Request for feedback & interviews: Shape the future of Sharing in Confluence

[#1]

Hello community members!

I’m Nidhi, Sr. Product Manager on the Confluence team. Over the years, Confluence has adapted its capabilities to foster more collaboration and engagement amongst our users. But we know there is room to grow!

Help shape the future of Sharing in Confluence

What capabilities would you wish in Confluence to help you collaborate better with your team?

Specifically, among the below functionalities, which would you say is the top one that you and your team would benefit from:

• scheduled share: allows you to share a page at a specified future time
• ability to lock down or share specific parts within a page
• combined sharing and access management
• share within social like Share in Slack

I would love to meet and hear your thoughts if you are open to it! Schedule some time via this link: https://calendar.app.google/481QeUctUrb1ZmuT9

[Amanda Barber]

From these functionalities, the ability to lock down or share specific parts within a page would be most useful to my use case! There are times I want to share our release notes, but don't want to give full edit access to our Customer Success team. However, they should be able to check off their tasks I've assigned, for example.

[Andy Gladstone]

I can't pick just one, so here they are in order of preference, which just happens to be the order that you have them listed in! 

1. scheduled share: allows you to share a page at a specified future time
   1. Sometimes editing a page at 2AM is not the best time to share it for maximum engagement. I want to schedule it for just after the users first coffee break of the following morning, when they are caffeinated and attentive!
2. ability to lock down or share specific parts within a page
   1. Like @Amanda Barber said, this would be great where we need to assign specific tasks or actions to a team member or group, but don't want them editing any other parts of the page.
3. combined sharing and access management
   1. TBH, not 100% sure what you mean here. Assuming this is like giving quasi admin rights to page owners, I think this would be something that may allow more to contribute to a space or site knowing they can limit how their content is viewed and manipulated.
4. share within social like Share in Slack
   1. Slack is just the medium of communication, I'm not 100% convinced that there needs to be full blown access to a page in Slack (I feel the same about MS Teams).

I'll sign up for a session too so we can speak more!

[Nidhi Raj]

Thanks so much @Amanda Barber and @Andy Gladstone ! Your thoughts certainly helps us frame our roadmap. Appreciate you making the time to chat with me as well!

I do want to add - the list I gave are really just examples. Feel free to pull examples from your experience using other digital tools or your experience using Confluence where you had moments of "I really wish.." there was a certain capability that would help you collaborate better with others. 

[Sing Chen]

Hi @Nidhi Raj 

A few ideas come to mind (apologies, not all strictly related to sharing, but arguably all have a sharing aspect to them):

• The ability to lock down or share specific parts within a page would be huge. When I think of this, I think of visibility of macros - for example, being able to add a macro that contains instructions to page editors that users don't require to see.

• Template "sets" / Hierarchical template would be great. A lot of our work is project-based and we'd love to have the ability to have a template for a project's landing page and also be able to create a set of child pages (based on termplates) under the landing page for standard project management artifacts. Example: Project Landing page with pages under it for Communication Plan, RACI, Meetings Landing Page with (template-driven) meeting pages under it, timeline, status, risks, issues, etc. One approach we tried was to have a 'Create from template' macro for different artifacts included in the landing page template (see below with 4x 'create from template' macros on the main template. Having this visible to only page editors (per the above thought) would be great.

           

• The ability to edit content in the placeholder text macro.
• Linking labels with pages. Being able to re-home a page based on a label (or set of labels) would be powerful. For example, we have a 'Projects Directory' branch in the page tree for a space and under that, child branches for Active, On Hold, and Closed projects. Every project in each of these child branches will have corresponding labels (active, on-hold, closed) in combination with other distinguishing labels. Having the ability to have a project (and all it's child pages) moved from Active to On Hold by changing the active label to on-hold would streamline our workflow. Currently, we have to change the label and drag and drop the project.

          

• The ability to resize the vertical aspect of a smart link in the 'embed' option would provide greater control over page layout. Below is an example of a smart link to an Atlas view. There are many projects in the list so the scroll bar appears, but no option to reduce the size of the scrollbar by making the embedded link 'taller'.

           

• A native tooltip macro.
• Ability to format the title in the expand macro (particularly style/font size). It's not sufficiently prominent.
• Dynamic page reference in Include Page macro. Use case: a page that shows weekly updates. The weekly updates are generated in another part of the spaces' page tree by template and are prefixed with a date (so we have "04-Aug-2023: Weekly Business Update", "11-Aug-2023: Weekly Business Update", etc). We have an 'Include Page' macro that points to the "04-Aug-2023" page but when the "11-Aug-2023" page is created, the Include Page macro needs to be pointed to the new page. Being able to dynamically update the page referenced based on criteria (e.g. combination of labels and time - last created for example) would streamline the work.

I'm sure there are more but these are the ones that are top of mind based on usage I see across our team and other teams doing similar work.

Thanks,

Sing

[Nidhi Raj]

Thank you for taking the time to respond, Sing! I will pass on the remaining suggestions to other PMs in Confluence :)