I've been finding the new databases extremely useful for planning and coordination. Several reasons why:
- The simplify content reuse (mostly)
- They enable more effective communication of plans that can be more easily referenced in other parts of the space.
- They have better controls than tables for data quality
- Use of tags, dates, and linking to other databases is fantastic for reducing manual data validation
- Hierarchy coordination with pages and new entries is very helpful
- The new feature to create new pages from entries, using templates is immensely helpful, especially since it can automatically make the page a child of the database for better organization.
A few things I'm seemingly missing, or finding only half-implemented:
- Useful API for more effective and selective data reuse with other work artifacts and systems outside of Confluence.
- Page excerpts are limited to the first excerpt only - no ability to select a particular excerpt - or better, select a set of excerpts with pattern matching (but maybe excerpts need titles that this can be limited to, in order to avoid data overload in a table view)
- Automatic calculations for numbers are awesome, but the "effective numbers" were forgotten. Specifically, look at the "Entry Backlink" when it is displayed as a number. Clearly, anyone using this will want to be able to use the same numeric calculations they use on regular number fields.
Those are the items that come to mind through my recent use. It would be awesome if anyone can point me to the jira entries requesting these things so I can upvote... though I did already find and upvote the main API entry, as that one is extremely important. I can probably also provide some details on the limitations of the available content reuse in a follow-up post, or in later comments.
Cheers!
