Insights on Notes Documentation with Confluence Databases

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🗣️ Calling all note-taking lovers out there! 📢 

As keen note-takers in this age of AI, we’ve gotten pretty good at making the most of our notes, especially when it comes to meeting notes. However, even with data at our fingertips, finding the most relevant information within those notes remains a challenge (at least for me!).

Confluence tree-like structure

Confluence puts our notes in a tree setup under a main space. This keeps everything tidy, but it's not always the quickest way to find stuff, especially if you don’t remember the exact topic or date of the meeting.

Database Feature

With the database, I can pull up all the key stuff from past meetings in one view.

Meeting Notes Database: This database stores key details from each meeting, including:

• Date

• Project phase

• Topics discussed

• Goals

• Participants

• Highlights

• Action items

• Decisions made

• Next steps 

• Jira issues related

• Recording link

The limits depend on your needs (and imagination!) as well as the features available in the database. The card view layout provides an excellent overview.

In summary, it's a great tool for keeping the team in the loop ➿

I've got another database that's really helping me plan out future meetings, pretty much acting as my agenda planner. 

Agenda Planner Database: It’s what I use to line up all the meetings coming up.

👩‍🏭 Here’s my workflow with these two databases:

1️⃣ Planning a meeting in Agenda Planner Database: Here you'll add the topics, set goals and create an agenda page. On this page, I detail various aspects such as speaker notes, questions to ask, and overall meeting conduct.

The "Agenda page" column is configured to create a page using my Agenda template. By selecting the checkbox labeled “Display entry on created pages,” the information I filled in the database is embedded on the new page, so I don't need to add details like “topic” and “goals” again.

2️⃣ Integrate the Agenda Planner with the Meeting Notes database:

The Topic Column is an Entry link field type, integrating this db with  Agenda Planner DB. 

After having this entry link field configured, we can set other columns to retrieve the Agenda Planner values, by setting the Entry details field type.

You can understand better how these fields work in this Atlassian documentation:

I did this for the following fields:

• Phase

• Agenda's page

• Goals

3️⃣ Create the meeting notes page direct from the database:

Upon selecting a topic, the relevant details from the Agenda Planner are automatically populated, so we can go forward and create the actual meeting notes page. The column where we create the meeting notes page also have a template predefined. 

The custom template for meeting notes page includes an Excerpt macro that will be used to hold the highlights of the meeting.  This macro is what will allow  that these key information are visible directly within the database column.

4️⃣ Leveraging Atlassian Intelligence:

After I finished my notes, I use the Atlassian Inteligence to create a summary of key takeaways like action items, decisions, and next steps. It's essential that this summary be created within the excerpt macro.

After the page is published, the takeaways column displays the highlights of the meeting

🪄 Future Enhancements: When configuring this workflow I desired a lot of improvements that databases can have. A lot of them with open requests for Atlasssian. I am hoping Atlassian team continues working on the improvements for this amazing feature!

✨ I hope you liked my set up and maybe this can inspire you to adapt the database feature to your necessities.