Cross Referencing People Pages

Question

When making meeting notes, it would be great to be able to link references to people back to individual pages containing bios and information for those people, either automatically or semi-automatically (e.g. using @mentions). The people mentioned are usually external and so don't have confluence accounts. The idea would be to build up a list of documents where that person is mentioned, meetings they have attended, along with a bio and any other information about them which may be useful. Is there any functionality in confluence which can achieve this? If not is there an addon which might do something similar?

Cheers!

Robert Reiner _smartics_ · Answer

The projectdoc Toolbox supports this use case.

The Person Blueprint allows to hold information about people (part of the free Core Blueprints). The projectdoc Toolbox provides the Name List Macro that references documents of a given type. You would need to design a meeting notes template using the the Document Properties Marker Macro and the Name List Macro to reference the person documents. There is a Minutes Blueprint (on Bitbucket) as part of the Project Management Add-on which is not yet available on the Atlassian Marketplace, but may serve as an example for the meeting notes template.

In the following example the Attendees property (within the Document Properties Marker Macro) will reference Charlie Brown and Jane Doe.

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If the names in the Name List Macro match names of existing person document instances, a link will be rendered. It may also contain names that do not match such a document (for people that took part in the meeting, but you do not want to provide details for).

The meetings people have attended could be easily listed on the person documents using the Display Table Macro (using a query on meeting notes documents like ($<Attendees>=[${Name}] - the weird syntax ensures exact matches).

There is an example described in Collecting Information. It uses resources and authors (to build a library) instead of minutes and attendees, but the procedure is quite similar.

Please note that the projectdoc Toolbox is a commercial add-on for servers only (not cloud). It is required for the Core Blueprints to work. You'll find more information about it on its website. Please also note that I'm one of the authors!

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Rodney Hughes · Answer

Since these people don't have a Confluence account as a User on your system, you would have to create a normal page somewhere in your Space and manually complete the bio info etc.  Then in your meeting notes you would have to manually insert a link to their page with their name as the link text, but knowing which pages link to it is a bit more difficult - I think Confluence does track "incoming links" to a page but I am not sure how or where that is done.