Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – Third Quarter 2015

Are you following up on our series of quarterly posts ‘Top New Add-ons for Atlassian Products’ yet? We launched it this year and you can check out the articles about add-ons for Confluence of the first and second quarters. Today’s post will highlight 5 add-ons for Confluence picked from all that were added on the Marketplace within July-September 2015. We meant this selection to be relevant for our various audience. The articles with top 5 plugins for JIRA and Bitbucket Server (Stash) are also coming soon.

Top 5 new add-ons for Confluence that had their first release during July-September 2015:

• Brikit Targeted Search for Confluence by Brikit
• Metadata for Confluence by Communardo Software GmbH
• Presenter for Confluence by Incloud GmbH
• Permission Assistant by Xidras GmbH
• Log Downloader by Artemis Software

1. Brikit Targeted Search for Confluence

Brikit Targeted Search for Confluence helps with finding relevant content in Confluence fast and easy. How does it work?

Confluence administrator creates filter groups and adds certain filters in each group. When creating a filter, it is necessary to specify its name (something that would be clear for your users) and a label that will be associated with this filter.

Let’s see what these add-ons are designed for, how you can benefit from using them and how much their licenses are.

It is possible to set visibility of each filter group based on space category.

Once you have filter groups and filters associated with certain labels, it is necessary to make sure that your Confluence content (pages, blog posts, attachments) is labeled using filter labels to make it discoverable for the add-on. When editing labels in the ‘Labels’ dialogue, you can see filters arranged in groups. By selecting needed filters, a user adds corresponding filter labels to a page.

When everything is set up, it is time to actually use the search functionality. There are several options. You can add:

• search fields, links and buttons with pre-configured search parameters on a page using the Targeted Search Field and Targeted Search Link macros
• add the Targeted Search box site-wide

When a user performs their search using the plugin search field, link or site-wide search box, they see the page with search results built based on the predefined parameters, specified in the macros settings or in the code added while setting up targeted search box. On the search results page, there are groups of filters to the left that can be used to refine search results by point-and-click.

The add-on also provides the Upload Attachment Button macro that allows you to add a button on a page, using which a user can upload files and have them attached to the current page with given labels being automatically applied to uploaded attachments.

Pricing: Brikit Targeted Search for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 360$ for 25 users; 660$ for 50 users; 1200$ for 100 users.

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2. Metadata for Confluence

Metadata for Confluence allows Confluence and Space administrators to assign metadata fields and sets of fields to specific pages, several pages, all pages in a space or across all spaces in order to have a congruent common structure in Confluence.

Metadata sets may be:

• global – configured by Confluence administrator and available in all Confluence spaces
• user-created – configured by Space admin and available in only this particular space

E.g., you want all pages in a space to have the ‘Content Info‘ metadata set with the following metadata fields: Contact Person, Page Status, Page Status Message:

To do that, you should:

1. Select ‘Metadata’ in the ‘Space tools’
2. Add the corresponding fields in the ‘Add Metadata Field’ tabHere you can add default value for a field and select type of your field:
   • Multi Select (Checkboxes)
   • Single Select (Dropdown)
   • Link
   • Single Select (Radio Buttons)
   • Text
   • Use
3. Create a set in the ‘Metadata Sets’ tab and fill it up with required fields

Here you can choose what Confluence templates to add this set to. As long as you want this set to be automatically applied to every newly created page in the current space, mark the ‘Default Set’ check box. Each field can be marked as hidden or required.

Every newly created page will have the ‘Content Info’ metadata set assigned to it and users will be able to view and edit metadata fields in the pop-out dialogue by clicking  icon on the top right of a page.

Space administrators can make bulk changes to metadata instead of editing fields per page. It is very convenient when you need to:

• add or remove metadata sets to/from multiple pages at once
• make same changes in same fields on several pages

The add-on includes 3 macros:

• Display Metadata Macro – shows metadata of the current page. You can select if all metadata is displayed or only the fields or sets you select
• Metadata Overview Macro – displays metadata of multiple pages based on a search criteria
• Metadata History Macro – provides the metadata history of the current page

Pricing: Metadata for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 240$ for 25 users; 440$ for 50 users; 800$ for 100 users.

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3. Presenter for Confluence

With Presenter for Confluence you can easily make a slideshow from any Confluence page directly in your browser. The plugin adds the ‘Present’ option in the page ‘Tools’ menu.

As you click it, the content of a Confluence page turns into a slideshow with its structure preserved. You don’t have to work on separate decks, the add-on does the whole thing for you.

To get started, Confluence administrators should set up presentation profiles with different presentation styling and behavior by choosing a base theme or styling presentation with custom CSS and selecting the style and speed of the animation used for transitions between slides.

Other options include:

• Display controls in the bottom right corner
• Display a presentation progress bar
• Display the page number of the current slide
• Center slides vertically
• Loop the presentation
• Enable slide navigation via mouse wheel

Once done, users can pick a suitable presentation profile when selecting ‘Present’ in the ‘Tools’ page menu.

Watch the add-on demo to see it in action.

Pricing: Presenter for Confluence is available for both Server and Cloud instances.

Its commercial license costs 150$ for 25 users; 250$ for 50 users; 400$ for 100 users (Server version).

And subscription is 15$/month for 25 users; 20$/month for 50 users; 30$/month for 100 users (Cloud version).

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4. Permission Assistant

Permission Assistant provides global admins with the capability to manage user and group space permissions in bulk, see indirect permissions. It saves a lot of time in cases when you need to grant or edit permissions for a specific user or group across multiple spaces, as you get to do that in one place and no longer need to navigate to each space.

Features:

• Search for users and groups
• See all spaces with permissions (direct an inherited)
• Add and remove permissions in bulk
• Filter categorized, archived and personal spaces
• See if a user receives permissions through a direct or group permission

Pricing: Permission Assistant is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 60$ for 25 users; 110$ for 50 users; 200$ for 100 users.

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5. Log Downloader

With Log Downloader Confluence administrators can download Confluence logs right on the add-on page in Confluence administration.

It’s a simple add-on that helps admins save time and efforts, which makes it handy and valuable.

Pricing: Log Downloader is available for Server instances and is free.

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If you get any questions or want to discuss one of the add-ons, feel free to comment below.

Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – Second Quarter 2015

In April, we launched the series of quarterly posts ‘Top New Add-ons for Atlassian Products’ to highlight 5 of the add-ons our team especially liked from those appeared on the Marketplace for key Atlassian platforms during the previous quarter. It included articles about plugins of the 1st quarter for Confluence, JIRA and Stash. Now the 2nd quarter is up and after reviewing add-ons it brought, there are 3 new posts that will be coming out in the following weeks. Today’s the first of them and it’ll cover top 5 new add-ons for Confluence which had their first release during April-June 2015:

• CA JIRA-Confluence Issue Macro by Capital City Consultants
• Labeler – Content Organizer by Transition Technologies S.A.
• PDF Macros for Confluence by TNG Technology Consulting GmbH
• confluence-sequence-diagrams by O’Hara Group
• Tooltips by M20 Technology LLC

Let’s go through problems these add-ons are meant to solve, possible benefits using them could give you and their pricing.

1. CA JIRA-Confluence Issue Macro

CA JIRA-Confluence Issue Macro allows you to pull your JIRA Issue data from connected JIRA instances and have it displayed on a Confluence page in a layout you can set up as you prefer. In other words, you get to create custom JIRA Issue reports for one or multiple issues in Confluence. It provides two macros, JIRA-Confluence Issue and JIRA-Confluence Issue Field, and a blueprint, JIRA Issue Report.

With this add-on you can:

• Easily select what JIRA instance to pull issue data from
• Use a predefined template of JIRA Issue Report blueprint to get started quickly. If needed, its layout can be easily modified by adding, removing or rearranging issue field macros
• Create your own template from scratch using add-on macros. JIRA-Confluence Issue macro is for defining a template block. While inserting it on a page, you select the JIRA Application Link and enter JIRA Query, which can be an Issue Key, Filter ID, or JQL Query. Then you need to fill it up with JIRA-Confluence Issue Field macros. Each Issue Field macro is for one issue field. You select the name of the JIRA field to display when adding macro. To organize issue field macros, you can use native Confluence styling macros, such as Section and Column macros
• View Linked Issues and Sub-tasks

Pricing: CA JIRA-Confluence Issue Macro is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 150$ for 25 users; 400$ for 50 users; 900$ for 100 users.

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2. Labeler – Content Organizer

With Labeler – Content Organizer users are not able to create new labels, but can only choose from those defined by administrator. It makes it easier for you to have your Confluence content organized in a better way by managing labels and attachments. To get going, label groups have to be created. Each group can consist of one or several labels. After that, when users click the Labels button while adding or editing a Confluence page or when editing labels for page attachments, instead of the standard Confluence Labels pop-up window, they will be getting the Labeler window with two sections, groups and labels.

In Groups you can see buttons for each label group. As you click one of them, all labels of the selected group are displayed in the Labels section below. You can pick the appropriate ones and switch to another group if need to add labels from some other group as well.

Another helpful thing is the Labeler macro that allows you to get a list of all attachments with a chosen label(s) from all pages and spaces, for which the add-on is enabled.

Other features:

• Children pages inherit labels from their parent (you can modify them)
• Changes to labels of a page automatically apply to its children pages and attachments
• Selecting what spaces the add-on is enabled for

Pricing: Labeler – Content Organizer is available for Server instances.Its commercial license costs 50$ for 25 users; 100$ for 50 users; 200$ for 100 users.

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3. PDF Macros for Confluence

PDF Macros for Confluence is a tool for customizing the way your Confluence page content is exported to PDF.

It comes with 5 macros:

• PDF Pagebreak: insert this macro in the place a page break should be in a PDF file and have the content of your Confluence page broken into PDF pages the way you want it to be
• PDF Landscape: the content included in this macro is displayed in the landscape page orientation in PDF
• PDF Hidden Content: the content included in this macro is hidden when exporting to PDF
• Hide in Web View: the content included in this macro is not visible while viewing a Confluence page but is shown when exporting to PDF
• Current Date and Time: this macro inserts the current date and time on your Confluence page which can be used as a timestamp for your export to PDF

Pricing: PDF Macros for Confluence is available for Server instances and is free.

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4. confluence-sequence-diagrams

The confluence-sequence-diagrams add-on provides you with a way to create sequence diagrams from plain-text instructions. Sequence diagrams are used to show the collaboration between objects based on a time sequence, model how objects interact with each other in different use case scenarios, describe the sequence of actions that need to be performed to complete a task. This tool can be useful for developing, business, design and analysts teams. With sequence diagrams you can design, communicate and validate the architecture, interfaces and logic of the system, document the dynamics and flow within a system, capture how different business objects interact, to document requirements for system implementation and more.

This add-on allows you to quickly create a diagram with participants, notes, messages and responses by inserting corresponding plain text notations into the Sequence diagram macro. To customize the look of your diagram, you can choose diagram theme. There are two options, simple and hand.

Pricing: confluence-sequence-diagrams is available for Server instances and is free.

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5. Tooltips

Tooltips is a neat add-on for adding pop-up tooltips with helpful information, which is displayed when you hover over text or images on your Confluence pages. It doesn’t require any macro and works via the link dialogue.

All you have to do to add a tooltip is:

• select some content
• click ‘Insert link’
• choose ‘Tooltip’
• insert your tooltip text
• click ‘Insert’

Being set up as links, tooltips do not overload your editor with additional macro and are easy to edit.

Pricing: Tooltips is available for Server instances and is free.

Try it

If you get any questions or want to discuss one of the add-ons, feel free to comment below.

Top 5 Rated Add-ons for Confluence Cloud

Confluence Cloud has been introduced as a new solution for companies and vendors who no longer wanted to support all internal infrastructure of the team collaboration platform. Most Atlassian Experts have embraced this initiative and added the required updates and modifications to support all capabilities of the Cloud platform. Atlassian Marketplace is also growing from a couple of add-ons for Atlassian Cloud products to more than 50 items for now. Most usually the companies migrate the top-selling add-ons to Cloud platform to preserve the positive user experience for users who have already transitioned to new products.

In the current blog post we will continue our series of blog posts about top-rated add-ons for Atlassian products. In the current blog post we will review the Top 5 rated add-ons for Confluence Cloudas of May 2015. The listing includes the following products:

• Gliffy Confluence Plugin
• Numbered Headings
• Table Filter Plugin
• Multiexcerpt Plugin
• Confluence Command Line Interface (CLI)

#1 – Gliffy Confluence Plugin

Gliffy is a convenient and user-friendly tool for building diagrams and creating drawings in Confluence. This is a Confluence replacement tool for traditional MS Visio application with the similar capabilities and features for diagram creation.

Once you have added the Gliffy macro to your Confluence page, you will be automatically redirected to the dedicated online service for diagramming. You can select among the wide range of diagram presets, as follows:

• Flowchart
• Software Design & UML
• Organization Charts
• Timeline
• Network Diagrams
• Business Process
• Website & Software UI Design
• SWOT Analysis
• Venn Diagrams
• Floorplan

Gliffy service provides a generic set of capabilities for drawing diagrams and storing them in Confluence. The set of available shapes varies depending on the selected diagram type, but you can add your own shapes if needed.

Additionally, you can import the existing diagrams into Confluence if they are of the following file formats:

• Gliffy Diagram (*.gxml)
• Gliffy Diagram (*.gon, *.gliffy)
• Visio XML Drawing (*.vdx)

Gliffy add-on supports the diagram revisions that are kept in Confluence attachments under the corresponding diagram. While editing diagram you can work with these revisions and restore the appropriate version if necessary. In addition to the source diagram file, Confluence stores the image of the created diagram, which is actually shown on the page in the view mode. You can quickly start adding modifications to the Gliffy diagram even while viewing the Confluence page.

#2 – Numbered Headings

Numbered Headings is a handy tool that applies automatic numeration to headings on Confluence pages. It allows you to paste the required text snippets into the Numbered Heading macro, which will automatically numerate the appropriate heading levels after you save the page.

The add-on provides a wide range of options that can be applied to headings on the page, as follows:

• number formats – you can select the appropriate number format (decimal, ISO-2145, full-decimal, lower or upper Roman, Greek or Latin, or set a custom number format)
• default number value to start numeration form
• heading level to start numbering from
• style for each heading level

Once you save the page, the headings placed within this macro will be automatically numbered.

#3 – Table Filter

Table Filter add-on is a useful and intuitive tool for manual data filtration in tables. Originating from the hosted version, this add-on allows you to place your data tables within the Table Filter macro. You can paste tables from MS Excel or Word, copy tables from web pages or use the native Confluence tables.

Once you have inserted the table into the macro you need to define columns which you want to filter, enable free text filters or a global filter for instant data filtration through. Optionally, you can hide the labels or the pane with filters or set the appropriate width for filters. You can find the full list of options and parameters in the add-on’s documentation.

Once you save the page, above your table you can find the filtration pane where you can either select one the cell values or enter a custom query with support for regular expressions.

#4 – Multiexcerpt Plugin

Multiexcerpt Plugin is a real catch for people who loves reading encyclopedias or browsing multiple websites and adding bookmarks or marking websites as favorites. This plugin is some sort of an on-page bookmark, which you can add on some page, place some information into it and then output this excerpt on some other Confluence page.

What does it do? This add-on adds two new macros – Multiexcerpt and Multiexcerpt Include. The Multiexcerpt macro is placed on the page, which will be used as a source for data excerpt, and the Multiexcerpt Include macro is placed on the page which will store multiple exceprts from other pages.

You can add multiple Multiexcerpts on one page and get several pieces of information from multiple pages in one place. All you need is to enter the reference name of the excerpt and the page where it is stored. Unfortunately, the add-on does not support macros placed within other macros, so this information will be unavailable to you.

#5 – Confluence Command Line Interface

Confluence Command Line Interface is a robust solution for administrators of Confluence Cloud instances. This add-on is comprised of two elements – Confluence CLI Connector add-on and CLI Client installed on some remote system or machine.

Once you have installed the add-on on your Confluence Cloud, you need to unpack the archive with CLI Client to your local computer and edit the application BAT file and write address of your Confluence instance. Once this is done you can proceed to execution of remote queries to your Confluence Cloud server.

It allows you to perform the following actions:

• add, copy or remove attachments or attachment versions within one server or between different servers
• add, copy, move, modify, export or remove blogs and pages
• add, copy, export or remove spaces
• manage users and user groups and grant or remove permissions
• add, copy, update or remove comments
• add, get or remove labels
• get information about Confluence server and other system action.

A generic command is comprised of the action and one or multiple parameters (either required or optional). You can combine multiple parameters for performing complex operations outside of Confluence.

The add-on allows administrators to manage Confluence server and stored content without accessing the server itself.

Conclusion

The listing of add-ons for Confluence Cloud is continuously increasing with old or new add-ons. So if you are planing to migrate from the the hosted solution to Confluence Cloud, you will be able to continue using Confluence without any deficiencies in its functionality.