A Love of All Shapes and Sizes - draw.io Diagrams for Confluence

[#1]

The Confluence apps/plugins I love the most are the ones my users find the most valuable.  My most recent love is the draw.io Diagrams for Confluence app.

Draw.io is a diagramming editor tool, similar to MS Visio, offering a large number of pre-built shapes which provides an endless variety of possibilities.

BYOS – Bring Your Own Shapes. If draw.io doesn't have the shapes you need, which I would find difficult to believe, you can import your own library of custom shapes.

Some of my Confluence users even dumped Visio for their new crush, draw.io Diagrams for Confluence.

When I first introduced the app to our users on the Confluence server, it was love at first sight. A flurry of user comments rolled in on how easy it was to use to draw a diagram; they felt like they were cheating. They shared their affection for the app and talked about how they were using it.

In the words of the poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: flowcharts, architecture diagrams, data warehouse key object diagrams, floor plans, hierarchy diagrams, website mock-ups, minds maps, context diagrams, process flows, networks diagrams, activity templates, and the list goes on.

Here is an example on how one Confluence user used draw.io to create a visual to help explain how an idea turns into a completed project.

And sometimes draw.io is used to create a decorative way to display information, like this candy heart I created. (Literally, took me 2 minutes to create.)

Make a boo-boo? You don't need someone to kiss it better. In Confluence the draw.io diagrams are saved as attachments which means you can restore to a previous version.

Plus, you can export the image and use them in other places, like Atlassian articles. 😊

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Awesome post! The draw.io looks super useful as approximately 70% of people are visual learners. Seeing a diagram of an idea to project process resonates with me more than pages of documentation. Thanks for sharing!

[MadelineBarr]

Thanks Jodi!

My users find the add-on really easy to use and the diagram does help. The user that made the diagram also makes a copy of the diagram and adds a you-are-here arrow and adds it to each project proposal page. This helps employees figure out what they need to do next to get their idea made into a project.