How we manage Confluence Cloud changes in our company

[#1]

Hello there,

I wrote my first article to present how we try to handle changes for Confluence Cloud, and get some feedback from the community regarding our process.

So since our Cloud migration, our 2600 users have to get used to a solution were the change is permanent. 
This is quite a step for a more than 125 years company used to mainframes and paper !

I will explain how we configure our site, how we get and share the information to be sure that we are ready to support our users. 

Manage Release Track

We configured our Release tracks as below

• Confluence PROD -> Bundled

• Confluence Sandbox -> Preview

It allows us to get the changes on the sandbox, to experimente and try the changes with a small group of users is needed before the effective release on Prod. 

Get release notes informations

Based on this screen, we copy/paste all the changes in a table on a specific page stored on our Confluence space dedicated to Confluence.

We add the following informations for each new change:

• Users Impacted

  • Users

  • Confluence Space Admin

  • Confluence Admin

• Prequisites

  • Atlassian Intelligence

  • Jira Cloud

  • ...

• Communication

  • Confluence Blog Post

  • Company Intranet

  • None

At the end of the day the table looks like  

Room for improvement…

Get a csv file with all changes for a specific release

What could be great is to have a csv file at each release to import as a table in Confluence using Table Filter or better in a Confluence database that we are trying now.

Use Confluence DataBase

We will start to use Confluence DataBase instead of a table to store and follow the changes per release with our stakeholders. It will help to create a simple board for each Release based on a filter with the release date, using our Communication tag as column.
If you want to know how with use the Communication tag, please read the next chapter.

❓If Atlassian is able to communicate the releases notes with a CSV it could be great just to import the data in our DataBase instead of creating them manually !

Share release notes with Stakeholder

We have a commitee including Collaboration Solution Stakeholders in our company, and we review all the changes a few days before the are released on Prod.

We have a meeting with them, and we use the Release Note page to review all changes and make decision regarding the way we want to handle them.

Communication of the change

The main goal is to define what will be communicated to the users and to take action if necessary.

We identified the following communication, depending on the impact of the change

• Confluence Blog Post

  • The change is important to communicate to our users, but this is not impacting the whole company.
    In this case, we add a description of the change in our Confluence Blog post for the release

• Intranet

  • The change is critical and need to be communicated widely to the company.
    In this case, we send the information to our Internal Communication Team so that it is published on our Company Intranet

• None

  • The change is not important or is not impacting our Users.

Other Actions

Support Team

Some of the changes need to be communicated specifically to our LVL 1 and 2 so that they have the right informations to support the users.

Exemple:

• the new Confluence interface

So the comitee decide, based on our suggestion, to involve or not the Support Teams, and what is the correct option from a specific communication to a meeting or some addtionnal user guides.

Specific Documentation

For some of the changes, it appears that we are able to create a specific documentation, whereas there is a clear usecase in our company for the change, or any need to highlitght the feature.

We also make specific documentation sometimes for our non-english speakers, to be sure they have all the information requested to enjoy the new features (exemple: Confluence Whiteboard) .

Share release notes with Users

It appears that, based on the last year, we always create at list a blog post on Confluence

What is on the blog post ?

On the blog post, we highlight each changes, grouping them by category and if possible linking them to a use case.

We make the blog post as readable and short possible, and we add a link to the Relase Note page generated before so that our most curious users have access to the whole list of changes.

Hint

• We create a TL;DR; section at the top of the blog post with a few bullet points

• We add an Announcement Banner on Confluence to share this blog post

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Do you have such a process in your company ?

I will glad to have any feedback or Experience sharing on this topic !

[Darryl Lee]

Thank you so much for this post @Patrice Champet !

We migrated to Cloud exactly one year ago, and set up our Prod/Sandbox instances with Bundled/Preview Tracks just as you did.

Just like you, many of us are frustrated by the lack a better delivery mechanism for monthly release notes, and like you we have resigned ourselves to manually copying/pasting from the monthly emails to a Confluence page. A CSV or API endpoint would be terrific.

I love your table (and future database) for tracking impact, prerequisites, and communications, AND the blog you maintain. Alas I don't know if I can devote that much time to this.

What I'm doing is a monthly "Atlassian Cloud Change Review" meeting that I've opened up to any interested stakeholders.

I walk through upcoming features, try to do demos on our Sandbox (sometimes the new features aren't there yet, grrr), and take any questions or comments.

In fact I had a meeting today for the 2025.06.09 Bundled Release, and inspired by you, I added some broad category lozenges to each issue and moved all the irrelevant ones (for instance, we don't use Team-managed projects) down to the bottom of the list so I could more easily skip them.

[Darryl Lee]

BTW, for folks taking my "lazy" approach, I will note that the emails from Atlassian (ex: "Bundled changes for your product for Jira") at least have proper formatting, so that when you copy/paste into Confluence, each of the feature titles is "Heading 4". So you can add a "Table of Contents" macro at the top and it's somewhat useable.

I do a little more work, removing extra linefeeds, but yeah, usually that's about it.

It would probably be possible to write a script to split Titles from Descriptions and put those into separate columns in a Table, and probably also take educated guesses about Impact, and Prerequisites. Or ask AI to do it. :-P

[Jens Schumacher - Released_so]

I've been struggling to keep up to date with Cloud changes and looking to bring them into a format that is easier to consume. Happy to make it available to the community once it's done. 

Would love to hear what you would be looking for in an improved format. 

[Martina Guth]

Hi @Patrice Champet

As you are going to work, we already insert all of the new changes to a database. This means, two persons in our team are checking the release notes and find out, which ones are important to us as admins or to our users. We have the same release track, like you - bundled for prod and direct for sandbox. A more automatized way to get the data to a database would help us a lot.

The database contains some filters for our users, so that they can filter on impact, system (confluence or jira), target group and so on.

Communication: The release notes database is linked in our company hub, called 📣News Hub in our company. There we have our newest documentations for confluence and jira, training offers, the link to our cip system (which is built up in jsm), and a "Shortcut of the month". Every month, we change the shortcut information and then set a banner in Confluence and JIRA, that the release notes and the shortcut are new.
Is it worth the work and do people consume the information? Let me say - it can work better, but it is a good starting point with 1631 views and 178 unique visitors during the last 30 days.

@Patrice Champet , thank you very much for sharing in that detailed way, how you work. It is inspiring and has a really good strategy and structure. Let´s learn from each other.

Kind regards,
Martina

[Jens Schumacher - Released_so]

Since changelogs are kind of our thing, we built a free tool to make it actually useful:

👉 https://cloud-updates.released.so

Here’s what it does:

• 🆕 Highlights what’s new this week

• 🔍 Search and filter by product or status

• 📊 Table view for power users

• 📥 Export to CSV or PDF

• 📰 RSS feed to stay up to date

Caveat: It currently only supports the continues updates coming from the cloud changelog. I've spent some time with @Darryl Lee to explore if we can add more detail to the update and also support bundled releases. 

But before we invest much more time, I wanted to hear if people find this useful at all. 

[Rick Westbrock]

@Patrice Champet you mentioned "Based on this screen, we copy/paste all the changes" but for those of us not using the bundled track yet how are you able to copy the changes from the release tracks page?

Currently I rely on the weekly Cloud Changes e-mail but I have to just search for "new this week" items and curate those to add them to our monthly internal Atlassian User Group meeting notes page ahead of time. The down side of this method is that the changelog often doesn't have a lot of detail and rarely has any links to documentation pages.

That being said I am going to check out the tool provided by @Jens Schumacher - Released_so as that looks like a promising alternative.