Confluence is a collaborative workspace where teams can create, edit, organize, and share knowledge through web browser. It is a corporate wiki developed by the Australian software company Atlassian.
Confluence enhances consistency and visibility across teams, ensuring everyone stays aligned and on the same page. Confluence Cloud and Confluence Data Center are the options available. In case of Confluence Cloud there is a free version available as well. Refer to this link for more information on Confluence Cloud subscriptions.

Space/Page/Page tree

Your content lives in pages ,i.e, the documents you create on your Confluence site. You can create pages for almost anything, from project plans to meeting notes, troubleshooting guides, SOPs, policies, and more. Use the Presenter mode option from More actions(…) of a published page to present it in full screen. Pages are stored in spaces,i.e, the workspaces where you can collaborate on work and keep all your content organized. It’s best to group related content together in the same space, but you can create as many or as few spaces as your team needs. Organize space content with a hierarchical page tree that makes finding work quick and easy. The page history helps you understand the number of changes made by users within a specific period of time. In addition, you can create a completely centralized content repository by hyperlinking the various pages.

Macros

Using macros helps you to extend the capabilities of your Confluence pages and live docs, allowing you to add extra functionality or include dynamic content. Typing “/” opens a list of available macros, allowing you to quickly search and insert them into a page without navigating through the toolbar. I will list a few of the macros that I have come across as follows.

  • Table of contents
    • An automated table of contents can be built into Confluence pages. The macro automatically picks up the contents based on the headings within a page.
  • Status
    • The Status macro displays a colored rounded box that is useful for reporting the status of a page, project, or task. It’s a simple yet effective way to communicate progress, priority, or any other relevant status information. 
  • Roadmap planner
    • Add the Roadmap Planner macro to a page to create a simple, visual timeline that’s useful for planning projects, releases and much more. It’s a simple yet effective way to represent upcoming plans with lanes, bars, and markers.
  • Quote
    • The Quote macro adds weight and credibility to your words with a visual cue, such as a vertical line on the left margin and a change in font color.
  • Change history
    • The change history macro shows the history of updates made to a page. The information displayed here are version number, date and comment(author). It displays the information inline.
  • Date
    • With the Date macro and the integrated date picker in an appealing calendar view, the current date or any other date can be quickly selected and integrated into pages.
  • Anchor links
    • The anchor link macro allows you to hyperlink to a specific part of a page or live doc so that a reader can jump directly to that section upon selecting it. These can be especially useful for allowing your readers to navigate to specific parts of a long document. Anchor links are invisible to the reader when on a page in view-only mode. This macro is used in combination with the link macro. The anchor link is set to a particular name that will be input to the link macro section with the # prefix and the display text. The display text will be visible to the reader. When the visible text is clicked, the reader will be taken to the part of the page where the anchor link is set and is invisible.
  • Decision
    • This macro gives you a nice and quick way to format and highlight any important decisions taken, especially during meetings. This macro adds some nice formatting and allows you to create decision reports. Starting your meetings with a review of past decisions and action items can make a huge difference.
  • Excel/Word/ppt/pdf
    • Embed Excel, word, ppt or pdf with respective macros. To use each of these files upload the respective file using the image macro and select the file. Later on, use the respective file type macro as above to display it.
  • Chart
    • The Chart macro allows you to display a chart based on tabular data. You can edit the macro parameters in the macro browser to configure the format of the chart.

Formatting toolbar & Content status

The formatting toolbar provides tools to format and color/highlight page content, create lists and tables, indent and align text, and insert other content into the page such as symbols, links, images, multimedia files, and macros. If a space admin allows statuses in a space, you can add or change them at the top of your content when editing. That means anyone with edit permissions can set the content status, choosing from the suggested options defined by the space admin or creating your own. Assign a status to your content to help set clear expectations for viewers and collaborators when they visit a page, live doc, or blog post.

Comments & Labels

For a page that is being prepared, you can use the comments feature to highlight the text and address the concerned team member with your comments. You can add comments to content while you’re editing it or viewing it in published status.

Labels are keywords that you can add to pages, live docs, and attachments to make them easier to group and find. For example, you could add the operations label to all pages related to operational activities. That would allow you to easily see, display, and search for related pages. It is handy for finding content across spaces if labels are consistently used. Labels are not only important to search results but can be extremely beneficial in dealing with certain macros. Since labels provide Confluence with another way of grouping information, you can use macros like Filter by label or the Labels list for more functionality and to easily navigate between content by looking for a topic or other articles if one does not meet your requirements. The Popular Labels macro can be used to generate the heat map of the most popular labels.

Whiteboard

Whether you’re brainstorming, planning projects, having a sprint retrospective or mapping out strategies, whiteboards provide a flexible canvas for collaboration. Use existing templates, sticky notes, shapes and connectors to visualize your thoughts and keep everyone on the same page. With real-time collaboration, your team can contribute simultaneously, making it easy to capture everyone’s input. Use a timer if you want to limit the sessions like in a retrospective.

If you have both a Confluence and Jira app in your Cloud site, you can seamlessly track project updates across both tools and create Jira work items without leaving the Confluence content you’re working on. To display Jira work items list on a Confluence page, use the Jira work items macro. Display a single work item, a list of work items, or show the total number of work items using separate macros. The simplest way to add a Jira work item to Confluence is to paste a Jira URL on a Confluence page or doc.

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