Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – First Quarter 2016

The second month of spring has come, so it’s high time to see the Top 5 of Confluence Add-ons appeared in the Atlassian Marketplace in the 1st quarter of 2016. We have reviewed more than a dozen of Confluence add-ons published in the Marketplace between January 1 and March 31, and selected five add-ons  that may be useful and interesting to you.

This is a regular series of blog posts about new add-ons, so if you have not read the already published posts, so feel free to find Top 5 Confluence add-ons in the first, second, third and fourth quarters of 2015.

So, the actual list includes the following add-ons:

• Categorise spaces for Confluence Server by Kupper Software
• Poll for Confluence Cloud by Addon Engine
• Contact List and CRM for Confluence Server by P. Eckelmann
• TechRadar for Confluence Server by it-economics GmbH
• Handy Macros for Confluence Server by StiltSoft

Let’s try these solutions and use their capabilities in real life.

Categorise Spaces

Categorise Spaces for Confluence Server allows you categorize spaces on the basis of specific labels that can be assigned to each space. With this add-on you can better structure your Confluence structure 🙂

What does it mean in real life? With this add-on you can group spaces for particular user groups, or on the basis of similar content stored within spaces. Now you needn’t open the space list all the time you need to open some space not shown on the dashboard page. Just use the embedded navigation section and choose the space for opening.

Configuration of the add-on is pretty simple and it will not take much time of yours to bring order to categorize your spaces. The configuration section is accessible right from the drop-down menu with space categories.

While configuring the categorization of your spaces you can create a two-level hierarchical structure of spaces. Space grouping is performed with space labels, all you need to enter the group name and select the space label for grouping. You can define the type of the category – either primary or secondary. Regulation of categories within the primary category is performed with drag-and-drop operation.

Pricing: The pricing for 25 users starts from $60, and ends with the unlimited commercial license costing $600. This add-on will allow you to structure your Confluence and categorize spaces for easier navigation across your content.

Poll

Poll for Confluence Cloud is a simple and intuitive tool for quick creation of polls in Confluence. Having no rivals for the moment, this add-on allows you to conduct opinion polls in your Confluence Cloud.

On any Confluence page you can add one or multiple poll questions. For each question you can set multiple answers and allow users to leave one or multiple votes for the pre-defined answer variants.

Once you save the page you will get a nice-looking poll which your colleagues, Confluence users or anonymous users can open and vote for.

Optionally, you can enable a capability to change votes by voters and view the report on answers. The report shows the basic information about the number of votes left for a specific option and users who left them.

Pricing: The pricing of the add-on varies from $5/mo for 10 and 25 users to $100 for 2000 users. Now you needn’t anymore think on how to find opinions of your colleagues, just create a poll and get statistics.

Contact List and CRM

Contact List and CRM is the add-on for Confluence Server that allows you to keep and manage your business contacts within Confluence. Additionally, you receive a capability to mention contacts on pages the same way as you mention Confluence users on pages. The contact mention resembles the native user mention and when you hover it within the page context you get the pop-up form with details of this contact.

The add-on puts an additional section onto Confluence menu bar. Opening this section allows you to view the list of contacts and the hovering over them opens the contact details. You can perform the basic set of operations on your contacts. Optionally, you can deactivate business accounts by so doing you disable a capability to mention this business contact on Confluence pages. Of course, you can always restore it and return a capability of mentioning this contact.

While keeping notes of meetings, conferences and meetups you can reference particular business contacts on Confluence pages. You can do this by entering # (hash) character and then entering name, email or company where the business contact works. It supports autocompletion so you will be able to quickly select the necessary contact.

For each business contact you can open the index page storing the full list of Confluence pages and comments where this or that contact was mentioned.

So what about the configuration? Configuration of the add-on is not difficult and all you need, at first, is to grant permissions. It provides the differentiated level of permissions for Confluence and anonymous users, so you can configure the appropriate level of available information and actions depending on the policy in your company.

Besides using the default fields for contacts, you can add your own custom fields. This becomes quite useful when you need to add some specific data about each contact.

Optionally, you can also modify the contact mention mask and add besides full name the company, position or any other information you need to find at glance. For anonymous users you can also set the appropriate contact mention mask.

Pricing: The pricing of the add-on starts from $60 for 25 users, and ends at $1200 for the unlimited commercial license. With this tool, you can build your own CRM system on the basis of Confluence.

TechRadar

TechRadar for Confluence Server is an efficient tool to visualize evolvement of technologies and their adoption within the particular time period.

It embeds a separate section for viewing your technology radars into Confluence menu. You have a capability to create multiple techradars, for example, for years. So what does the add-on do? It allows you to position blips (specific tools, techniques, platforms, languages and frameworks) onto the quadrants of your techradar. Each blip can go through different rings – stages of technology evaluation or adoption. When you click a specific blip it expands the section with the technology description. Additionally, you can view the movement of the blip on the radar and understand whether your attempted to adopt it or not.

The newly added technologies are marked with the New label and are shown as green, while the already trialed technologies are shown as orange on the radar. Right from here, you can proceed to the section where management of the techradar is performed.

The initial configuration of the techradar includes the sub-section for management of new and existing records. For each tech radar you need to set the arc distance in pixels, this affects the size of your tech radar.

Once this is done, you need to create arc definitions (stages of technology adoption). Then you need to put stages into the appropriate order, which they will appear on your techradar.

After this you need to add quadrant definitions and set the appropriate angles for their display on the tech radar. Having done this you can proceed to adding tools, languages & frameworks, techniques and platforms.

For each technology you can specify the title, URL with its details and add brief description. Position of the blip (technology) on the radar is determined by the angle and radius (distance from the center of the radar to the blip). For each technology you can add stages when the technology was updated or your tried to trial or adopt it.

Pricing: This is a free add-on, so you can try it and build your own techradar in a couple of hours.

Handy Macros

First of all, this is our add-on that we are developing at the moment. Handy Macros is a bundle of simple but efficient macros that allow you to optimize your experience with Confluence content and quickly insert the required data. You can insert interactive statuses and timestamps, create buttons on the fly and view the aggregated set of page differences since your last page view.

So what way does it work? Add-on allows you to create global sets of statuses that will be visible across the whole Confluence instance.

For each status you can set the custom background and text colors. So, your imagination is not limited to five pre-defined colors, now you can create your palette of statuses for each case. Each user can create his own set of status or copy the existing global or personal sets.

You can quickly insert the required status on the page by writing {Handy Status} or by selecting in the form for macro insertion. Once you have added the statuses and saved the page, you can quickly and easily change the task status in the page view mode.

All the status changes are reflected in the page history, and all watchers will get the corresponding notifications about updates in tasks.

The next macro – Handy Button – is a pretty simple tool that allows you to insert buttons on the page.

You can quickly insert the link to the page or email and select the color for it.

The third macro allows you to insert timestamps of the appropriate time and date format onto Confluence pages.

The last and the powerful augmentation for Confluence is the aggregated page difference report which allows you to view the full and merged list of changes added in several page revisions since the last time you viewed the page. Now you needn’t browse individual page revisions trying to figure out who and what kind of change made on the page.

Pricing: License for 25 users will cost you $50, for 50 users – $100, and so on. With this add-on you will add much more interactivity to your Confluence pages and save some time on opening the page in the edit mode. The new release of the add-on will include new features, so start watching the add-on and get updates on new releases.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave comments for this blog post or drop an email to tech-support@stiltsoft.com