Confluence Whiteboards
Years ago I learned the “claw” technique for holding dry-erase markers. You take three markers of different colors and hold them between your fingers when you’re presenting. This makes it easy for you to switch colors to draw attention to something or make it stand out. Over the years I added holding an eraser in my palm to make it easier to remove things from my drawings. I really like this technique since it means I don’t have to keep walking back to a table to get a different color.
Much of my job now, however, involves working with virtual teams, and unfortunately sharing a whiteboard on a conference call is iffy at best. This means that the claw technique isn’t really helpful when most of my team is virtual. Over time this forced me to look into other tools, like draw.io or Lucidchart to satisfy my whiteboard needs. At the same time I primarily have used Confluence as my knowledge base / collaboration platform. This means I am constantly opening multiple applications to document a process, brainstorm and record information.
This certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world - however - it does mean I have to maintain (and pay for) multiple systems. This is where Confluence whiteboards come in. This is a (relatively) new content type that natively hosts a whiteboard within your Confluence instance… which has several benefits.
Context
Having the whiteboard appear in Confluence directly next to, under or above, related information is incredibly powerful. This means new hires can easily find related information, engineers don’t have to go far for API documentation and project managers have their planning diagrams in a single spot. Until I began using Confluence whiteboards I didn’t realize how important this was, but now that I have it I can’t easily see myself changing.
Whiteboards can be placed anywhere in the hierarchy you need. Typically I place them under a related page - for example system diagrams go under the page for that system. Whiteboards, however, can also be parents to other content. This makes it easy to include relevant information to support the whiteboard in a spot that’s incredibly easy to find.
Integrations
Like any other part of Confluence, whiteboards are natively integrated with other Atlassian products, mainly Jira and Confluence. This means that with a few clicks you can pull in any number of Jira tickets or Confluence pages. This has make it much easier for me to plan out things like sprints (by visually showing tickets on a whiteboard) Confluence redesigns (by visually moving things around).
Some upcoming features will also allow us to create Confluence pages based on whiteboard summaries - further improving our ability to quickly share information. This particular feature also helps teams better utilize whiteboards as many times I find they get incredibly broad. The summary page helps teams understand what the whiteboard is about.
Another feature will allow you to change fields on the ticket (such as assignee or priority) just by dropping it onto a section. This can help teams better manage their tickets by giving them a visual, hands-on, way to quickly edit multiple tickets.
Single tool
Many organizations these days have 100’s of different tools they manage and maintain, so (almost) anything you can do to reduce that number is a win. Not only is it a cost savings, it reduces administrative overhead, as well as frustration. The first is important as your information technology teams are likely already stretched thin, so having one less thing on their plate is important. The second is important as your workers won’t have to struggle to remember which system is for what. Instead they just open up Confluence and everything they need is in there.
Whiteboards are still a relatively new feature, however, I’ve found a lot of use - and removed my reliance on other tools. They’re available in all versions of Confluence Cloud (but limited in Free/Standard to 3 per person). Definitely worth a look!
