Has anyone successfully synchronised Confluence tasks / actions with another service?

Question

I really would like to use a dedicate todo management tool eg: Todoist, to be my source of truth for all tasks.

I'm struggling to find if there is anyway to feed confluence tasks into Todoist (even with a third-party tool like Zapier or IFTTT).

Has anyone successfully done this before?

Matthew Lewis · Answer

I've been looking for a way to solve a similar problem in this area. (Thanks @Stephen Sifers for the info, I'll do more homework with those resources.)

The problem with the Task Macro is that it's perfect only if all the users are all on the same page with what actually is "a task", they put them on the pages that are labeled with the right labels to link them together to the top-view page, and I think they also have to be all within the same Confluence space.

My team didn't do it that way. Some use Jira, some don't. Some use it in different ways (as in using it to keep track of tasks, whereas some actually use sprints.) Some use Confluence tasks as their own visual task list, so the macro would pull in a bunch of noise along with the relevant tasks. I can't expect my team to make that big of a behavioral sea change right now so I need something simpler.

I'm hoping that I can get close enough with this plan, and I'd love it if someone else who figured it out can give me their advice:

* Clone their pages and move them into one space.
* Put one task list on each subpage which will show up in the macro on a top page.
* Top page will have the task macro, a jira filter with roadmap-only ticket links (i.e. epics.)
* Add a Trello board to the top view page for a visual/spatial view of the prog.* Hopefully the board will link well enough to the epics but this is a nice-to-have.
* I might need to have a separate workflow for the epics to show a more organic-but-accurate status badge.

* This will be manually curated but hopefully there's an app in the Atlassian suite or a plugin that will make this a little better automated.

Adrian_glb6as · Answer

Is it possible to do something with the Task Report macro?

The macro has the ability to collate all tasks from a set of pages/sub pages and apply filters on labels, assigned to, completed/incomplete etc.

Stephen Sifers · Answer

Hello Jeremy,

Confluence tasks are a quick and efficient way to record what needs to be done and who it commented/assigned to each item. With this said, tasks are not recorded as individual items and are simply text on a Confluence page used to represent a “task”. Along with this, there is not an API call to extract just tasks within the Confluence. If you attempted to gain access to the tasks within a page, you would have to make a GET content call and from that call you would have to attempt to parse out the content within the storage format of the page to get the tasks (if any were present). Doing this would be highly problematic as your data from the GET request would not be clean are easily readable from an additional integration tool.

There are additional options within Confluence where you can use Add-ons to gain further functionality around tasks lists.

Do more with Confluence

For even more ways to organize your tasks in Confluence, check out these apps from the Atlassian Marketplace:

* Comala Workflows: Improve document collaboration by assigning users to review, approve, and publish pages
* TodoMe for Confluence: Add, assign, and view tasks from every Confluence page
* Agile Retrospectives for Confluence: Interactively assign action items to team members

Source Document: Add, Assign, and View Tasks.

Your best use for tasks to have them synced with additional tools would be to use Jira. From Jira you would create tasks with the users assigned to them. From there you can use a Kanban board or 3rd party integration software to then display your list of open issues/tasks.

There is a blog posts that covers a few way to become more productive while using the Atlassian suite. You can find more at the blog post; 6 ways to be more productive with your to-do list.

I hope this clarifies the ability to extract data from tasks via the API along with additional resources to use for your tasks lists.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers