An update on Confluence Cloud customer feedback – September 2022
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24 January 2023: Thanks for your interest in helping us shape and improve Confluence. There's a new Update on Confluence Cloud customer feedback – January 2023 now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored. |
My name is Genevieve Sheehan and I’ve recently joined Atlassian as Head of Product Management for Confluence Cloud. We love receiving your input, so we can ensure that we are delivering value and working on the most impactful areas. I will continue to share what we’re hearing from customers who take the time to share their feedback and what we’re working on, just as we did in our update article last quarter.
Usability and efficiency
”Two years ago I was in one company and we had the latest version of Confluence Server. Now I'm with a different company and using Confluence Cloud, and the usability is a lot better than it was. The new page editor gives a better layout. Inserting "clever stuff" into pages is now much easier. I find page reordering is too buried. I need it frequently and would like the option to automatically keep pages ordered a-z rather than having to do it manually.”
Sometimes the hardest part of work is getting started. In the update last quarter, we shared some of the latest and greatest templates and the option to create your very own custom templates to get your pages started more efficiently.
We’re also making good progress on delivering the ability to automate a task or process with a few clicks, so you can efficiently manage content at scale. We’re currently running a closed Early Access Program for Automation, for Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise customers. You can follow our progress on our Cloud Roadmap.
We’re always looking for ways to make Confluence easier to use and more efficient. In response to a prominent ask from Confluence Cloud customers, working on long Confluence pages is now easier with quick edit, which automatically takes you to the same spot you were viewing, when you enter edit mode on the page. We shared our thinking and approach on this in the previous quarterly update, as we did for presenter mode for Confluence and whether links should open in a new tab or in the same tab by default.
Confluence users who are living with disabilities have shared how accessibility issues negatively impact their personal health, career progression and team productivity. This overview of the company’s expanded commitment and approach to accessibility shares our plans for engaging with the disability community, improving our platforms and design system, and accelerating improvements in accessibility across Atlassian products.
To begin, we're addressing basic accessibility gaps that require no new platform support or deep accessibility expertise and addressing critical issues that block key user journeys. We'll then focus on achieving conformance with WCAG 2.2 AA across our products, which will then enable delivering more usable experiences for people living with disability.
Using the Editor
”I don't know how to save the documents that I am still working on but are not ready for publishing. Also, if you are editing and push "close" by accident or just click on a link that directs you to another Confluence sheet or wherever in the same browser tab, you lose the work instantly. It would be good to get a warning or auto-save every few minutes and make a separate unpublished document available. I feel it is too easy to lose work in progress and at the same time i don't want to publish.”
Some of you have also shared that without visual confirmation in the editor, it’s impossible to feel confident your work is saved in Confluence. We see many users clicking publish to “save,” so we’ve introduced a Save Indicator – a dynamic, visual way for creators to feel confident their work is saved continuously without having to take any action. If you’ve been around the block, you might remember an old version of this in the Tiny editor. We rolled back that feature in November 2020 because of performance issues, but we’re excited to launch a sleeker, more performant version that looks good on all screen sizes.
We’re continuing work on a better experience for adjusting table widths and still suggest using a ‘Layout’ section on your page as a workaround in the interim while we’re working on addressing how to better resize tables in Confluence. We’ll announce any future updates here in Community.
As a result of our focus on improving the reliability, scale and performance of Media; we’ve made huge strides in reliability when uploading, previewing or viewing a file on a page. Reducing Media’s bundle size has contributed to a much faster experience in Cloud and scale improvements mean we can now support much larger Cloud instances.
We plan to start addressing features related to manipulation, capture and collaboration on Media in response to the mix of feedback from customers who want a better experience re-sizing and manipulating images, adding and referencing attachments and collaborating on Media with sharing, commenting, and reactions. We’ll share updates in Community and on our Cloud Roadmap as work progresses.
Representing work
”Confluence helps us stay organized and transparent with information and processes. Organizational structure and linking with Jira is really nice.”
We’re continuing to offer more possibilities and improved flexibility for representing your work in Confluence. The release of table visualization unlocked the ability to present data dynamically from your tables as pie, bar or line charts without needing to leave Confluence and the ability to assign a page status helps set expectations for others viewing your pages and allows for more confident content creation, without needing to lock down in-progress pages.
The option to customize panels with a variety of colors and emojis (or no icon at all) helps you easily highlight important pieces of information and create pages that your audience can skim and retain in seconds.
Reactions are an interactive, lightweight way for teams to express themselves on content in Confluence. We believe that by reducing the friction in collaboration, we can help teams get work done in a social and engaging way. We recently delivered reactions on pages and comments to all customers, and we are planning to continue to improve this experience by adding an inline reactions feature in the coming months.
Navigation and search
”The only thing I would say I wish was a little easier is when I search for something in Confluence, it is a little easier to find.”
In response to customers asking for more flexible sorting and filtering controls, we’re currently exploring and testing changes, including the ability to quickly sort results by date and a revamped filtering experience.
We also heard from some customers that finding work that's in-progress could be easier, so we released Findable drafts, to make your unpublished work easier to retrieve from your space’s page tree, blog tree, page cards, Home, and across all spaces.
In the last update, we shared Related pages (now rolled out to all customers), which surfaces relevant suggestions at the end of each page for further reading, as well as an improved Confluence Home to help you quickly get back to your recent work, catch up on any relevant activity and discover what’s happening around you.
Finally, we’ve made a number of improvements to make Confluence search easier to use, with more on the way. Live search macros, the popular search macro that lets you add a search bar on any specific page for easier navigation, just got a visual refresh. Soon, Confluence search will also offer special character support (so you can use “ “ to find exact matches for your queries) and is experimenting with an auto-correction feature for common typos and misspellings.
Look out for more improvements soon, as we work to make sure you spend less time in Confluence searching, and more time creating impactful content.
Set up, configuration and administration
”It should be easier to manage the permissions and understand what can see what, especially in a set of subpages inside a Space.”
Some customers tell us they find it hard to understand the outcomes tied to permissions settings, resulting in either unintended restrictions or over-sharing.
We hear you and are making good progress on a combined share and restrictions functionality that allows users to grant permissions to and notify others of content in a single flow. For more details on the new share functionality, check out the New page sharing experience, coming soon to Confluence Cloud.
We're committed to making the experience of sharing and setting the right access easier and more intuitive for users. This will continue to be a high priority for us and we’ll provide updates through Community and our Cloud Roadmap.
Notifications are an important way for teams to share content and stay on top of work. We’ve heard from customers for many years that they need a more effective notifications experience that doesn’t feel like spam and actually helps them collaborate more effectively. We recently released the Confluence Daily Digest to all customers as our first step towards providing a more intelligent and useful notifications experience. The digest helps customers stay on top of content updates in the spaces they watch without overwhelming their inboxes. We have plans to continue to build on this feature by adding additional types of notifications as well as improving our total default set of notifications to make them more actionable, useful, and valuable for all customers.
It can be difficult to understand exactly what a user has access to and how different groups affect that user's access without more visibility across all products, so we're making the administration of Atlassian Cloud products better and starting to centralize user management across all our products.
We want your admin hub experience to be simple, fast, scalable and expandable. Organization-level user and group administration now offers a single location to manage user access across Confluence, Jira Software and Jira Service Management. We’re also moving closer to centralizing all user access information across more than just those core products.
You can find out more about our plans for simplifying administration, centralized permissions view and granular admin roles on our Cloud Roadmap.
Technical performance
“It is a little bit slow. Improve the performance and it will be perfect!”
We continue to invest in the best ways to make sure Confluence meets the performance needs our customers share in their feedback. We’ve released several performance improvements for images, page tree, quick search and inline comments so you can find and update Confluence pages even faster:
- Images now load up to 4x faster, making rich content experiences significantly better.
- The page tree, which allows you to navigate pages within a space, is now 3x faster and ready to use once you see it (no more loading states).
- Quick Search is now 4x faster and you can now use the search dialog without any delay. Once you’ve added input, enter takes you to the advanced search page immediately.
- Yellow highlights for inline comments are also now visible and interactive 4 x faster than before.
We also plan to make several more features including Smartlinks, macros and page comments immediately interactive. Learn more about our future plans to improve performance on our Cloud Roadmap.
Integrations and extensibility
”I like the integration between Confluence and Jira, more features improving these integrations will be very welcome.”
We have heard repeatedly from customers that integrations between Confluence and other Atlassian products, such as Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Trello, could be better at facilitating cross-product experiences and eliminating context switching. In August, we delivered Smart Links page embeds which allows users to view and edit Confluence pages within a Smart Link. This capability is currently rolling out and can be found in any Atlassian product where Smart Links reside.
Additionally, we have built a tighter integration between Confluence and Jira Work Management to help business teams bring project management and documentation closer together. Confluence pages are now embedded into Jira Work Management projects so you can document notes, track outcomes, and stay aligned on work, all in one place.
We intend to keep investing in core features and native functionality to meet your evolving needs, while also enabling teams to add more advanced or specifically-tailored functionality with Marketplace apps.
To help you navigate the availability of apps without cloud versions, we’ll continue to update Cloud alternatives to your Atlassian Marketplace Data Center & Server apps to recommend alternatives for apps where partners don't intend to build a cloud version in the near future.
We’ll continue working with Marketplace Partners to make sure their cloud apps support your needs. We keep shipping new APIs and investing in app security, support standards and reliability programs. For more detail on Cloud Fortified apps, visit Marketplace App Trust.
Lastly, customers who have asked more flexibility on app pricing so they can customize Confluence according to their needs can visit the Atlassian Marketplace to browse the 400+ Confluence apps that offer a FREE version for teams of up to 10 users.
Thank you to all of you who share your feedback with us. I look forward to sharing more of these updates in the future. Watch this article to receive a notification when we share an update next quarter and follow our progress and plans for Confluence on our Cloud Roadmap.
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Genevieve Sheehan
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