📣 End Users Can Now Easily Leverage Automation for Confluence with Smart Buttons

[#1]

Avinoam from Confluence Automation here with an exciting new feature to make it easier for end users to use Automation for Confluence.

With smart buttons, end users on Confluence Premium and Enterprise plans are now able to create their own rules from a pre-defined list and run the automation with a click of a button on the page. This helps admins and users save time by safely placing automations in the users' hands, with the right guardrails. Let’s dive in!

Why smart buttons?

We know being an admin isn’t easy, especially when juggling multiple requests across spaces, assigning new users, and more. Smart buttons helps reduce the admin burden by allowing users to set up and launch one-time automation rules on a specific page.

It’s a win-win for all: admins get time back to focus on other high priority work, end users can eliminate low-value manual tasks, and everyone benefits from the clearer processes that smart buttons enable.

Here are some example use cases

• Create a “Send for approval” smart button on a creative brief: Once clicked, it will change the page status to “ready for review” and send an email to reviewers with a request to approve the details.

• Create a “Notify team members” smart button on a marketing launch plan: Once clicked, it can update page restrictions so cross-functional partners can access the plan and send an email to share it with them.

• Create a “Kick off next steps” smart button on a product poster page: Once clicked, it can add a label for the new product and create new page templates for product requirements, product design, and technical documentation to be filled in by the team.

How do smart buttons work for admins?

Admins can create page templates with smart buttons already built in for end users to click

To help improve team processes and workflows, admins can add smart buttons to new or existing page templates. For example, adding in a “Approve project poster” smart button to the “product requirements” template, so end users can simply click the smart button when ready to trigger approval workflows.

Admins are always informed and in control

Admins will be able to view and manage all smart button automations in Global automation or Space automation. These automations will be identified by a smart button label, and admins will be able to view it in the rule builder, as well as disable it as needed. They’ll also be able to see page details in the audit log to see where the smart button was triggered.

How do smart buttons work for end users?

End users with edit permissions can create and edit smart buttons on a page

When ready to add a smart button in edit mode, end users can select the insert menu (+ icon) from the toolbar or type /smart button or and select “smart button.” From there, the end user can choose from a pre-defined list of automation templates and edit the components to fit their use case.

End users can click the smart button to execute one-time actions

Anyone with view permissions on a page can hover their cursor over the smart button to see what actions it’ll take. When a user clicks the smart button, it’ll trigger the actions in sequence, respecting the permissions they’ve been assigned. For example, a user who has edit access can successfully run a smart button to change a page’s status and update its labels. However, a read-only user will still not be able to change the page’s status or labels, even through the smart button. This helps set safeguards in place and control who has access to run the automation.

FAQs

When will it be available?

It's currently rolling out gradually to all Confluence Premium and Enterprise admins and their users!

How should I get started?

We’d suggest admins start by adding smart buttons to page templates and promote these pages, making it easier for end users to understand how smart buttons work before they start creating their own.

Admins can also work with power users to help identify the top use cases and guide them through the first smart button setup. Questions to ask would be: Are there any workflows that require repetitive manual tasks? What tasks are involved (e.g. notifying team members, adding a label, updating page status)? What type of pages are typically involved?

How is smart button usage measured?

Only smart button usage that successfully takes an action will count towards your overall automation usage. Admins can manage automation usage by determining which users can create automations, as well as by monitoring top-running rules from the Automation Usage tab. Automation Service Limits will also apply across smart button usage.

How is smart buttons different from manual triggers?

Great question! Last year, we released manual triggers as our first foray to opening Automations in Confluence to end users. However, unlike smart buttons which can be created by end users directly, manual triggers need to be pre-defined and set up by admins in order for end users to trigger them.

In addition, smart buttons can be added anywhere inside a page within the context of the content, whereas manual triggers exist at the entire page level and not in context.

What’s next?

This is just the beginning of smart buttons! Over the next few months, we’ll continue to add more use cases and actions for smart buttons, including actions across other Atlassian products like Jira. We’ll also provide increased levels of visibility for admins, making it easier to manage all smart buttons built by end users.

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 on how you plan to use smart buttons! 

[Laurie Sciutti]

👏💗

[Hana Kučerová]

Love this!

[Zack Howard]

Looking forward to this! Will there be an option for the button to activate an existing automation? Or will we have to set up a new automation each time the button is inserted on the page?

[Avinoam]

@Zack Howard down the line that's the plan - to both link from a rule to a smart button and vice versa. For the short term manual triggers are still the best vehicle for linking an existing automation :) 

[Svenja Lorenzen]

This is brilliant and expands the possibilities of working with Confluence many times over! 👏🏻💙

[Aaron Geister]

This is super solid and now we can have approvals in Confluence. I have been waiting for something like this and super happy that we now have action buttons in Confluence. This is icing on the cake!! Great work @Avinoam 

[Alison Milne]

Look forward to trying this out

[Davide Giglioli]

Hello, thanks for this new feature. I have two questions:

1. can administrators define Smart Button Templates? currently the options are limited to basic options, and the "smart button" automation rules created are not editable.
2. are the smart buttons available to customers of Jira Service Management portal?

We are trying to understand how we could allow these customers to export the page into a pfd file and have it sent to their email address, and we are wondering if Smart buttons could help for this.

Thanks

[Avinoam]

@Davide Giglioli excellent questions!

1. Not at this time, since we intentionally wanted to start out a bit limited and open up as we go. This is absolutely on our roadmap to open up configuration vs. only being able to use pre-defined templates.
2. Not yet, however, they are built in such a way that in the future any product with automation at Atlassian can add them, so over time we expect these to become available outside only Confluence.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Ohhhh smart buttons, you have SUCH a bright future!

Video, of course: https://youtube.com/shorts/vCq_tIi1ALI

[Zachary Howard]

@Avinoam Hello again! I was playing with the Smart Buttons feature and was wondering if there will be a way to select "Current Page" or "Same Page as Trigger" as the value for the Parent page field. 

My Use Case: I was going to use this button on a "Meeting Notes Overview" page for users to generate a new Meeting Notes page under the current page. Currently I have been using @Matt Reiner _K15t_ teams' addon called "Create From Template Pro" however, this also does not allow you to set the current page when putting it in a template.

Currently, our PMs still have to go in and manually edit the Meeting Notes Overview page (which is automatically created for them from the template w/ automations) to make the button point to the current page.

I would love to eliminate this step for our users! 

Thanks y'all! 

[Avinoam]

@Zachary Howard great call out. This state is intentional as we need to build them out separately for the main rule builder and smart buttons. That said, we're going to add these to smart buttons in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned!

[Khai Ha]

@Avinoam Is there any update on when Smart Buttons can be mapped to perform a custom automation as opposed to a template?

[Avinoam]

@Khai Ha that should be available in a the coming months, but in the meantime we're adding more template shortly!

[jd_santos]

Am I understanding correctly that smart buttons can't be used to launch actual Confluence automations? Just whatever minimal functionality is provided by the templates, which aren't even customizable? 

Can y'all understand how incredibly frustrating and unintuitive it is to have extremely similar functionalities here that apparently don't communicate at all? Confluence automations were launched two years ago, so this isn't even an issue of interacting with "legacy" features. 

I want to push a button and launch an automation, that doesn't seem like much of an edge case.