About a year ago, as a part of #ConfluenceLovers, I wrote an article about my first impressions of using Confluence since joining my new company. It’s really hard to believe that a whole year has past already. I thought it might be fun to reflect on last year’s article and then also look at how much further I have come from being a Confluence newbie in just one year!
I started using Confluence as a regular user with standard access to the main company space and a couple of smaller R&D specific spaces. As a quick recap from last year here are the things that really impressed me:
Ease of use navigating the REST API documentation
Templates help with visual discovery of important macros
Real time collaboration on content creation
My role has expanded so much within the past year. I can’t believe that just a year ago if someone asked me to create a page and document our Jira Workflow process I would struggle with anything beyond clicking the create page button. Now, I’m doing so much more than that!
I’m not doing as much with the API now, but I’m still referencing it when someone asks “if it’s possible to do something not visible in the UI“ (I’m looking at you CQL searches).
I’m regularly using templates, and I have expended from just the “How To Articles“ into the “Meeting Notes“ (and soon many of the new templates that were announced and launched yesterday).
While real-time collaboration is cool, I have also found the massive advantages to asynchronous collaboration. I’m an early bird, which means I can see all the inline comments that have been left by the team members reviewing documents at 6pm, and I can then respond to them and make adjustments at 6:30am ahead of our entire team meeting at 10am.
I’m now a full Confluence administrator (and Atlassian site-admin but we’re focusing on Confluence in this article). I have been tasked with a number of larger projects, from splitting our 'Mega' space into logical, smaller spaces. Performing an audit and revamp of all our permissions. And, helping to define the custom templates and process for people requesting changes to our Jira workflows.
As a part of achieving my goal for 2021 of getting to Atlassian Certified Expert, I was even able to successfully pass the Confluence Space Administrator Pro Badge! I would 100% attribute the studying I needed to do to pass that exam as some of the largest “Ah Ha!“ moments in my Confluence knowledge.
I’m also drafting this article in my personal Confluence instance as I do for every article I write on the Community now. I also love using the mobile app for adding scratch notes or topics that I want to write about. Being able to jot them done the moment I think about them is amazing since I sometimes have a very short-term memory.
To say I have fallen in love with Confluence would be an under statement at this point. It’s hard to believe I was writing content without using Confluence, I’m here to stay!
Jimmy Seddon
Sr R&D Tools Administrator
Arctic Wolf
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
181 accepted answers
4 comments