What's New in Confluence Whiteboards: June Edition

[#1]

Hey Whiteboards Friends!

It’s that time of month: we’ve had some fun updates over these last few weeks and wanted to share with you details of the improvements we’ve been making in Confluence whiteboards. As always - please give them a go and let us know any thoughts!

📸 Transparency in images

We have recently improved our images feature, allowing you to import transparent images (PNGs) in Confluence whiteboards. We know you’ve all been asking for this one to help in your diagram creation and layering your images. Happy diagramming!

👀 Full screen mode

We've added a new display option that pops you straight into fullscreen mode, making it easier to present existing content during your meetings. You can access this super easily from the three dot menu on the whiteboard.

💟 New sticker packs

We already had AWS stickers to help identify your shapes and capabilities on whiteboards, and we felt it was high time we supported the next two most popular architectural services in our sticker packs - Azure and GCP. Let us know if there are other sticker packs you’re interested in for future iterations!

Coming Soon

We’ve got a couple of features coming really soon and wanted you to know that they’re on their way!

🧰 Minimising the toolbar

While you all love the capabilities available in our toolbar, we’ve also heard from you that sometimes you wish it was just a bit smaller. To help you have even more space to add content to your whiteboard, we’re building out a user preference that allows you to make that toolbar shrink away when you don’t need it.

〰️ Dashed and dotted lines

Based on feedback we know that drawing connections between elements is important, but so is visualising that relationship. We are extending our styling beyond a simple solid line and added in both dashed and dotted lines so you can make those connections happen!

🧹 Alignment

We recently added the ability to tidy up your sticky notes, but we thought you might want even more ways to make your content neat, so we’re working on alignment options in pretty much any direction you want - Left, Middle, Right, Top, Centre and Bottom.

⚫️ Dot background

Sometimes you need something between a grid and a blank background - for all those users we’re adding the option to set your preference to have a dotted background!

⌨️ Shortcut refresh

We know we’ve added a lot of shortcuts recently and it can be hard to find the ones you need quickly. This refresh has simplified them into 5 buckets so you can locate the one you need easily:

• Tools

• Edit

• Text

• Navigate

• Advanced

Happy whiteboarding! Let us know any feedback on our latest capabilities!

[Yatish Madhav]

Superb!!! Thanks @Em Ditchfield 

[John Funk]

Lots of great stuff that just keeps coming!!

[Karine VANEL]

Hi @Em Ditchfield ,

Thank you for these highly new features expected by my users !!

For your information, I've some feedback from them:

- Manage historical save

- Rotate shapes and images

- Resize multiple frames at the same time ( improve the group /ungroup feature)

- Group/ungroup objects (to improve)

- Search wording ( I think will be arrived with IA)

- Change Font

[Amanda Barber]

Fantastic improvements!

[Susan Waldrip]

Hi @Em Ditchfield , thanks for the great update (with pictures!). Your team is doing a great job in listening to feedback, the features you're adding and direction you're going with this tool are spot-on. Appreciate your efforts!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I haven't had time to really get into creating a whiteboard yet, but I'm happy to see that the features available are really improving, so I'll be happy when I do get the time.

[Chrissy Clements]

Great updates.

[Prajwal N]

Folks, would really appreciate the pen functionality.
The potential, for us to use this as our main whiteboard is enticing.

We are a iPad friendly product team and would love to have the pen tool. 

[Yousuf Raza]

The ability to align the sticky notes is awesome. Waiting for the next update. 

[Zaid Smadi]

Great improvements! Thanks 

[Graham Twine]

The features are rolling out thick and fast.

Love it...

[Dave Mathijs]

Looking forward to the July update already. 🙂

[Lacy Saute]

Love whiteboards! Excited for the upcoming new features!

[Ciara TN]

Great to see so many new improvements coming. 

Busy bees!! 🐝

[Lynne Wilton]

I would love to see whiteboard content utilising the label feature - we use labels a lot to pull content together in reports

[Lynne Wilton]

When will we be able to search for content inside a whiteboard?

[David Tieman]

@Em Ditchfield I have posted some questions regarding future Confluence Whiteboards functionality improvement requests but was advised to bring those questions here.

1.) Can the Whiteboard card be configured to include other fields on the card? (i.e. the Parent, Label, Component fields)

2.) While the Whiteboard card be able to reflect updated data when updated in JIRA and without re-importing the JIRA data? (Dynamic updates)

3.) Will there be any option to perform more JIRA field updates in the Smart Action?

4.) Will there be an option to select more than 10 issues per page for the imported JIRA issues?  I have to scroll over several pages to import 50 issues (as an example).

5.) If I import issues that are already linked, can those links be displayed on the Whiteboard?  Don't want to create a link where one already exists.

Thank you

[Em Ditchfield]

Hi @Lynne Wilton this is something we're keen to get to, as we know it's hard when you're looking for something on a big whiteboard. We are hoping to look at this sometime in the next few quarters.

@David Tieman Thanks so much for all your questions! These are all great suggestions for improvements for our Jira integrations. I don't have any timelines for you on these ones, but stay tuned for more Jira x Confluence Whiteboards features and improvements in the future. 

[Szymon Walkowski]

When can we expect crucial features like:
- custom sizing for arrows
- group resizing
- grouping elements
- custom font size
- bezier for arrows

In current state the scale is kinda useless, once you want to draw big picture and then some details, everytime I use separate text component instead of inside text of elements cause it's invisible on big zoomout.
Beside, arrows are hardly visible in for example 8% zoom.

Also once you have to scale stuff, you're screwed cause you have to zoom each element on each own

And if you have many arrows out of the element, only 4 points can be anchored! only 4! and you want to have clear arrows you have to just put them, so then if you move element, you have to adjust each arrow.

[Helen C]

@Em Ditchfield  When can we expect an importer from Miro to Confluence whiteboards that allows us to import live boards ? ideally in bulk rather than 1 by 1?

[Prem]

Helpful & Informative.

[Josh Costella]

I gotta be honest, when Whiteboards first came out in Beta, my immediate reaction was "another white boarding app?!" 

But, thanks to the constant innovation and new features being released, I'm confident this can compete with other diagramming apps and let customers potentially ditch them all together. 

I'm glad Atlassian is investing in this. 

[Ashlea Shaw]

I love a good whiteboard and in my PM role I often use them however we keep leaning in to Miro more... the new features you mention, are they going to give Miro a run for their money? 

[Tim.Sullivan]

Hi, any updates for July or August?

Thanks!

Or September or October?

[Amol Dongare]

This helps with brainstorming sessions