Adopting Confluence in conjunction with Jira Software

Danielle Allen

Hello,

I am the lead technical expert at a fully remote B2B consulting services agency. We provide consulting services to 15+ business clients which involve;

• Daily tasks that are automatically created as tickets in a Jira Software Project
• Longer-term projects that are created manually in a Jira Software Project
• Manually, weekly reporting on the progress of each type of task

I am not a Jira expert, just the most technically savvy manager and I have been tasked with reviewing whether Confluence would allow us to provide external reporting that is streamlined from our current process (Google Sheets / Toggl / Google Slides / Emailing to clients) and internal document control (Google Docs for SOPs). Potentially also using Confluence as a basic CRM. 

I set up Jira Software for ticket management and have built all of the automations myself through Jira and Zapier but I don't know if I have done it in the best way possible, it works for the most part. I have a custom field on each ticket that populates the Client Name for reporting purposes.

What I would like to know from the community is;

• Can I use Confluence as a CRM, building a page for each Client and automatically linking all tickets to that page?
• Can I create reporting that the client sees, without giving them access to anything else?
• Can I build pages for Internal SOPs and link them to tickets or Projects?
• Is there anything I should know about Confluence or Confluence Apps?
• And most importantly; how much time would you recommend budgeting for setting this up? If I build a dozen Client Pages, reporting for each and around 15 Internal SOP documents, plus the initial setup and integration.

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Danielle Allen 

1. You can integrate Jira and Confluence, and automate linking Jira issues to a page. However if what you want to do is have the page present a list of the Jira issues, that is done by using a Jira Macro in Confluence rather than a "link" to each issue.

2. Confluence divides content into Spaces. Within Spaces there are Pages. Pages are organized in a tree within a space. You can manage access at the Space level so that users can see only selected Spaces. You can also place Restrictions on Pages to limit who can see and edit them. Page Restrictions are inherited so if you set a restriction on who can see a page then only those people (or a subset) can see any of its child pages.

In order for the Client to have access to see the content of Confluence they may need to be licensed users of Confluence. There is a Beta feature for Guest users in Confluence, where the Guest does not require a license. Here is some reference material on that:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Single-space-guests-now-on-Confluence-Cloud/ba-p/2121527

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/invite-guests-for-external-collaboration/

Note though that the Client users would also require access to Jira to be able to see Jira information that is pulled real-time into Confluence.

3. Yes, in Jira you can add links in individual issues to Confluence pages.

4. There are many things to know about Confluence and Confluence related apps, much more than can possibly be conveyed in a single user forum post.

5. I don't think I can accurately estimate the time needed to accomplish such a task. It depends a lot on your level of experience. There are a lot of unknowns in your scenario that I would want to know before making such an estimate. (Disclaimer: I work for an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner that could provide assistance with such work.)