Max from K15t here. :) First of all, thanks to @Kristian Klima for your research efforts and for sharing it with the community!
Our product teams are aware of the changes and new challenges that live-edit pages introduce in Confluence, and we are working on improving the user experience as much as possible.
Although we are optimistic about the live-edit pages, they entail many changes in different areas of Confluence, which will certainly be smoothed out during the EAP with the help of all users, the community, and partners.
Therefore, we do not currently recommend the use of live-edit pages for users with content management use cases if it is essential to you that content is published stably and reliably.
Thanks to everyone who shares their feedback with the community and the Atlassian team. 🙂
Yeah, I agree with @Max Foerster - K15t and his recommendation not to use Live Edit in workflow and compliance environments or if you're using 'presentation layer' apps to present your Confluence content.
Love this feature! It's great to finally have parity with the best feature of Google Docs, while also allowing publishing of versions of documents. This should completely remove the need for us to use Google Docs internally for collaboration and then copy the content into Confluence. Good work Atlassian team.
It'd be really great to have this be opt in/out for pages. Some pages are definitely ok to have live edit. others you want more "carved in stone" so to say. Would be lovely to have the option per page.
@Sam Lucas this is potentially very exciting functionality! However, when it is rolled out, Atlassian definitely needs to adhere to some best practices or it will be a complete no-go from our perspective:
It should be entirely OFF for all spaces by default instead of on (the system should make enabling it a proactive action vs making us scramble to turn it off.)
It should further be a setting at the Page level in addition to the Space. Only an admin or someone with proper permissions should be able to turn it on for a new page.
It should be able to be enabled on existing pages rather than only new pages. We are in no circumstance going to rebuild a large library of existing pages where we want to use it.
The number one use case we would have for this is being able to update Jira field values in filter tables within a confluence page (statuses, or information in Confluence tables within a page. In a future state, the ideal would be to be able to turn 'on' live edit at that level (as a column or table setting, for instance) vs the page as a whole. Just as overall context! but the above 3 bullet points are the Key for rendering this functionality actually useable vs just plain dangerous and error-prone. (We want it to save work, not create more work for Admins to go digging through version history to find where someone messed something up :-)).
I don't think I like this at all. I wouldn't mind a new "live document" alternative to pages, but making this the default for all pages is something I'm not excited about.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 17, 2024 edited
Thanks for everyone's feedback thus far! We really appreciate it. Please know that your feedback guides our product roadmap!
We have received a lot of great feedback from our existing users and will begin sharing top roadmap items and upcoming improvements via our Private Community! If you'd like to join the discussion, and help shape this feature, please join us there!
Also - please note that we do have a Vendor Ecosystem EAP also running today, and are actively working with our vendors to ensure your integrations and apps work seamlessly with Live Pages!
For those who have signed up for the EAP in the last 60 days -- you are on our waitlist and can expect to get access to our most recent, new and improved live pages experience in mid-August!
You will receive an email confirmation of your acceptance to the EAP, and then another email when the feature is live for you!
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 17, 2024 edited
Addressing a few other important questions from others here:
This feature is in an early access program and only those who sign up will get this experience. The nature of this EAP is to learn from our customers, make improvements, and ensure that we deliver a highly valuable and capable solution that benefits our customers.
Live pages can be published, and published pages can be "switched to live-editing" by users with editing permissions.
Therefore, users do have the ability to go back and fourth and control this at the page level in addition to the space level. These transitions are also recorded in page history.
All existing pages will remain in their Draft or Published state for tenants whom join the EAP, but per the above functionality, existing pages can be converted to live edit.
At the request of tenants within our EAP, we can enable live pages in a default on or off setting.
We are hearing that "preventing against accidental editing" is important for live pages and your documentation. We are currently exploring solutions here outside of users making their live pages "view only" permissions and/ or publishing their live pages when ready for broader consumption.
Please join our Private Community for more regular updates on areas we are working to improve and new functionality you can expect moving forward!
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 6, 2024 edited
Hi, Community!
We want to extend a big thank you to everyone currently enrolled in our EAP, and the many participants that have provided feedback thus far. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve been able to make a number of improvements to the EAP experience!
(Friendly reminder: you can provide direct feedback to our team anytime via the feedback banner at the top of every live-edit page.)
We also want to let you know that we’ll be rolling out an update the week of August 12th, 2024 for tenants already enrolled in this EAP. New participants will get the updated experience at this time as well!
Updates to live-edit pages will include, but not be limited to:
Improvements to page titling, including realtime emojis
Star & Watch capabilities
Increased synchronous collaboration on live-edit pages from 20 to 30 collaborators max
Page reactions are here!
Improvements to activity feed and email notifications for live-edit pages
Improved page history, including annotations for autosaved changes, switches to live editing, and published versions
Live-edit templates are now supported within spaces where live-edit pages are turned on
Live-edit Meeting Notes template is now available within spaces where live-edit pages are turned off
Smoother, easier content creation overall – with Copy link to any heading, media preview, and more!
Improved and expanded usage of 3P macros in live-edit pages
New and improved user education and tutorials
Bug fixes, and more!
We are actively working on even more improvements to this experience thanks to your continued feedback!
To stay informed about our next release, please join our private community and feel free to join the conversation. We’d love to hear from you!
One live-edit feedback item we provided was that it would be great to have a read-only-but-live-update link available to provide to others who would/should not be actively editing but would like to watch (without editing by mistake), for instance during a meeting.
Bonus points for a floating "Live Scroll" button to "follow the action" so that the page auto-scrolls to wherever someone is typing (keeping their hidden cursor in the middle of the page). This would get tricky with two or more editors, but I'm sure there is a good approach for this scenario (such as the viewing user choosing whose cursor to follow).
Quick Question: For this feature, once it is applied to our instance, can we have it appear for one of our spaces? One team wants to try this feature however, we do not want it on or visible for other spaces
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 10, 2024 edited
@John Tolle! We hear you! The "live-publish" idea.
This is something that we will continue to explore and consider.
Right now users can still publish their live pages if and when necessary.
Am I correct in understanding that you want to be able to transition/ set a live page to default to "viewing," (where users with edit perms can still toggle into edit)?
If so, would you still need the static Publish that exists today? When and why/ why not?
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 10, 2024 edited
@Brian De Guzman Live Pages settings exist at the space level. Space admin can choose to have live pages as the default, or Drafts as the default. Both can still be published. For the most part, all tenants opting into the Live Pages EAP have Live Pages as the default initially, but again, Space Admin can revert this if needed. We'd love to know more about your concerns with Live Pages as the default.
@Leigh Cameron Awesome! Hope you have signed up for the EAP! We will start adding new tenants this quarter! You will hear from us soon!
We wanted to test the feature out with one of our teams who has one space in Confluence. The problem we have is that space admins of other spaces will be able to turn on the feature.
My question then is can we lock the setting on an org-level and turn it on for one space.
The goal for my "live view" idea is to allow an editing user to provide a "read only" link for the live edit page that, when shared, provides the new user with a view that is continuously updated in the same way that pages in edit mode are.
As you noted "live publish" or "continuous publish" might be a better description and it doesn't have as much to do with live edit; it could be an option you could enable on non-live-edit pages, too. And yes, those who have edit rights should still get an Edit button, of course.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 15, 2024 edited
Hi, Community!
We are back with another update! Over the next 2 weeks, the following features and improvements will begin rolling out to your site.Live-edit pages are getting better and better thanks to your ongoing and continuous feedback.
And thanks to all of you in our EAP, 100,000 live pages have been created to date! We've been blown away by the engagement and response to this program from you all.
New updates to live-edit pages will include, but not be limited to:
Improvements to page performance for faster loading
Brand new "editing/viewing" toggle to protect against accidental edits
Improved and enhanced auto-saving
An improved "byline" experience (under your page title) that includes page analytics, reactions, & status (with more to come!)
Entry points to our Vendor Marketplace apps are now available while live editing
Improved macro performance
Codeblock wrapping is now supported
Keyboard Shortcuts can now be used while live editing
Improvements to page indexing and the activity feed
Other assorted bug fixes
Please note: Our support documentation for this program has moved! It can now be accessed anytimehere.
We are actively working on even more improvements to this experience, thanks to your support and participation. To stay informed about our next release, please join ourprivate communityand feel free to join the conversation. We’d love to hear from you!
Thanks, Sam L. | Product Manager
PS. If you are not yet in the EAP, please make sure to have a Site Admin from your Org.sign up here! We will begin adding new tenants to the EAP in December 2024.
PPS. Stay tuned for information about our upcoming Beta release. Check out the recent announcement at TEAM '24 Europehere!
I've developed an app that uses the Confluence Cloud API to generate project documentation automatically. It creates a new Space for each project and fills it with pages of documentation. This has worked fine for months, but recently the new 'Live Editing' rollout is causing headaches.
I realise that the Live Editing option is turned ON by default and can only be turned off as a space feature setting. The problem is that my app creates a space and populates it with new pages through automated API calls - and these new pages are all being created as the 'live-edit' type now. How can I create a space through the API and have it default to Live Editing turned OFF? There doesn't seem to be a way... Thanks for any advice.
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