include page in e-mail

Question

Hi, I'm trying to increase adoption of Confluence across my organisation, but many of the senior stakeholders travel a lot and are wedded to their smartphones. They are huge fans of reading content offline in their e-mail inboxes, and it's hard to move them away from this feature, which I must admit is a very useful feature. The big problem with Confluence is that it's not available offline, so if someone sends out some useful information then the only way for those people to read it offline is to send the content in an e-mail.

I was thinking that one compromise would be to allow users to easily embed the contents of a Confluence page into an e-mail. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be possible using in-built Confluence functionality; I am reduced to advising my colleagues to create a Confluence page, then copy&paste into an e-mail (clunky). The alternative is to export to PDF then attach to the e-mail, but this process is even more lengthy and doesn't exactly show Confluence in a good light.

This may be a feature request rather than a query, but is it possible to do what I want? A suggestion would be to check a box when sharing a page (or a blog post) that converts the page contents into an e-mail and includes it in the notification that is sent out when a page is shared.

Thoughts and suggestions are appreciated!

Dafydd James1 · Answer

Thanks for your response! Yes, I understand the potential difficulties of rendering some types of content into a HTML e-mail, but I wouldn't expect any of the JS or anything to work; just a best-effort version of the page, even putting placeholders in to substitute for difficult-to-render components.

You are correct about the users not engaging as much with Confluence if they don't see the information in context. Unfortunately, some of the recipients of the e-mails are unlikely to ever even log in to Confluence. I suspect that a PDF might be the best compromise. It would be excellent if a plugin existed to "e-mail as PDF", because, like it or not, a lot of people still distribute information by e-mail.

Adrien Ragot 2 · Answer

Confluence doesn't have this option and I don't know of any plugin which does it. It is quite difficult to render Confluence pages outside of Confluence because they come with a few attachments such as javascript enhancements, images, urls, which are difficult to ship in an email.

Of course attaching a PDF to the email could be a solution for your issue. However, don't forget that:

* If people don't see the page in Confluence, they won't be in the context of commenting and interacting;
* Thanks to the workaround of seeing their page in the email, they may even forget their password.

It is generally good for a website when people browse it often. Of course, I understand your motivations for offline browsing and if you find a plugin with this feature, please share it with us!