Status Reporting Copy/Paste "Automation"

[Joshua Lai]

Tool: Confluence Data Center (on-premise)

I have a request to automate weekly status reporting between project leads (initial input), managers (review/revise) and executives (review/revise).  There will be several departments  with their respective managers involved in this process.

Here's what needs to happen each week

1. Weekly reports submitted by project leads across multiple departments
2. Managers of each department edit and finalize their respective set of reports
3. Executives review each managers' set of reports and finalize revisions for overall report
4. Consolidate all status reports by departments and publish the overall deliverable into Microsoft Word

Initial Thoughts:

• Each status report will need its formatting (e.g., bold, bullets) preserved to some degree.  Entries will be utilizing bullets with possible use of sub-bullets
• I wanted project leads to have the option of copying the previous week's entry as a potential starting point, if needed, and therefore needed to preserve the initial "raw" input and keep it separate from the managers overwriting the entry in order to create their own revised versions.
• Because each manager would be reviewing, revising and submitting their set of status reports (i.e., 5-8 weekly reports), it would be really beneficial to allow each manager to view their respective set of weekly status reports on one weekly page
• Similar to the manager review/update process, the executives would review each manager's page of multiple status reports and make their revisions before overall publishing, preserving the manager's version while finalizing the executive version
• The executive version would then need to be published from Confluence into a single Microsoft Word document each week (i.e., separate issue to be addressed on how to preserve formatting between Confluence & Word)
• At the end of the weekly cycle, it'd be efficient and convenient to clone the page tree in order to create the following week's set of pages (i.e., start the whole process again)
• Using the Excerpt macro or Include Page macro won't help here because text will be changing between the project leads/managers as well as managers/executives

Possible Solution Ideas:

1. I thought about initially using Comala (Document Manager) and its workflow capabilities, but I wasn't sure how that would work if I have multiple weekly status reports on one page (one section for each project status).  It would be great if I could show some kind of metric that 3 of the 5 reports due have been completed so the manager knows not everyone has submitted their report yet. 
2. For the manager's version that would be edited, I thought about using a low-tech approach where I would need to figure out how to use automation (or a macro/button) to copy/paste text from the project lead's section to the manager's section within the same page (i.e., also open to creating a separate page dedicated to the manager as long as the text gets "auto-copied" to it).  Is copy/paste "automation" the best solution?
3. For publishing the overall report from Confluence to MS Word process, I haven't yet figured out how best approach that issue because the Export to Word feature does not work well at all.  I would like to preserve formatting as much as possible, but I suppose performing a manual copy/paste and then using Format Painter in MS Word afterwards might be the only solution for its final format. 

I still believe Confluence is the right product for this project and am interested in any simple elegant solutions to consider.  All ideas are welcome!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

@Joshua Lai it would be much easier if we were talking about a cloud that supports native automation (and now AI) 😅

I haven't worked that much with Confluence DC, but I know some of my teammates used ScriptRunner for Confluence to build similar processes and automate stuff.
I don't know much about Comala, so I won't comment on that.
Also, regarding the publish status - if you had one 'dashboard' which would actually contain Page properties report macro, maybe you could pull page properties from each page and this would be some kind of quick overview for everything relevant 🤔

When it comes to those new weekly pages, have you thought of using page templates for this case? These could contain main formatting and placeholders, and folks could just add new status updates each week. 👀

Lastly, regarding the export to Word, from my experience, one of the best exporters would be Scroll Word Exporter so maybe you could give that a go. Native functionalities are definitely now enough if you want to retain formatting and potentially put some additional styling within exported content.

I mean, this can probably be built within Confluence, but it's quite a plug-and-play kind of thing, so it might take some time to finalize an adequate process.

Cheers,
Tobi