is there a way to alert users to critical content posted since their last visit?

Question

Hi all,

I'm looking for an effective way to present some sort of Alert in our users' Confluence page that will notify them of certain posts that were created/edited since their last login.  The idea is to have various pages that we've created (Known Issues, Important Announcements, etc) feed this alert, which will appear until the article that was created or edited is viewed.  Ideally, we'd then be able to read a report of some sort of who at least navigated to the page so we can have some basic sense of how aware our staff might be of the change.

We currently Notify Watchers, but we can't rely upon each of our engineers to read the generated email.

Any ideas?

Susan Ostreicher · Answer

Some other thoughts... If you're using Cloud, Analytics for Confluence Cloud will show who's viewed a page.  It's simple and easy to use, but expensive for what it is.

To create a feed, you could use the Recently Updated macro and use labels to control which pages appear there.  For example, you could add an "alert" label to specific pages, and then set the macro parameters to include only that label.  But this wouldn't meet your original requirement of having the page disappear from the list after the user clicks on it.

Good luck!

Brian Anderson · Answer

Hi Susan,

Thanks for the suggestion!  I haven't tried or heard of Viewtraciker, but unfortunately we're also on Cloud.

I almost see this as an expansion of the Notifications feed, but:

a) the admin would be able to dictate what appears in the feed

b) the admin can see when and who has clicked on what, so they can devise another communication strategy if necessary for certain topics

c) it would be a gadget that can be added to a page.

Susan Ostreicher · Answer

Hi Brian,

Have you tried the Viewtracker add-on?  I haven't tried this because it's not available for Cloud, but it seems like it would solve your problem of knowing who viewed the page.

It doesn't provide a way to put alerts in Confluence itself.  Then again, if you did that, you might run into the same challenge as you do with Notify Watchers - you still can't guarrantee that everyone will click on the alert.