A new Google Drive integration for Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Hey Community,

Shrey Luthra here from the Confluence Product Management team. We hear from customers that they often use Confluence as a source of truth within their organization. However, sometimes that truth is dispersed across different applications and they want a way to pipe it back to Confluence. That’s why we’re working on improving our integrations with third party tools that we all use and love. Today, I’d like to share some improvements to our Google Drive integration for Confluence Cloud.

All your files in one place

With the new Google Drive integration, you can embed Google sheets, docs and slides into your Confluence pages.

Edit files in context

Without having to switch to another tab, you can now edit your Google docs or sheets straight from Confluence.

Go full screen

Click the expand button and see your content in full screen so you have access to the Google formatting toolbar.

Try out the Google Drive integration

To try out the Google Drive integration, make sure you have it installed on your instance. You can find the app on the Atlassian Marketplace Google Drive for Confluence listing.

Once installed, simply paste the Google Drive file (Docs, Sheets, Slides) link in Confluence OR

type /Google Docs, /Google Sheets or /Google Slides OR

go to + (Insert) menu in Confluence editor and click on "View more" to find Google Docs, Google Sheets or Google Slides

Feedback?

We’d love to hear your feedback on this new experience. Please comment below.

If you’re loving the Marketplace app, please review it!

PS: For some of you /commands might not work due to a caching issue. If it happens in your case, simply clear your browser cache. We are working on fixing this issue

Thanks,

Shrey Luthra

[James Bullock]

Good stuff, thought the title made me twitch. These features do "better integration of Google Docs" meaning information *sourced* from Google Docs into Confluence which holds the baseline single source of truth.

The title had me thinking some active / dynamic link injection into Confluence objects, so Google Docs remain & are edited there, directly referenced by Confluence. That would be Bad and Wrong. Besides, if somebody really wants, I can see how you could make a plug-in to do that bad and wrong thing. But we don't have to help them by baking it into the product.

[Matthew Lumino]

I had our site admin download the google app for confluence.  As a user, how do I link files?

[Amanda Luu]

Once installed, type /Google Docs, /Google Sheets or /Google Slides to add your work to your page. Or simply paste the Google link.

[Rob Alvarez]

The live editing is great for sheets. Getting a team to only use Confluence will never happen but this helps connect project elements and ease team members into the "Conf". 

[Jigar Patel]

I can insert a link, but could not edit doc or sheet file, how can we edit documents?

[Shane Johnson]

Same - I don't have an option for /Google Sheets and when I add a link, it just takes me to Google Drive....

[auridas]

If i embed the sheet, does the other user have to have access to that sheet in google drive to view it in Confluence?

[Parker Short]

I installed this (I'm the admin on our account), but the / commands aren't appearing. Do I need to do something else?

[Tizz]

We need the same for XD (ie. that you can login to XD inside Jira in order to see the preview of private projects) at the moment is a bit useless because all projects are private therefore we have to paste the previews manually

[Shrey]

@Shane Johnson @Parker Short there are 3 ways you insert a Google Drive file in Confluence:

• Paste the Google Drive file link and it automatically transforms to a Google Drive macro
• Go to + (Insert) menu on top and click "view more" to find Google Docs, Sheets and Slides macro.
• /Google Sheets, /Google Docs, /Google Slides: There is a caching issue with Confluence because of which it might not be working for some of you. If so, just clear your browser cache once and it should work. We are working on fixing that issue.

I will update the post above to reflect the same.

[Francisco Guerios]

Really nice feature !!!

[Heifara MATAPO]

Hi,

The feature is really great ! I'm new to confluence and think it's an incredible feature.

Is it possible to only allow users to view only ? 

Thank you

[Shrey]

@Heifara MATAPO this macro respects the permission on Google Drive file. If you give someone view only permission on a Google Drive file, they won't be able to edit the content.

[Jigar Patel]

@Shrey , I got it now, once embed the link, save the document and then can edit sheet even without editing document.

I thought to edit sheet while editing document :-)

[Xaviar Steavenson]

I was so excited... until I realized this is cloud only :( 

[Jody Maxwell]

Does this mean we can now have an easier way of importing Google docs into Confluence spaces?

[Shrey]

@Jody Maxwell this integration works to dynamically link your Google Drive files within Confluence. If you have specific needs around importing Google Docs, I would love to meet you and discuss

Shrey

Confluence Cloud Product Manager

[Jody Maxwell]

@Shrey Thank you, specifically as far as I can determine there is no easy way to import existing Google Docs into a Confluence Space without a great deal of effort. More than should be required. We are migrating our source of truth from Google Docs to Confluence and the volume of our existing documentation makes this task very time consuming and bordering on a very diminished ROI.

Would love to have a discussion on how to make this better. 

Side note, I am new to this organization but still active in solving existing problems

[Tobi Maierhofer]

Wow, stunning feature to consolidate the user interface to one place, love it.

[Tom Crowley]

"Simply paste the Google Drive file..." 

I simply pasted the Google Drive file as instructed, and I simply got a link to the document. Now I simply can't work out whether it is simply a problem with the app, or whether I have simply pasted the link wrong. Or maybe I simply typed `/` wrong and so the macro simply didn't appear. Now I'm simply confused because a task you said was simple simply isn't working.

[Tom Crowley]

Now I have the integration working, if I set the Google Sheet to "Anyone with the link can comment", when I access it in Confluence without being signed in to Google, it doesn't give me an option to sign in. When I set it so that only specific people can access, then it displays the login screen.

Also, the comment feature doesn't work. I need to open the sheet in Google Drive to be able to add comments:

[Paul Stallworth]

Will this be coming to Server, I saw the post tagged for Confluence and Confluence Cloud and got excited.

[Shrey]

@Paul Stallworth no plans yet but I will definitely pass the feedback to appropriate folks at Atlassian

[Bruce Reed]

As usual, server customers are disregarded. Sad we invested in Confluence Server. Before long it will be a throwaway license and we will be forced to migrate to Cloud.

[Nik]

@Shrey  Thank you for the post. I would like to know if you can restrict/limit google drive to a specific domain that your users can import documents from?

Ex: we have our own gmail domain and would like to restrict users to integrate with their personal accounts and only use the company account, is this possible?

Thank you,

Nik