Top Cloud Apps That Can Power Up Your Confluence
With the announcement that Atlassian is ending the server licensing for many of its products including Confluence, it is expected that many of its users will be migrating to the cloud in the next year or so.
New Confluence users will, by default, be on the cloud unless they choose the data center hosting capability.
Moving to the cloud is a highly encouraged step for businesses that want to experience greater flexibility and scalability.
As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we would like to support migration efforts by helping you get the most out of your Confluence Cloud.
In this article, we are highlighting a number of key cloud apps from the Atlassian Marketplace that admins like yourself can benefit from.
Read on to learn more about the apps and how they can help you deploy a highly usable Confluence Cloud.
Deliver a Well-Managed and Easy-to-Maintain Wiki Using Metadata
As an admin, wiki management is essential in ensuring that users can access, add, and search for content successfully.
To deliver this, your Confluence Cloud needs to be structured, consistent, and highly navigable.
However, Confluence Cloud’s limited metadata configuration (labeling feature), makes efficient institutional information management pretty hard to attain.
You need metadata management capabilities to help you pull data from your content, giving it structure as well as context.
Metadata for Confluence is an excellent app that you can leverage to help you manage content and maintain your wiki effectively.
You can combine document templates with metadata fields to create new content categories.
The app can help you create overviews across your wiki which can then improve content searchability and navigability for your users.
Users can also create new content with ease using pre-defined metadata fields.
Improve Document Management with Reviews and Approvals
Now that you’ve nailed wiki management, it’s time to improve document management.
Scaling your instance would mean adding more content to your wiki and creating new documentation.
However, unchecked documentation and content creation efforts can lead to a lot of unnecessary mistakes.
Having to take time to correct and revise them later would disrupt productivity.
If configurable workflows consisting of reviews and approvals are in place, documentation efforts can be improved tremendously.
With Comala Document Management, you can bring process control to your Confluence Cloud and designate workflow to documentation tasks.
You can configure simple approvals or more advanced workflows to your documents.
The app allows users to assign a reviewer to ensure that the content for a page or a blog is reviewed and signed-off.
Users can either apply the three installed workflows – each with different approval/review states and transitions – or customize their own workflow.
Gain Extensive Visual Data Presentation Capabilities
Data is central to any kind of business – the more data you have, the more the intelligence and insights you gain.
To help make sense of data and communicate a bigger picture of all the information you have, you need visual data presentation capabilities.
More precisely, you need to make sure that your users have the tools to create data visuals (charts, graphs, models, diagrams, and so on) with ease.
Gliffy Diagrams for Confluence is a fantastic app that can help you do just that.
Gliffy gives you pixel-by-pixel detail when you’re creating your visuals.
The solution offers such an intuitive interface and user experience that adoption is almost effortless after installation.
Key features of this app include the following:
- Drag and drop diagramming
- Automatic updates of all diagram duplicates
- Searchable diagrams via keywords
- Range of template availability
Remove Language Barriers Across Your Team
If you have a globally distributed workforce, then it’s important that you make content highly accessible for all your employees and make it easy for them to get critical information in their preferred language.
By meeting their needs this way, you help them improve productivity, feel connected to the organization, and highlight the value of institutional information.
Translations for Confluence helps remove language barriers by enabling you to deliver specific wiki content in the language preferred by your users.
The best thing about this app is that you don’t have to create multiple pages just because your wiki is multilingual; content remains on a particular page and is translated based on users’ language display preference.
The drop-down menu allows users to switch between the available language versions of a page.
Content editors can freely choose the language macros they want to use on a page and content will be displayed in users’ preferred language accordingly.
Support Collaboration by Enabling Platform Integration
If you have employees residing outside of Confluence – particularly, on SharePoint, then you’d be well-aware of how difficult it can be for users of both platforms to collaborate effectively.
You’d find users of both platforms sharing information and documentation outside of where they do work. For instance, through emails, private messaging, or personal cloud accounts.
While done with the best intentions, such a practice leads to project management inefficiencies and takes away transparency from collaboration efforts.
Close the digital gap between the two user groups and bring them together using SharePoint Connector for Confluence.
The app allows you to share and publish documents or lists from SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams or OneDrive within folders or as a preview in Confluence Cloud.
You can also embed Confluence Cloud pages in SharePoint. Once this is done, any changes made to the content will be automatically updated on both sides of the platforms.
Turn Your Confluence Cloud into a Team Workspace
Getting the most out of your Confluence Cloud leads to a higher adoption rate and greater digital capability among your employees.
However, the capacity of Confluence Cloud doesn’t stop there. Learn about what it means to have a team workspace and how your Confluence Cloud can become a central work hub for your transforming organization.
Read ‘The Ultimate Guide to Building a Confluence Cloud Team Workspace’ now.
