Refined for Jira and Confluence by Refined
Refined for Jira and Confluence
“Warning! Threat detected! Immediate action required!” Your mother ship’s operating system detects a lethal virus that’s fast approaching. Your crew members are on the edge of their seats as they’re waiting for your next move – you must be swift! Building an escape portal is the only way to get everyone to safety but there’s a blocker! Your crew members are operating in silos, as different platforms are used across the ship. Time’s running out – what’s your plan?
A Real-World Crisis Much like in space adventures, a lot of unpredictable things can happen to businesses in the real world. The current pandemic is a prime example of that.
Box, a cloud content management and file sharing solution provider with about 2,000 employees, had to quickly find a way to deliver COVID information, policies, and organizational updates in real-time as employees commenced remote working in the middle of March 2020. The company’s senior executives had two clear goals in mind:
• Making sure that all employees understood Box’s offices were closed indefinitely;
• All employees had access to health and safety guidelines.
Delivery and accessibility of content were key to this crisis management plan, and the idea was to build a site to host all the content. However, integration was an issue standing in the way.
Unavoidable Silos Here’s the thing, Box was transitioning between intranets at the time, so the company couldn’t simply add a page to its company-wide site and call it a day.
Jira, Confluence, and Box Notes were at the center of the business functions, and different types of information were hosted across the[1]se three platforms. With tech ops and engineers preferring Confluence, product and support teams favoring Jira, and Box Notes storing a good amount of key documentation, silos were pretty evident.
This clearly wasn’t an ideal situation, especially when employees were going to work remotely across the globe. That was when Box’s IT Systems Engineer, Micheal Cyr, decided to build a portal that could bring all users from all the platforms together. To make it possible, refined for Jira and Refined for Confluence were brought into the picture.
One Portal to Bridge Them All Refined offers Atlassian users the capability to make content clear, accessible, and actionable through its site building product, which is integrated with Jira and Confluence. In simpler terms, if you want to build Confluence and Jira content onto your own site, refined offers the infrastructure to do so.
Cyr had leveraged Refined solutions to build 15 sites enterprise-wide. Based on the success rate box had had with Refined, it was only sensible for them to collaborate again to build this crisis management portal. The main idea here was to have the portal up on both Jira and Confluence, hosting content and resources from Box’s main site.
According to Cyr, he was very much familiar with Refined at the point, so he knew instantly that both apps could help him set up the portal in a short amount of time.
Understanding the requirements was key to building the portal. Cyr had three considerations while working on the portal with Refined:
1. Identifying the types of important content that had to surface the portal as the pandemic unraveled;
2. Positioning this content at the top of the page to maintain ease of navigation
3. Continuously evaluate users’ needs to maintain engagement.
Ready for Takeoff The portal was built almost instantly! With the help of internal customers, Cyr even had time to make a few quick iterations. In fact, it was ready right before remote working arrangements commenced
Cyr used templates to get the portal up and running quickly. He used a wireframe to help internal customers envision and build their own sites.
Once everything was ready for launch, Box’s Chief People Officer, Jessica Swank, revealed the establishment of the portal in a company-wide email. It was used to support the announcement of the work-from-anywhere policy. In the first week alone, more than 500 users visited the portal. Box also reported that traffic has remained high throughout the pandemic. Sure enough, that spelled success.
At a time when things were highly uncertain, unstable, and scary, Box made sure that its employees are kept in the know constantly and consistently by delivering up-to date information through the portal. Bottom line is, managing a crisis is never a walk in the park, but with the right partner you can even take on the galaxy.