📣 New batch notifications and look-up capabilities⚡️🤖

[#1]

👋 Community! Elana from Confluence Automation here today with a super exciting announcement: You can now “batch” email notifications so that your team doesn’t get multiple emails from the same notification trigger!

What does this mean?

Have you ever accidentally spammed yourself or team members by creating an automation rule that sends an email for every page, action, or task found by a trigger?

Well no more! We've expanded our rule logic capabilities so that you can send a single email with all the content you need.

We've also added new “look-up” actions and smart values that allow you to search through your pages and tasks without taking explicit action on them!

What does this look like?

Let’s run through an example

You want to make sure all your content is up-to-date and relevant so that your team has the information they need. It's too tedious to manually search through every page, so you decide you want to create an automation rule that sends an email notification to inactive page owners about their stale content.

How would you do this?

1. In the rule builder, you’d add a “When” trigger and input your desired schedule time.

2. From there, you’d add a “Branch rule / for each inactive page” component. This branch will loop through all your pages and compile a list of the inactive ones.

3. Then, we can add an advanced branch component and input the smart value {{inactivePagesPerAuthor}}, which will compile a list of lists with inactive pages and their authors' names. We will later use this smart value to send targeted emails. 

4. Next, we can add a condition that checks to ensure that the smart value is not empty. This will ensure that we don’t accidentally send an email with no recipient.

5. Almost done! Last step would be to add a “Then: send email” component. Input the variable “{{authorInactivePages.first().author.emailAddress}}” into the “To” section. This will find the inactive pages author’s email address and notify them about their stale content!

Additional Updates

We updated 4 rule templates to have “batching notifications” by default: 

1. Notify people about inactive pages
2. Remind teammates about incomplete tasks when scheduled 
3. Mark inactive verified pages ready for review and send an email when scheduled 
4. Notify people when a page passes a threshold of views 

We added new “page” and “task” look-up actions

New “page” and “task” look up actions enable you to search through your space and compile a list of pages or tasks given a certain criteria. To use, navigate to “lookup pages” in the rule builder and select your desired component!

New Look-Up Actions and Smart Values:

1. {{lookupPagesPerOwner/Author}}
2. {{lookupTasks}}
3. {{lookupTasksPerAssignee}}

When will this be available?

This is fully available and live for all Premium and Enterprise Confluence customers with automation enabled and we hope you find “batching” notifications valuable in your mission to always keep your content up to date!

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 🙏

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Elana Agarwal It is a bit unclear to me how this works.

1. Is it the “Branch rule / for each inactive page” component that populates the {{inactivePagesPerAuthor}} smart value?
2. If so, then what components will populate the other smart values you mentioned in the article? Like {{lookupPagesPerOwner/Author}}, {{lookupTasks}}, {{lookupTasksPerAssignee}}?

[Guess_ Brandi N_]

love this, now can we make it send the email to the owner and not the Author?

[Elana Agarwal]

@Guess_ Brandi N_ Yes! Just use the {{inactivePagesPerOwner}} smart value instead! 

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Love this @Elana Agarwal

Made a little shareable video to spread the news!

[Avinoam]

@Matt Reiner _K15t_ you're the best!!!

[Elana Agarwal]

We would love to talk to you about how you're using this feature and learn more about what you want to see next! Feel free to reach out to eagarwal2@atlassian.com or schedule time here to chat! 

[Bri]

Excited for this,

I am trying to adapt an existing rule that currently sends an individual email per page, and I am a little unsure about how to structure this. 

1. If I want to add some additional criteria or action before moving to the compilation of the email body, would those compare (or action) blocks go on after [Branch rule/ for each inactive page] but on the same branch?
   •  Example:
     • Using a [If: Compare two values] block to check if the page status is 'Verified' 
     • Using a [Then: Change page status] block to update the page status to ['Needs Update']
   • I am thinking it would look like this.. am I on the right track?
     
     • When: Scheduled
       • Branch
         • Branch rule / for each inactive page
         • If: Compare two values (looking for verified status pages only)
         • Then: Change page status  
       • Branch
         • For each: Smart value (as shown in this page)
       • Then: Send email
         
         
2. Will the last row in the body just be repeated for as many pages as there are in the results

---

Request for update/future posts:

• I'd love to have seen a screenshot of what the email body will look like after the rule runs.  
• It would have been handy to have the text from the send email setup included as text on the page so copy/paste was an option. Not a huge deal but would prevent typos. 

---

Thank you! 

[Sergio]

Hello Elana,

thanks for that new capabilities!

I'd like to create an automation workflow which lists all pages haven't been changed since two years. Initially I have build a workflow which sends an email per page. But for some spaces with over 10.000 pages I would annoy some users.

So is there a similar smart value for the branch "Pages" ? Like {{PagesPerAuthor}} ?

Thanks in advance

Regards

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Sergio You can see the personalized list of pages to their authors using the Better Content Archiving app. So every author receives only his/her specific list even if the total list is extremely long.

The app has a flexible notification system that allows you to choose:

1. the schedule
2. the CQL
3. the custom email subject and content
4. the recipients (any combination of authors, owners, last modifiers, space admins, concrete users, concrete groups)

Multiple notifications like the above can be grouped into a notification scheme. Notification schemes can applied to any space.

[Erki Tammik]

@Elana Agarwal how could we find pages that are, for example, 6 months old and have a certain label, and then send a list of these pages via email.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Erki Tammik Given your are working with Better Content Archiving, the first step would be to define what "6-month old" mean by applying a status. Are these pages that haven't been edited for 6 months? Or haven't been viewed? Or both? Or simply pages that have been created 6 months ago?

1. Create the right Confluence page status for the criteria you need and make sure the status is applied to the pages.

2. Once you classified your pages, you can set up an automatic email notification that collects and sends out these pages periodically to the right stakeholders.

Give it a try and reach out to us if you need a hand with your strategy.