👀 Sneak Peek: How whiteboards are thinking about becoming a core part of Confluence

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey everyone! Hope y’all have been enjoying the whiteboard’s early access experience. We’ve been finding your feedback immensely helpful - so, thank you!

I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you our plans for making whiteboards a truly native part of Confluence. Please share any feedback in the comments below.

For context, we’re planning to announce whiteboards publicly in April at Team '23 (our yearly product event in Las Vegas). As early adopters, you're getting access and news before everyone else! 

A couple months later, we’ll also announce an official Beta that will allow anyone on Confluence to use whiteboards. Until this announcement goes live, please keep this between us! 🤫

Between now and then, our team is going to be heads down deeply integrating into Confluence. You’ll progressively see pieces of this land on your sites over time. Note, we’ll give you a heads-up before any of the core experiences change (e.g. when we move whiteboards from being a standalone screen to being part of the page tree).

Some of our upcoming native experiences

With that said, below is a sneak peak at some of our early-stage plans. These are directional mock-ups of what we’ll be building over the coming months. As always, these are subject to change. They’re also not presented in the order that we’ll ship them.

We’d love any thoughts, questions, feedback, etc 🙏

Whiteboards in the content tree

The existing whiteboard home screen in the side navigation will be removed. All whiteboards will now appear as part of the content tree (i.e. what is currently the page tree). Users will be able to organize whiteboards alongside pages. All whiteboards created before this change within Confluence will be migrated to the content tree.

Creating a whiteboard

Users will be able to create a whiteboard from the global create menu.

Users will also be able to use the contextual create in the content tree.

Templates to create a new whiteboard or add content to an existing one

A template picker will be introduced inside the whiteboard. Users will be able to choose a template on whiteboard creation. They’ll also be able to insert a template to an existing whiteboard to help quickly create content.

We will update some of the existing templates, plus add a bunch of new ones.

📣 If you have any feedback about the existing templates, or have requests for any new ones, please let us know in the comments!

Moving & copying a whiteboard

We'll introduce the ability to move and copy whiteboards, including via drag-and-drop in the page tree.

Deleting & archiving a whiteboard

The existing delete and archive functionality that exists for pages will be added to whiteboards.

Initially, users will not be able to restore whiteboards from the space settings. We’ll add this later. 

Sharing & restricting a whiteboard

Users will be able to set individual whiteboard permissions.

Whiteboard permissions will also be added to space permissions. They will be coupled with pages.

 

Initially, the share experience will slightly differ to pages. In whiteboards, users will purely be able to share a whiteboard by copying the link to the whiteboard. This is the same experience that exists in whiteboards today. Over time, we’ll add the same share experience that exists for pages - i.e. share a whiteboard via email. 

Finding a whiteboard

Users will be able to find whiteboards via the global quick and advanced search. Note, initially, whiteboards will only be searchable by their title and metadata (e.g. whiteboard creator). You will not yet be able to search by content inside a whiteboard (like text on a sticky). This functionality will come later.

Whiteboards will also show up in all the “Recents” lists. You can determine a whiteboard vs a page by the icon to the left of the title. The whiteboards icon is turquoise with multiple shapes. The pages icon is blue with horizontal lines. 

What are some of the things that will NOT be available on day 1 of Beta?

As a reminder, we are announcing Beta at Team '23, but it will not be available until a few months later. Here’s a list of some of the core experiences that will NOT exist when we first launch Beta. They will follow in the near future.

• Notifications → updates or tags made in whiteboards trigger notifications

• Content search → content within a whiteboard is included in search results

• Whiteboards in the 

• Hover previews of Whiteboards in the content tree and when embedded as a Smart Link in pages

• Star, Follow, and Activity feed

• View only on mobile → for Beta, we will show a message telling users whiteboards aren’t viewable on mobile

I know that was a lot to take in so will leave it there for now.

Thanks for all the awesome support so far. We’d love to hear any early thoughts about the proposed native experience. Please drop them in the comments below.

Cheers,

Jonno Katahanas | Whiteboards Product Lead

[Adam Buckingham]

Hi Jonno - lots of cool new Confluence deep integration!   Love it. 

What about new features of the Whiteboards themselves?  Anything to share in that space?

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey @Adam Buckingham ! Great question. We have some improvements you should already have received or will be receiving very shortly like alignment guides and free-form resizing of text, stickies, and shapes. Beyond that, for the next couple of months our whole team is focussed on bringing whiteboards closer to Confluence (i.e. the stuff shared in this blog). We'll then start to ramp up with more whiteboard-specific features.

[Kelly Drozd]

Bravo @Jonno Katahanas and team! We just joined EAP recently and are really excited to start using Whiteboards more! 

I love global create and the ability to have a whiteboard live within a page tree.

question(s): If you're decentralizing the whiteboards so to speak, will there still be a single view of all whiteboards within a space or across an instance? Or ways to easily search whiteboards versus pages in search?

I know this is a bit farther off, but asking because at times even a well organized space can be like going into someone else’s closet and trying to find something. It’d be nice to be able to pull some things down into the page tree, like a customer journey or a roadmap but not include things down in the page tree like team building activities that I don’t want to throw away - as a facilitator is like to refer back to them but not have to have them on the page tree and treat it like a file folder if I don’t have to. 

Such exciting things coming our way, thanks for sharing all of this! 

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey @Kelly Drozd 👋  That's a really good point. At the moment, we're planning to treat all whiteboards the same as pages. That would mean that if a whiteboard existed, it'd be in the content/page tree. 

I'll chat to the team about this as we think through the ongoing integration work. cc: @Natalie Johnson @Daniel Simmonds @Eden Gorton @Christina Ristevski 

[Andy Gladstone]

Love the updates @Jonno Katahanas and team, and enjoying testing this functionality in the EAP.

A few points/questions.

1. Bullet point #3 in the summary looks like it is missing some text
2. I love the idea of templates - will take away the paralysis of trying decide what/how to use the shapes and elements available.
3. When will an expanded library of shapes be available? We would love to use it for more than just brainstorming. Process flow mapping and planning shapes would be great.
4. Will we be able to embed a Whiteboard inside a Confluence page? I can think of many situations where the planning/brainstorming whiteboard(s) may want to be accessed on the page describing it.

[Jonno Katahanas]

Thanks, @Andy Gladstone 🙏 

Re; missing bullet --> Good catch. Sorry! I'll update. Was meant to say "Whiteboards in the space content view". For context, the space content view is the view that shows of all your space content when you clicked on the "Pages" heading above the page tree in your left navigation.

Re; expanded library of shapes --> Which would you hope to see? cc: @Natalie Johnson @Christina Ristevski 

Re; embedding a whiteboard inside a Confluence page - you already can! Just paste a link to your whiteboard into the Confluence page -> select the link that appears --> in the floating toolbar that appears, select the icon for "embed"

[Donny Gison]

Hi, 

We just joined Beta recently and when I presented this to our Trains they are excited. There's some apprehension in fully using it though.  

• Will Whiteboard be a core feature of COnfluence moving forward? Not a separate license?

Thanks.