional editing.

Include Macro

First solution is easy and doesn’t require installing any third-party tools. You need to compose a page of several shorter children pages that can be edited one by one with the macro Include Page that comes preinstalled with Confluence. On your main page locate Include Page in the list of default Confluence macros:

Insert the macro for every page you want to include. When you’re done you main page in the Edit mode will look like this:

Now, we want to make links that will take us to the Edit mode for every page so that you could quickly start editing a separate page. To do that, go to your children pages’ editors and copy the link from the browser address bar. Then go back to the main page, create a web-link called, for example, Edit and paste the address. It’s important to create a web link, because otherwise Confluence will convert an Edit mode link to a View mode link, and this is not what we want.

Create web links for all children pages and you’ll get something like this:

In the View mode you now can click the edit links to jump directly to a page editor.

This approach, however, has a couple of drawbacks. First, you need to create page sections manually and changing the page layout can be tricky. Second, every time you go to a children page editor you need to navigate back to your main page manually.

Zen Foundation Theme

This last problem is perfectly solved by using the Zen Foundation theme. It’s a custom theme that lets you easily create page sections and is full of other nice features like a drag&drop layout and flexible permission control.

But again, you need to create sections manually, and unless you’re a very small team, the prices can scary you off.

InPlace Editor

A cheaper and much easier solution is our InPlace Editor. If your page already contains headings, after installing InPlace Editor you’ll see small icons next to each of them.

Clicking the icon takes you to the native Confluence editor where you can edit only this section alone. Also, if several people are editing different sections of the same page at the same time, you avoid the risk of editing conflicts, since all changes made in different parts are merged. In a rare case when someone is editing the same section as you are, the standard Confluence merge mechanism is invoked upon saving the changes.

InPlace Editor works out of the box and doesn’t require complex setting up. However, it lets you activate the editor icons only for certain heading levels and disable the add-on completely for selected spaces.

To make the editing process even more productive, it would be a good idea to use InPlace Editor along with the default macro Table of Contents. While the former lets you edit a page part, the latter is a nice way to get to this part.

You can try InPlace Editor in our Live Demo without installing it or generate a 30-day free trial license and evaluate it on your Confluence.

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Three Ways to Deal With Long Pages in Atlassian Confluence

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Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel Tricks: Turning Off Table Sorting

February 4, 2014

#How To#Confluence

3 min

Edit long Confluence pages by parts with InPlace Editor. Check the demo and try for free.

In the previous Confluence How To posts, we focused on the look of Confluence proper. And now we will show you what can be done with your content. Specifically, we are going to share a couple of tricks that can be useful for turning off table sorting in Confluence. By default, there’s no standard way to do that for certain tables which can be painful since some tables don’t make any sense once sorted.

Confluence provides the way to disable the Confluence Sortable Tables plugin though. However, this could be overkill, since sometimes sorting may come in handy.

One of the workarounds might be removing the standard header row and mimicking it with a highlighted first row with bold text in it.

However, if you need the standard header row for some reasons, you may want to insert an empty row right after it and merge all cells in this row. This will prevent the table from being sorted. In fact, if your table contains any merged cells, it can’t be sorted, here we added a dummy row for a nice table look and data consistency.

Another solution might be to add an empty column and merge all its cells with the column before it. Your table will look like the original one and the number of rows won’t change, however, you should have time and patience for merging cells for each row, so this makes sense only for short tables.

Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel Tricks: Tweaking Page Titles

January 20, 2014

#How To#Confluence

3 min

Edit long Confluence pages by parts with InPlace Editor. Check the demo and try for free.

In on of the previous posts here we showed you how to change the look of the Confluence homepage. Now let’s see what can be done about normal pages. Below is one of our Documentation pages. What we want to do is change its title font and get rid of the line showing page changes (byline).

To do that, select Look and Feel in Space Tools on the space sidebar and go the Stylesheet tab.

To change the page title font to Tahoma and increase its size to 50px, we add the following lines to the space stylesheet. Note that space stylesheets override the global stylesheet and the changes made in a space stylesheet apply for all pages in this space.

h1#title-text {
 font-size: 50px;
 font-family: tahoma;
}

Ok, now we want to hide the byline and make it pop up only when hovered over. For this, add the following:

.page-metadata ul {
 visibility: hidden;
}
.page-metadata:hover ul {
 visibility: visible;
}

After saving the stylesheet and reloading our page, we get the page that looks like this.

The font has changed and there’s no visible byline unless we move the cursor over it.

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Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel tricks: How to Make Your Homepage More Attractive

December 19, 2013

#How To#Confluence

4 min

Add contextual comments with Talk Inline Comments. Check the demo and try for free.

Don’t judge a book by its cover? Yeah, right. However, Atlassian Confluence is not a book and tuning its ‘cover’ (i.e. the homepage) might make its look cleaner and more attractive for your team, customers or whoever visits your enterprise wiki. In this post we’ll share a couple of tricks for turning your main Confluence page into a real eye-catcher.

If you ever visited our Documentation site (that is actually a Confluence 5 instance), you may have noticed that the main page looks different than a standard Confluence dashboard. What we did first was changing the site homepage to the main page of a space named doc.

That gave us more flexibility in arranging content on the main page, since the standard dashboard is not something you can deeply customize. On the contrary, any main page of any space allows you to change layouts, insert images and videos and do whatever you want. We placed large add-on icons that users would click to go to add-on manuals.

However, there was still one problem with our homepage. As we already had a navigation system on the page, the sidebar with the page tree seemed redundant.

One solution could have been to add global styles and hide the sidebar on all pages with the default theme. But we wanted to hide it on the homepage only, we still needed it inside each space. That’s why we wrote a user macro that hides the sidebar. In Administration – User Macros we created a new macro with the following code:

<style>
    .ia-fixed-sidebar {
        visibility: hidden !important;
    }
    #main {
        margin-left: 0px !important;
    }
</style>

We inserted the macro to the page and voilá, the sidebar is not there anymore!

Now, we have a minimalist-looking homepage and sidebars inside spaces for better navigation. If you want to try this in your Confluence and have questions, we’d be happy to help you out, drop us a line or just comment this post.

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