Power Tips for Using Jira & Confluence Together

[#1]

Hi Community!

Jenn from Confluence Cloud PMM team here. Have you heard these tips for using Jira / Confluence together? Here are a few of our favorite tricks for making the most of your time with the Atlassian power couple.  

Let the Jira roadmap macro handle that

With the Jira roadmap macro, it’s easier than ever to embed the URL of your roadmap into any Confluence page and see it created for you. From there, the link is live and accessible to anyone who wants to see it. An executive needs to okay your roadmap? Leave Jira to the engineers and head straight on over to Confluence. 

This feature is available in next-gen projects in Jira Software Cloud.

Create an issue when viewing a page

Link any Jira issues or project to a Confluence page by pasting a Jira issue link on a page or by typing /Jira to find a project or issue.

You can also highlight the text on your page and select the ‘create issue’ icon that appears above the highlighted text. Enter your server (if you have multiple Jira sites connected to Confluence), project, issue type, and description. The highlighted text will supply the issue summary automatically. The issue will appear in Jira and be added to your page.

Stay updated with your team’s workload and completed tasks 

Confluence automatically embeds newly created Jira issues in your related requirements docs. Your project managers can have access to your dev team’s work as it’s being tracked in Jira.

Your requirements and other Confluence pages are naturally linked to your epics and issues in Jira. This allows developers to get all the context they need without interrupting their workflow. You can even create and access Confluence pages directly from your sprint backlog and view them inline with “Pages” in the Jira sidebar.






Grant any active user access to see knowledge base spaces

If your Confluence page isn’t open to the public, you can still make a knowledge base optional through the customer portal. When linking your Jira Service Desk to a Confluence space, you can choose to allow all active users and customers to view pages in the linked space–no Confluence license necessary.

This permission can only be turned on through Jira Service Desk. However, you can pull access to the whole site or to particular spaces through Confluence’s global permissions or space permissions.

Connect all things through the power of Pages

To create, store, and share all project-related documentation, Pages is your destination. This is the one and only place in your Jira project that lets you see all the relevant Confluence pages your team is putting together.

Quick shortcuts allow you to create the sort of documents most useful to your team. Once you save a document it becomes visible in the page tree, where you can look through your team’s documentation without leaving Jira.

If this sounds like the perfect pair for your team, work better together starting here.

[Hamed Hassanzadeh]

Hi;
I have question about "External Collaboration" feature, as it is mentioned "Coming Soon", I wonder how soon it will be. We are going to replace existing system working on Exchange platform and we are thinking about Confluence Cloud as an option, However as a service team who arrange the several training to our customer during each year. We need to share training documents with attendees and we willing to use new system as gateway to make 'restricted read access' to customer who attend training (External Use). Also give the access to different internal users as well. So I am wondering if the confluence cloud is right option or not? Please bear in mind that range of training are diverse and number of documents are remarkable.

[hilarydub]

Hi @Hamed Hassanzadeh! I'm a product manager on Confluence Cloud working on the External Collaboration feature. We have two versions of External Collaboration coming out soon: 1) The sharing of one page to external users - think, "anyone can view this link" - which is planned for Confluence Standard. 2) The sharing of an entire space with external users - meant for longer term collaboration with external clients and contractors - which is planned for Confluence Premium. These features are still in early days and we can't promise an exact delivery date quite yet, but I'd love to get some more feedback on your use case to help shape some of our product choices if you have some time to chat! Feel free to sign up for a slot here: https://calendly.com/hdubin/confluence-cloud-premium-feedback

[Dan Winkler]

@hilarydub How is External Collaboration different using Anonymous Access to grant permissions?

[Dave Graham]

We're currently evaluating Jira & Confluence as a suitable upgrade from our current project management system. I'm a little unclear about what is "coming soon."

Are all of the features in this post "coming soon?"

What are "next-gen projects?"

[Bert Pattyn]

@Dave Graham https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Next-gen-articles/Everything-you-want-to-know-about-next-gen-projects-in-Jira/ba-p/894773

[Zachary Jones]

When do you expect to make the classic issue view a norm, so that we don't need to waste so much org tie moving team off the new-issue-view?  The new issue view really is a major blow to credibility for PMs and related teams that have to lobby to bring in jira. 

[Deb Hanrahan]

Creating Jira issues directly in Confluence is great, but I would like to be able to to add an assignee to capture action items in a backlog.

[Srini_Krishnamoorthi]

looking for options to link requirements with roadmap

[Liz]

@Dan WinklerAs I remmeber with Anonymous access you can only add comments and see the pages that you are allowed to if they are in an specific space, maybe with External collaboration space you can allow some users with an specific domain "like @abc.com", without consuming a license, to add pages, maybe participate with the colaboration feature and all the people in the space edit the meeting page. When working as contractor to access to some info and pass all the requirements to get assgined a VPN or an account could be a long process, maybe its thought to be this way. I hope so it could be cool :p

[Drew Heasman]

How do we add roadmaps to classic projects?

[Zachary Jones]

@Drew Heasman I"m sure we cannot, and we will all need to keep demanding this awful 'new jira issue view' be discontinued in favor of the classic view, which works.  If they just put classic view on the new jira, we'd be getting somewhere (as long as the classic project are still available since their admin configs are 10x more powerful)

[Chris Gaskins]

Sure would be nice to get roadmaps working with legacy projects in Jira Cloud (i.e. non next-gen projects).   Is this ever gonna happen?

[Joshua Tjhin]

There were many bugs when trying to create Jira issues from a Confluence table in the new editor.

• Epic on the page was not the parent issue
• Issues were not linked in Confluence (the page was not updated)
• The issues were still created (even though it was to find out) - I had to go my recently created issues filter

[Stefan Prelle]

This would be a cool feature, if such a roadmap could be displayed to anonymous users. Currently nextgen projects don't allow anonymous users to view issues, so cool Confluence macros like Jira reports or Roadmap won't show anything but an error message.

[Jeremiah Guappone]

Great article.  Is there a Gant type feature built-in for traditional projects?