I’ve been over at Atlassian’s Team24 event (their yearly conference) and there are loads of interesting changes coming to their various products.  There’s so many I’m going to focus posts on each system - starting with Confluence!

Whiteboards

AI sorting

Using whiteboards for ideation is a very common use case… I find, however, that the board easily gets full with sticky notes and other information. Sure, I can manually go through and sort them… but soon AI will sort them by category for us.

I can easily see how this will help teams gather their ideas, but more importantly organize and action them. It will also help reduce the time it takes for a team to go from “we’ve got an idea” to “what do we do”. Shortening this gap is important as the bigger it is, the more energy and excitement the team loses. 

Voting

Folks will be able to vote directly on the whiteboard for their ideas. This looks similar to voting on a Jira issue - just click the thumbs up icon to vote on the sticky. Personally I haven’t used the voting features too much in Jira, but I’ve spoken to folks who find it very helpful in getting feedback from bigger groups.

This seems to be another great way to reduce the distance between “we’ve got an idea” and “what should be do”. Having it right in the whiteboard is also great, since folks won’t have to remember to look it up later and target what they wanted to do.

Databases

Pages can be built into databases

Personally I haven’t used databases very much as they’re a bit new, and missing some features I need… however, they now support the ability to build pages directly from a Database. This makes it easy to keep building out confluence and provides two-way linking between that page and the database.

This will speed up my process as I won’t have to go create a page, copy the link and come back any more… I can just create it from the database, use a template if I like and keep going. This will help keep me focused on my planning, and then circle back to the content.

Smart links can be added

This one is very interesting to me… we’re no longer limited to using only Confluence or Jira links within a database, we can link anything. And even better, that link can pull back information like a screenshot if it’s supported.  This makes it much easier to build dynamic, and interesting, databases without having to manually copy in that additional content.

Smart links in Content Tree

In addition to smart links appearing in databases, they’ll also now be available in the content tree. Personally I find this to be exciting since many times the teams I work with have resources outside of confluence (e.g. tableau, google docs, whatever), so having the ability to pull them then directly into Confluence and make them a link only further helps reduce friction in using Confluence.

Search / AI

Page Catchup

This feature tracks changes made to a page since you last saw it and summarizes them for you. Essentially an extension of summarizing a page, but something I’ll personally find very helpful since things change a lot!.

Suggested Searches

Suggested searches will now appear (powered by AI) and results should be more accurate. This seems like a small update, but having Confluence suggest searches (similar to how Google autocompletes its search) is a big usability / quality of life feature. It will help folks find content they maybe didn’t know was there and expand their knowledge - the entire point of Confluence.

Search expansion

Search’s scope will expand beyond confluence and cover all atlassian products. This will allow folks to find related information in compass, jira and other places where it otherwise may be hiding.

I think this will make the search feature a lot more interesting / usable as information can easily be in various places. Allowing Search to find it beyond just the scope of the system you happen to be in will make it easier for folks to find what they’re looking for and increase the system’s overall usefulness.