Introducing Confluence whiteboards! 🎉
G’day Community! We’re super excited to announce whiteboards in Confluence!
A free public beta is coming soon, so join the waitlist to be among the first to get access as soon as it’s available.
Until then, here’s a fun sneak peek to watch: 🎥
Why whiteboards?
For distributed teams working in hybrid or remote environments, brainstorming together can be especially tricky. Our customers and own teams heavily relied on online whiteboards while working remotely because they enabled us to collaborate as if we were in the same room. But connecting that “pre-planning” work to “structured” work was not as smooth as we wished.
We saw an opportunity to create a deeply integrated experience for customers connecting their unstructured whiteboard ideation to Jira and Confluence workflows. Our goal is to help teams move seamlessly across their Confluence pages, Jira issues, and whiteboards in a deeply connected way.
So with Confluence whiteboards, you have a new digital canvas to brainstorm freely, turn ideas into action, and visualize work. Read on to learn more.
Why have whiteboards in Confluence?
So you may be wondering, why whiteboards in Confluence? Because great ideas come to life in Confluence! Since Confluence is your single source of truth where work gets done. It only makes sense to keep everything in one convenient place where everyone is already working and has the same access.
Brainstorm freely
We heard from customers that they wanted a more flexible way to brainstorm in Confluence. So Confluence whiteboards come with all the essential features you know and love to quickly capture and bring disparate ideas together from anywhere. With a toolbox of visual elements, like sticky notes, stamps, stickers, images, timers, lines, and multi-person editing, along with best-practice templates, your team can get creative and get up and running, fast.
Turn ideas into action
How do brainstorms become deliverables? Whiteboards in Confluence simplify transforming ideas into actionable tasks for team collaboration. Turning a fruitful brainstorm into a reality should not be a manual, big lift. Confluence whiteboards are designed to make this process as smooth as possible.
Jira issue creation: Turn sticky notes into single or multiple Jira issues in one click.
Edit Jira issues: Expand Jira issues within your whiteboard to add more details or edit tickets on the fly.
Confluence page conversion: Take free-form thinking from a whiteboard and turn it into a structured Confluence page in seconds.
Connect issues: Connect two Jira issues to indicate a relationship like a blocker, assigned by, or related in an epic.
Smart Sections: Quickly update Jira issues in bulk like assigning all issues to one engineer or a particular sprint, from your whiteboard.
Note: This works for any Jira Cloud product, so Jira Software, Jira Work Management, Jira Product Discovery, Jira Service Management, etc.
Visualize your work
Work management isn’t exactly a straight line, is it? Do any of the following challenges sound familiar? Because it does to me.
“I struggle to understand how all my team’s work fits together,” or “It’s hard to get a clear view of prioritization, and how different tasks relate to each other,” or even, “I have information in different tools that I wish could be brought together in one place.”
Enter: Confluence whiteboards. One view for every project with the context you need–here’s how:
Import Jira: Bring all your Jira issues into one view to add relationships with connectors and sections to visualize your work. Search across any Jira (cloud product), on any site, or in any project. You can even use Jira Query Language (JQL) with the native JQL editor directly in whiteboards to find the Jira issues you’re looking for.
Smart Sections: Create automated sections in your whiteboard that you can use to manage issues in Jira, assign tasks to sprints, update priority, and more. Simply drop Jira issues into the Smart Section, and the automation will do the rest!
Smart Links: Embed your content from other Atlassian products or third-party tools, such as Figma or YouTube, into your whiteboard to have all your plans and context in a single view.
⚠ Note that not all the features listed above will be available immediately at the start of beta. However, we are actively building these features, so it won’t be long before you can start to use all these tools and more! Another reason to join the waitlist!
Can I still use my other whiteboard tools?
Atlassian believes teams can work differently, together! So we’re giving our customers choice! We know many of our customers find great value in their existing visual collaboration tools like Miro, Lucid, and InVision. You can expect to see continued enhancements in how these tools integrate with Confluence and other Atlassian products. So, for example, you can bring your Miro boards into Confluence, embed them, and edit them all from a page. You can also do the opposite and embed Confluence pages into Miro.
Through Smart Links, Marketplace apps, and other integrations, you can use the tools that suit your needs best, whether that be draw.io, Gliffy, FigJam, Miro, Mural, or something else. So, work differently, together.
Confluence whiteboards beta is coming soon
We’re so excited for you to give whiteboards a try soon and use Confluence as the collaborative knowledge hub for all your work––from early thinking phases to finished delivery. Beta is coming soon so join the waitlist to try out the features above as they progressively roll out over time.
Cheers,
Jonno Katahanas and the whiteboards team!
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