Comparison: Talk and Confluence inline comments

December 21, 2021
#Confluence#Collaboration
12 min

Note: the information in this article applies to the Server and DC deployments. 

Those of you who use Confluence inline comments and have just found our Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence app may wonder what’s the difference between them. To save you time and effort, we compared these two solutions in the table below.

confluence native comments vs talk

As you see, the list of differences is quite extensive. If we go into detail about every feature, it could overwhelm you with information. That’s why in this article we decided to focus on the Talk-specific features.

Setting up viewing permissions

Talk: You can set default space viewing permissions applied to all the Talk inline comments (hereafter talks) created within a space. It gives you the option to hide talks from certain users while letting them see the rest of the available page content.

Talk Space Permissions

The list of users who can add talks in the space

It allows you to have by default (for example):

  • talks on your public pages visible only to your company users and hidden from external viewers
  • talks hidden from some of your team members/teams, who have the View All permission for the current space
  • only one user with the Talk space viewing permission to create private notes

Moreover, you can override space permissions for any specific comment on a page while adding or editing a talk. You can include certain users/groups in discussions or make personal notes.

Talk permissions in Confluence

Confluence inline comments: In Confluence, you can give user permissions only to delete or add comments (including inline comments), but there’s no way to restrict viewing of inline comments to users with the View All permission.

Confluence native inline comments permissions

Adding Talk Suggestions to improve content

Talk: Along with a megaphone button on the highlight actions panel, you can notice a person with a chat bubble right next to it . It’s our Talk Suggestion feature. Sometimes your eye catches mistakes while browsing some pages in Confluence. To handle the error in the easiest way, you can suggest changes to this word.

It’s also a must-have feature for content creators and editors in your company. With Talk Suggestions, they can rapidly review content and make remarks to improve it. The author can accept these changes or reject them. Once accepted, they automatically apply to the highlighted text.

Suggestions in Confluence

Talk Suggestions facilitate content review and make this process more user-friendly than Confluence inline comments. You can add Talk Suggestions in edit mode as well.

Confluence inline comments: It takes you a while to apply multiple changes to your page since Confluence inline comments are inaccessible in edit mode.

Making Talk Report to overview comments

Talk: When your page has a lot of comments, it’s proving difficult to browse all the comments and find the appropriate one. The difficulty may also arise when you want to find comments with high priority or the talks with your mention. The situation gets worse when a comment you are searching for is on another page or space. It may take hours to handle this job.

Talk Report allows browsing comments on any space/page without the necessity to leave the current page. It provides you with an overview of all comments where you get information about their content, author, status, date, and more.

Report on discussions in ConfluenceThis is how Talk Report looks on a page

To learn more about how to work with Talk Report visit the Talk Report page in the app’s documentation.

Confluence inline comments
 lose one more score against Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence in this regard.

 

Archiving comments

Talk: Why overload your page? You can take comments out of your sight for a while and restore them later.

Once you archive a talk, it disappears from the comment sidebar but continues invisibly exist on the page.

Archive the Talk comments

Confluence inline comments: You only have a choice to delete or resolve comments. In both options, the comments are absent on the page.

Resolve native inline comments

Marking favourite comments

When using native inline comments, you might fancy a place to store important comments and easily access them like Confluence tasks. With Confluence inline comments, you have to rifle through multiple spaces and pages to find the one comment you need. To make life easier, we rolled out the Favourite comments feature. It allows you to mark interesting ideas, thoughts, or high-priority inline comments and put them in one place. To see their context, you can press on a talk and automatically find yourself on the original page with it.

Mark discussions as favourite in Confluence

The view of the page with Favourite comments

How to proceed to your Favourite comments and manage them check our Favourite comments guide.

Confluence inline comments: It can be quite time-consuming to find the appropriate comment because they don’t provide similar functionality.

Prioritizing comments

It’s often the case that our users add talks as their personal notes or leave talks as tasks. By defining the priority for a talk, you can set the level of significance to it and decide what you should implement firsthand. You can choose one of three levels of priority for a comment:

  • low (default)
  • medium
  • high

Also, Talk Priority can be helpful for a company or team leader to draw attention to the talks that need a quick response.

Add priority to discussions in Confluence

Confluence inline comments miss this feature.

Picking colors for a comment thread

Talk: The option to pick a color for a comment thread may come in handy in situations when different teams chat over the same document. You will find it convenient to distinguish teams, topics of discussion, or to highlight important comments with color.

Pick a color for a thread in Confluence

Different teams decided to distinguish themselves with a color

Confluence inline comments only provide one color for all the comments on a page.

We hope that this list of the Talk features impressed you in a positive way. Indeed, our app gives you more flexibility and deals with a greater amount of use cases. But, as we said in the beginning, the listed options only partly describe the differences between Confluence inline comments and talks. If you’re curious to know more, watch the Talk video and check Talk documentation. Also, you can pass our 3-minute quiz and decide what comments you need more.

In case you have any ideas on how to make your experience better with our app, create or vote for ideas on our Talk feedback forum.

Related posts

    Smart Project Planning in Confluence

    January 21, 2020
    #Project management#Reporting#Analytics#Integration#How To#Confluence
    10 min

    Aloha, Atlassian fans! 

    Have you ever thought of vacation planning as a project that requires thorough study and preparation? My colleague and I decided to challenge ourselves and plan our dream vacation with the help of Confluence because we use this collaboration software every day at work to create content and share ideas on the fly.

    In this blog post, we will show you that Confluence can be a great travel planning tool that helps you carefully plan every step of your trip. You will get answers to the following questions:

    • How to choose a place to stay that suits your preferences
    • How to plan your travel budget
    • How to discuss your travel plans with your colleague
    • How to get more ideas for great travel photos

    How to choose the best hotel at a bargain

    The Gold Coast city in the Australian state of Queensland is our dream destination. We start by gathering all the information about hotels, hostels, and apartments in the Gold Coast on Confluence pages. Next, we create a master page with the help of the Page Properties Report macro.

    Now we have a detailed list of hotels. However, it can be a bit difficult when it comes to working with table data. We love to filter and sort tables and visualize them with the help of dynamic charts and graphs. This functionality helps us to get a bird’s-eye view of all options from the table, range the accommodations, and, finally, select the best hotel for our needs.

    How to stick to your budget

    We need to accurately plan our budget because covering more than 15 000 kilometers to Australia would cost us a fortune. Moreover, we plan to spend a terrific time in Australia and some extra money for entertainment will come in handy.

    So we create a table with our travel expenses distributed by multiple categories.

    With the help of the pivot table, we can aggregate all the expenses in each category. After that, we can view the chart to analyze them.

    No doubt, Confluence is a platform for team collaboration. Irina can rapidly review the table with expenses because it’s better to plan more money for unexpected expenses. She can easily add suggestions to the content to let me know what she thinks about my plan.

    Pro tip:

    Learn more about using Spreadsheets in Confluence

    How to find inspiration

    One does not simply spend hours surfing on beautiful beaches, watching awesome sunsets, and making no photos. We’ve found a couple of pictures that inspire us to make our own during the vacation.

    So we upload already structured files to Confluence and easily embed the required folder into our Confluence page to manage these files on the go.

    How to get all the things done

    And the last but not the least thing in planning a journey is to keep an eye on deadlines. We have so many tasks and don’t want to forget about anything. Our dear old friend Gantt chart can help us in this situation. We can plan some periods to complete every task and define the milestones to draw attention to particular tasks. To keep our plans on track, we add flexible reminders that are easy to configure.

    Confluence for project planning

    Confluence is all about working together and is a perfect solution to get everyone on the same page. It helps you accomplish multiple tasks at the same time, from writing blog posts to building a knowledge base. So why not use this trusted software to plan your dream vacation?
    We hope that this blog post helped you look at Confluence from a different perspective and discover more capabilities you can use with the help of:

    Please, share your story of using Confluence in the comments below. What are your use cases?

    Related posts

      How Broadband Forum Uses Talk and Confluence to Get Answers in Context

      September 26, 2019
      #Case Study#Collaboration
      3 min

      Broadband Forum, our Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence customer, delivers ultra-fast broadband services for home and business, access and converged 5G infrastructure, and Cloud with the help of the innovative use of NFV, SDN, Ultra-Fast access, and IoT.

      Broadband Forum is a member organization. It aims to accelerate the adoption of their work to bring new, valuable services to their member companies and all stakeholders who use the developed work.

      In the company, the Talk app is used by its technical participants, who are hundreds of users from more than 150 different companies. They develop technical standards for the global telecommunications industry.

      Easy communication inside Confluence

      The Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app helps the Broadband Forum participants communicate about logistics, administration of projects, and technical issues. Their Confluence users get to ask questions in Talk inline comments, which are added to the needed parts of the page content. It gives the insightful context for everyone involved in the conversation.

      Automatic notifications about new discussions and replies sent to the watchers of a space assure that the right person jumps in and provides a timely answer or feedback. Talk Report allows Broadband Forum to track and easily find unresolved discussions that are pending for way too long. With the help of suggestions, the users can propose a change on a page without editing the content.

      The team also appreciates that they can view, add, and resolve comments in the editor and set priority to discussions to signal others whether it waits or they expect a quick follow-up.

      Challenges and benefits

      The Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app made technical discussions much easier for Broadband Forum. The users can easily ask questions and rapidly get answers next to the discussed information on Confluence pages. Seeing all Talk comments of a space in one place, working with inline comments in the editor and giving priority to threads of comments take collaboration on technical issues to a new level.

      5 Apps Compatible with Confluence 7.0

      September 10, 2019
      #Confluence
      7 min

      Greetings to all Atlassian fans!

      We suppose not only our team was looking forward to a new release of our favorite tool for creativity and collaboration. Finally, Confluence 7.0 is here and you can already dive into it right now.

      For those of you who love to be the very first trying all the new things and strive for progress we prepared five apps compatible with Confluence 7.0, so let’s check them out.

      Power up Confuence tables

      Table Filter and Charts for Confluence is a powerful data evaluation solution for Atlassian Confluence that is perfectly combined with other macros and apps outputting tables. You can take advantage of bundled tools for running all kinds of table data filtration, aggregating it in multidimensional pivot tables, transforming it with the help of SQL, and visualizing it with a variety of charts and graphs, including a Gantt chart.

      Simplify document management in Confluence

      Smart Attachments for Confluence is a solution for comprehensive document management and file control. It provides the centralized space storage for keeping your project documents and assets. Now your teammates can instantly locate the recent version of the required document, diagram, or spreadsheet at once. The app deeply integrates with the native Confluence functionality and gives you powerful tools to collaborate on documentation with your colleagues in real time.

      Enjoy LMS capabilities right in Confluence

      Courses and Quizzes – LMS for Confluence allows you to create quizzes, tests and training courses for employee and customer education, employee onboarding, knowledge evaluation of job candidates. It lets you use Confluence as a learning management system (LMS).

      Make your Confluence pages more powerful and attractive

      Handy Macros for Confluence is a comprehensive set of tools (12 in one) to make your Confluence pages more appealing and interactive, including:

      Take collaboration on content to a new level

      Talk – Advanced Inline Comments helps you add powerful inline comments to your Confluence pages. You can easily add comments anywhere on the page, both while editing and viewing the page content. Moreover, you can restrict access to specific talks for appropriate users or groups making your conversation private, prioritize discussions, and use the Talk report that shows you all discussions spread over multiple pages in the space.

      All these apps were designed to enrich your Confluence experience and simplify your daily tasks.

      Do you remember you can try all of them free? (wink)

      Related posts

        Talk: Add Suggestions on Confluence Pages

        April 3, 2019
        #Confluence#Collaboration
        6 min

        All Confluence users have a great way to document their ideas about any page or blog post with the help of page comments and inline comments. Commenting helps them contribute to each other’s content. Users can review what’s written on the page and comment any piece of text and then discuss all the details in a comment thread.

        The Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app brings team collaboration to a new level providing you with a better commenting experience:

        • View, add and resolve comments not only in the view mode but also while editing a page
        • Have private discussions on public pages with the help of the permissions feature
        • Track all the comments per space in a detailed Talk report that helps you monitor resolved and open discussions
        • Archive comments to get back to them or review them later

        To further empower teams that work on pages together, we came up with a new handy feature for the Talk app. Please, welcome Suggestions in Confluence.

        Propose changes

        This useful feature helps you add suggestions to any text fragment both while editing or viewing the page content. This way you can easily help your colleagues improve the page content. This means that this feature allows you to:

        • suggest changes during a review
        • propose an update — to add some missing information or change what’s outdated
        • inform the author that you found a typo

        You just need to select the text you suggest to change, click and enter your suggestion text. The initial content will remain on the page and your suggestion will be displayed on a sidebar.

        suggestion in Confluence

        Discuss proposed changes

        If you need to explain your point of view or want to check what other users think about your idea, you can easily discuss your suggestion – add a comment in your suggestion and mention people you want to include in the conversation. This will help the author understand why you think this change should be made and allow other stakeholders to chip in as well..

        Moreover, you can use all the capabilities of the Talk app: set view permissions, priorities, use different colors, and build reports to track all suggestions in any space.

        restricted discussion in Confluence

        Accept or reject changes

        When you suggest something, the owner of the page gets a notification and can decide whether to accept your ideas or not.

        If a suggestion is accepted, changes apply automatically. In case a user rejects the suggestion, it disappears. However, it can still be found in the page history.

        accept or decline suggestions in Confluence

        Try Talk – Inline Comment for Free

        Check out the capabilities of Talk – Advanced Inline Comments and enjoy team collaboration in Confluence.

        You can discuss and review the content your colleagues share with you suggesting edits on the fly. This way you can easily edit and correct any piece of text in Confluence both when editing or viewing the page content.

        Talk – Advanced Inline Comments can be an alternative solution to the native inline comments in Confluence. You can check the difference between Talk and Native Inline Comments and choose the one that suits you best.

        If you have any questions, feel free add your comments and suggestions to this blog post. (smile)

        Try Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for free

        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.