What's New in Confluence Cloud – April 2020 Edition

[#1]

Hey Community!

Wow, what a month! As many of us acclimate to working remotely, we have some much-requested updates we’re excited to share. They’ll help you and your team kickstart new projects and processes, and keep your team moving no matter where (or how) you work.

Templates for all teams
To celebrate the 60,000 customers who use Confluence every day to transform the way their teams work, we’re announcing a brand new gallery featuring more than 80 new templates with best practices from our ecosystem of customers, partners, and our very own leaders at Atlassian. This collection includes templates from industry leaders like Indeed, HubSpot, InVision, and more.

It’s the perfect resource for info-rich guides that can help teams across your organization from HR to Design, Marketing, IT, and Business strategy.

Switch up your site
Chances are you've already switched up the way you're working these days. Why not switch up how you toggle between sites on the Confluence too? By popular request, you can now seamlessly switch between multiple Confluence sites on mobile.

That means that opening Confluence links from externally-shared URLs just got a whole lot easier. Now, you can easily open Confluence pages shared in mobile clients like Slack, Zoom, email, etc. Site switcher will automagically take you to where you want to be.

You can access this feature using the Overflow Menu on Android and the Settings menu on iOS.

            

And now we leave you with this month’s Power Tip: type // to quickly add dates to your pages! Set expectations and due dates for more transparency.

That’s a wrap for April! We have a whole lot more new features coming soon. As always, please leave us any questions or thoughts in the comments.

[Alex Rouk]

Hmm.. Not very impressed by this update.. Was expecting something more useful for content editing and management.. Once I 'enriched' my site with the mind-blowing template and then 'seamlessly switched' between multiple other sites, I am all back to the same issues with the platform as it was before.. 

BTW, putting a table on an empty page is not a template, it's a table on an empty page. 

Power tip: You don't have that much controls to work with, try to enrich them.. 

#stayhome

[Mark Hubbard]

speed.  Speed!  SPEED!!!!!

Confluence is way, WAY too slow!  You know it's bad when the competing product from Redmond WA is outrunning yours.  They're usually the slowest product on the market.  Click, wait, click, wait, wait, wait, click....

[Mark Hubbard]

By the way Atlassian, kudos to you for the new editor.  I actually like it.  It's much better for me than other users because we're actually starting an all-new Confluence site, so there's no old content.

Especially you did a great job on the table editing.  It's very intuitive.  I picked it up without any manuals or FAQ's or searching the web.

Now, for next month, just make the editor respond at a reasonable SPEED!

[vinay jhedu]

great 

[Christina]

What I would really love to see in terms of templates would be the possibility to copy a template and adjust it. For custom templates I couldn't manage to access certain items.

[Harish Vaidyanathan]

Can't see comments when updating the document to fix those comments... is a PITA. Have to keep 2 tabs open, 1 in edit mode & 1 in view mode and toggle back-and-forth. Applies for inline comments & end of page comments. Help! 

[Dima Bekinin]

please make it's working faster. 

now it's like 3min to wait until page fully loaded - really really hard to keep it using.

[emrekazan]

Thanks. Something I'd like to be able to do is comment within code blocks. Otherwise we cannot specify easily what part of code we are referring to. Is that in the pipeline?

[João Sá]

I got really disappointed that I'm no longer able to paste part of a table to confluence with him respecting the arrangement column x row... really big setback for me

[Bronwen Bazzard]

Please can you add functionality that would allow tables to be merged when editing a Confluence page.

[Jules]

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[Jules]

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[Jules]

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[Jules]

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[Mike Bowen]

Edit: 01 May 2020: I need to point out the following: 
Dilani Kahawala ATLASSIAN TEAM Apr 23, 2020

Hi @Mike Bowen, I'm the PM for Confluence templates. Thanks for your feedback. The templates are free and available to every single Confluence customer. When you click on 'Create,' the templates are already there in the create dialog. Let us know if you are still unable to find them. 

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Where are the 80 free glorious templates for the organisations who already pay for Confluence, Jira Core, Jira Service Desk. Surely you want to reward the people that pay your subscriptions. Wouldn't that be a better way of keeping your customers happy? I tried signing up for the free plan for templates, and it says 10 confluence users and 3 Jira agents only, which suggests this plan is not aimed at existing customers. 

This WOW update doesn't feel very wow to me! I'll give it to you the recent menu update across the board was very welcomed. More space on screen is always a positive, but I'll echo what others have said so far: 

1. WE NEED FASTER PAGE LOADS especially now with everyone working from home. I am tired of having to refresh every time I load a page.
2. PLEASE ALLOW COPYING OF TEMPLATES. It seems really dumb that I can copy a normal page but not a template especially when most of the hard grind goes into a template to get it right. To then not be able to copy it seems ludicrous, frustrating and damn right stupid! 
3. GIVE YOUR CUSTOMERS PAYING ALL THEIR HARD EARNED CASH TO YOU SOMETHING USEFUL AND NICE FOR FREE. If this was the one thing you must do right, it is to look after your existing customers as they are the ones that will spread the good word about your products. So reward us with something WOW! This update is not what I am talking about. 

[Paul Stratta]

nice; make the templates a bit more professional in quality please.  Where is a SoT (Source of Truth) template, where one can really document, link MIRO screens, etc. to fully document a product feature, flush with text documents that spell out all the back-end flows that accompany the user feature?

[Naren Karanam]

no control on font size on this update too ? ok.

[Matthias]

Nice. I generally really like how the limitation of formatting options to the basic markdown formatting are boosting productivity and readability (I am serious). You should promote that more as a mind set.

What keeps Confluence for us as a knowledge space is exactly that. No one can waste time by being creative or get lost in the design/formatting possibilities. It is a straight forward knowledge article space. It HAS to look every page the same, because you need to find information fast and structured. So this is a big plus and a feature!

I think more fixes would be a good step forward.

- Speed (it is unproductively slow)

- Markdown (common markdown. At least the option. That would be so less painful)

- Why do you still have no onpage context menu? Everyone else has this. I keep accidentally right clicking on the page and see the browser menu and be confused for a second then I remember that Confluence is stuck in 2010.

- Please make onscreen editing happen. It is slow anyway and to click on the edit button, wait for a reload and then scrolling to the typo hoping you remeber what you wanted to do after the reload is so painful and keeps us avoiding edits. This should be an optional feature!

- Desktop app for non Catalina. Seriously we need that! Offline editing and sync. Screw the mobile apps no one needs. We need a desktop app for at least Mojave.

- Anchors. Why are there no anchors anymore? This feels like an alpha text editor.

I said it before and here it comes again: Confluence is only a good tool because its connected with Jira (and not even naturally good at the moment). We are really willing to use it and to motivated everyone in our company to work with it but you are giving us SysAdmins a really hard time if we are struggling our selfs with really basic stuff!

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I would like to add something:

I think all the frustrated comments and common frustration in your support spaces and boards are from the fact that Jira is a really great tool! Really. The Next-Gen Projects are awesome and the new navigation bar is almost perfect. That are some really good improvements.

But Confluence just comes with it and has only one feature at them moment: Connectivity with Jira. I think your product team has the wrong priorities. Instead of firing out features and templates no one asked about you should urgently keep focusing of providing a good and simple editing experience for all users: especially for common users but also for coders and admins (markdown, common markdown, please please common markdown! I can't repeat myself enough how bad we need common markdown! There is so much muscle memory and everyone is avoiding Atlassian tools to document in because of not properly inmplemented common markdown. Common guys why is this happening?).

It is that simple. If it feels simple, fast and familiar for all kind of users they will use it no matter what. It just has to feel got to use. At the moment it doesn't at all. It feels exactly the oposite.

I am guessing you have a lot of legacy code and stuff so it is not as easy as it sounds to change that but your focus you are communicating is just not what anyone is expecting now from your product. I really like to hear and see that this will change. At the moment I can't recommend Confluence and would always suggest another solution for documentation. Even if there is no connectivity to Jira. It would still be faster and more productive.

[Robert]

I still see Confluence as the weak point of Atlassian. Fancy things over usability and real productivity. As I use (or at least willing to use) it's power features, I always end up with one or two bug report (I have more than 40 issues since November). And then what I see: the reported bugs are sitting there for years (some of them more than 4-5 years old), having no interest from Atlassian side. As Matthias said, it is only good because connects to Jira, but I would never use it alone. And this is the problem, because moving to Atlassian ecosystem is being broken because Confluence.

[Paul R Wilson]

Contrary to some others commenting, I love having more template options. A nicer preview withing the popup window would be cool tho...

[Elias Awili]

Newer templates... Great!

[Lisa Foster]

Please give us back the legacy editor!! or at least the functionality that we had. I can't choose colors of text, I can't apply borders to images...etc... and yes it is VERY slow!!

[meirkhanr]

.

[aaustin]

This "update"..  *sigh*

This new editor has taken Confluence Backward.

An update announcement about blank pages that already have tables on them..  (which is NOT a proper template, fyi).

A proper template has headers, footers, formatting of tables, approved colors, etc. Having mentioned tables, I will point out that even the tables are broken now, with no formatting of lines, colors, boarders, cushions. 

I can't make a template with any of those things, because all of those tools are missing from the Confluence Cloud. I agree with some of the other posters; we only use confluence right now because of Jira, we would NEVER consider it on it's own, especially in this new, and much weaker iteration.

For example: 
No making image links, no proper header control, no longer CSS to format PDF downloads, even the CSS is broken, and most markdown doesn't work! If we use this for our external facing KB, it will be completely different than our product, and that is not cool.

The legacy editor allowed for linking images. Existing articles show how to use CSS for assigning fonts (not available on the cloud version (new editor)), and the list of tools no longer available goes on and on.

I would LOVE to make some templates for my company to use, for both internal wiki, and external KB. HOWEVER, what is the point of a template when you can't control the color, style, font, image links, or any of that. 

It's becoming a rather constant refrain in the office to explain why we can't do what we used to be able to do. Announcing a new page "template" where you have an empty table on an empty page, ...  I gotta say, that does not sound like an update.

An update would be giving us actual TOOLS to work with; like the ability to actually make a template, not the endless layouts Confluence keeps calling templates. Calling it a template doesn't make it one, calling the grass fuchsia, doesn't change it's color.

[John Morris]

Can I humbly suggest that the top 3 priorities for Atlassian in Q2 are:

1. Make confluence and JIRA faster
2. Make confluence and JIRA faster
3. Make confluence and JIRA faster

Your tools are great but are painful to use because they are so slow