Comments and mentions on drafts - collaborative editing

Question

Consider this use case:

There is a confluence page that is being updated for the next version, and few people are working on it together. They can see each others updater real time, that's great, but in reality not everyone works at the same time on the same thing necessarily. So how to communicate on changes on the collaborative draft? Well, we can add comments, yes. But the mentioned users don't get any notification as long as the comments stay on the draft. If this is a long-ish confluence page, it's not feasible to hunt the "yellow sections" i.e. comments.

We currently have to let each other know about such comments via another communication methods (e.g. slack). "hey I changed this part, can you please review?". Obviously this is sub-optimal, and not what I have in mind when "collaborative editing" is mentioned.

Think of Google Docs "suggestions" or at the very least the comments that notify users.

Question is: Am I missing something fundamental here? Or does Confluence really not have any of these collaboration features (particularly notification of comments in drafts; it's clear that it doesn't have a "suggestion" feature).

Any help is appreciated!

Julie d_Antin _Elements__bsgnak · Answer

Hi @Can Yildiz Have you tried tagging colleagues in the comments where their attention is needed? That will trigger a notification by Confluence.

It sounds like you don't want collaborators to publish the page until all changes are made, correct? If that's the case, what about using the new status feature at the top of the page to indicate that the page is in progress/draft? You can publish the page, but people viewing the page will know that it's not finished yet.

Daniel Eads · Answer

While it's slightly different than the "make a suggestion" with the approve/reject options, you could consider using in-line comments while editing to leave suggestions. These show up as yellow highlights on the text in question. You can leave in-line comments on the Edit screen and see them while editing, both without having to publish the page.

Cheers,
Daniel

Dave Mathijs · Answer

Hi @Can Yildiz welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I understand what you're saying. Confluence pages are either published or in draft. When they are published you can see the changes between the current version and the previous version.

When pages are in draft and collaborative editing is used, you'll only see real time changes being made while multiple people are editing a page. Within a draft, there's no change log.

The difference with Google Docs is that these docs are "live" all the time, there is no unpublished draft.

So I don't really have an alternative here, there is indeed a difference on how Confluence and Google Docs work in terms of real time editing.