Confluence and Team Central

[#1]

Benefits of linking to Team Central

Many teams have a Confluence page to show what their team is working on. If you're using Jira, you might be familiar with the Jira issue macro or Smart Links. Just pasting a link to a Jira issue on a Confluence page allows you to see the issue's name and its current status. Team Central has the same easy integration!

You'll be able to show Team Central goals/project names and statuses on a Confluence page. Some teams like sections underneath links where they can provide additional information, but since you've already created a great project homepage in Team Central, you won't need to do that! A compact display option might be to put links in a table (or even in-line in a sentence) in Confluence, and interested people can click through to your project's page in Team Central. The status is shown in Confluence next to the project name, and clicking the name shows you the project's status feed.

Adding links

Here's how to add links from Confluence to Team Central in 3 easy steps:

1. Copy the Team Central project URL (either from the browser URL or from Team Central's Share button)
2. Paste the link onto your Confluence page
3. That was it! It didn't even take 3 steps - give yourself a pat on the back

Link permission

Smart links do check to make sure that the person viewing the page has access to what's being linked. If you paste the URL on a Confluence page that isn't part of the instance you've got Team Central on, then someone else on that Confluence might just see the URL rather than the project or goal name if they don't have permission to view it in Team Central. This keeps people from accidentally seeing information they don't have access to. Handy!

BUT WAIT there's more!

Let's say you're in a hurry and you don't want to link multiple projects one at a time. And we know your stakeholders are in a hurry - you want to present them with the information they need with the least amount of clicks. Plus, you want to wow them with your Confluence page skills! Let's do that:

1. In Team Central, Label the projects you're interested in putting on your page if you haven't already labeled them
2. Click the label in Team Central to go to the label page
   
3. Copy the label page's URL. Paste it on your Confluence page.
4. Click the smart link to modify it, and switch from the default "Display as link" to "Display embed"
   
5. Go out and get yourself a nice treat with all the time you just saved yourself and your stakeholders 
   
   

[Arnd Layer]

Tis is cool!

[Kyle Swearingen]

@Daniel Eads This feature is great! It is exactly what I've been doing using tables in Confluence and Jira. The only problem with the version we have in Beta right now is if I'm sharing this with someone who isn't a Team Central member or a stakeholder who doesn't use Atlassian, they can't see that smartlink. Any idea when that will work so anonymous users can view it?

[Sherif Mansour]

Hi @Kyle Swearingen thanks for the question. Wen you say they don't use Atlassian you mean they don't have Confluence, Jira or Team Central? The way it's setup today is that you need to be licensed to be able to see the data. We don't have any feature where non-licensed users (e.g. through a private link or something) can follow updates.

In your case, is the person working for your organisation? Or are they a contractor/agency you work with?

[Kyle Swearingen]

@Sherif Mansour They are not in Jira, Confluence or Team Central. Basically what I do today is I allow for anonymous users to be able to view the content in Jira and Confluence. I then send out links of our development updates and they’re able to view the Confluence documents and also view tickets and filters. This gives them the visibility they need to stay in the loop without having any form of Atlassian account. What I am wanting to do is provide a link to a Team Central label and be able to share that with the same group. I figured since I could do it with Jira and Confluence through anonymous access, I would also be able to do it with Team Central at some point. Here is a screenshot from Confluence of the permission I’m referring to.