Changes to the location of Confluence Automations Manual Trigger menu

[#1]

👋 Community! Avinoam from Confluence Automation here - and today I just wanted to give you a short update on a small change in the location of the manual trigger menu on pages, and what we have planned ahead.

What's the change

Previously, you and your users could access the manual triggers lighting bolt menu from the top of pages in the actions menu. As part of a broader initiative in Confluence to simplify the page creation and engagement experience we've decided - amongst other things - to remove the manual trigger menu from the top of the page as a static menu that is there regardless of if admins have created manually triggered rules or not.

What's next

Moving forward, this specific menu entry point will resurface in two parts:

1. It'll appear in our upcoming revamped overflow menu (the ... menu on the top right of each page)
2. We'll be introducing a new contextual side panel with page actions to pages in which this menu will resurface and will only show if a manually triggered rule has been added by the admin

What about now

Luckily, in the meantime there are plenty of more contextual entry points for manual triggers! 

From the page tree menu

From Smart Links hover cards (this works both in Jira and Confluence for both Jira and Confluence Smart Links and automations)

From the Content Manager

By adding manual triggers as smart values to any surface (email, Jira, Slack, etc)

And of course - Smart Buttons, which everyone can use!

We want to hear from you!

We’d love your feedback so please feel free to schedule time with us directly here or drop a comment on this post 🙏

[Mirek]

Thank you @Avinoam for providing information what would change so that everyone can prepare and not be confused when something would change. However since Cloud is not strictly connected with versions releases and changes are implemented in different time for sites would be nice to have a one good place where all the changes are introduced and when exactly were introduced to easily filter things out based not only by platform (Jira, Confluence, .. ) but also component (Automation, Whiteboards, ... ) .

I know that there is one huge changelog here -> https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog  but it is hard to find things overtime. Changelog for developers are a little bit better when filtering -> https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/changelog/ so would be nice to have a combination of both to quickly refer to a specific change. 

[Rebecca M]

This doesn't help me rebuild my automation at all.

And, there is still the option when building your automation to use a manual trigger. This option should be disabled now that there is no longer a way to use a manual trigger.

[Scott Moore]

Myself and my team are using this to save time i.e press A and click (job done).

Now you have to click into a sub menu, click the automation button, then click the automation you want then ok it?

Until you allow for automation rules to be attached to /Buttons or smart buttons then this is a step back in making confluence a faster way of doing day to day tasks no?

[Tom Hudgins]

This is really bad timing for us. One of my users just created a bunch of training videos that show how/where to invoke an action. All that effort now needs to be re-done. 

Thanks!!!

[Bri]

This makes sense, but it would be great to get a keyboard shortcut to open up the page's automations so that we don't have to do all that digging. 

[Koloman Pfeffer]

@Rebecca M You can still use manual triggers, as described on this very page.

[Mary Agueros]

Thank you for providing information on where else to find the automation lighting bolt. I was needing to manually trigger a rule from a page and was concerned it had been lost. Thank you again.

[Charles Johnson]

This still caught us off guard.
The new accessibility is not intuitive.
I would have expected the same capability from the open page's menu (3 dots) along with all the other page options.  It never occurred to us to check the Nav-menu reference itself.  

[William Bowden]

Please bring it back soon. It was much simpler to use and train in the past with the manual trigger at the top right toolbar with no extra clicks and hidden options.

[Phil Kohler]

This caught us off guard and is negatively disruptive. It was simpler when the automation menu was more visible. This change is the opposite of helpful.

[Jörg]

Honestly this is a very bad ui decision!
Why not simply hiding the menu if empty or no manual trigger automation is available if hiding a empty manu was the use case? Or are there other use cases that are not mentioned in text?

We have currently a Request formular (for external stakeholders) that has a manual triggered automation that changes the pages status and creates a jira issue.
This is now not working anymore. If we would be able to trigger that automation via a smart button this would be nice, but hiding it in sub-sub-menu in of a tree menu cannot be a solution.

[Angie Adams]

Others have commented on the UI, so I won't spend time on that.  While I like the concept of smart buttons, at this point, it doesn't appear to allow you to configure a smart button to use an existing automation rule.  meaning, if i want to add the same rule to several pages / templates, i would have to configure the same rule each time. Changes would have to be configured for each.  Overall, it's a very inefficient design and goes the wrong direction relative to user experience.

[Dave Lines]

I just spent an hour looking for the manual automation trigger in a place where it no longer existed, and didn't find out it had been moved until I did some Googling. Great user experience.

[Darryl Lee]

Hey all!

Has anyone noticed the fun new error when they try to manually trigger an Automation (assuming you can FIND the button that they moved?)

---

Welp, I guess the good news is, they're aware of the problem and... they're working on it: 

• AUTO-1693 - When manually triggering an automation rule from a page, Confluence always throws an error message even though the automation rule succeeds

[Dave Lines]

@Darryl Lee - yep, I had hours of fun yesterday trying to fix an automation that wasn't broken! Thanks, Confluence! 😡

[Laura Campbell_Seibert]

Is there any way to select an existing rule for the Smart Buttons? To manually trigger a rule, I'd like to embed the button on a page, but I don't see any way to select an existing rule.

[Darryl Lee]

Hey @Laura Campbell_Seibert as I mention in Page Approvals - Let's Make It Complicated (Part 2) , the inability to link a Smart Button to your own rules is a real bummer. However...

Thanks to the handy Allow rule trigger option, we can use Labels to trigger more advanced rules.

So, I have a Smart Button that changes Page Status and Adds Labels, and then my rule triggers on the Page Status change + specific Labels. It's an annoying workaround, but luckily it worked for what I was trying to do.