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Atlassian hides this functionality, then claims too few people use it, then says they will remove it from those of us who do and maybe one day in the future give us something else because there are too few of us using it (that FOUND it) to matter.
I find it hard to believe 0.02% of confluence cloud users currently find easily editing word and excel documents from a confluence page useful.......................
You just ruined this organisations productivity by disabling this functionality and have left us scrambling to find a solution, none of them look as good as what you just disabled
Atlassian have proved cloud-native critics right by ignoring the realities of the real world, removing a useful feature at exceptionally short notice, and giving an arguably suspect and woolly justification for these actions.
The impression I'm getting here is that the Atlassian Companion app is broken, and the reason it's being kept alive for Data Centre has more to do with the amount of money involved, and the infrastructure the client likely has in place.
In my estimation there are only 3 or 4 reasons Atlassian would make this decision and announce it in this fashion;
This a security issue, and Atlassian cannot absorb the workload or cost of monitoring and mitigating this fully. Atlassian are relying on customer infrastructure to protect them by implementing a form of restricted communication, and setting implementation best practises to limit liability.
Same as Number 1, but prompted by an upcoming audit or external disclosure of vulnerability they can't mitigate, and the only option is to remove access to the files in the way they are.
Supporting the app for Cloud users is damaging the support SLAs
Atlassian has decided they can increase profitability by ditching this feature, whether this is by removing an element of internal cross charging, or simply by not needing to expand their support and security staff.
If it's 3 or 4, I don't understand why you didn't simply make Companion functionality reliant on Premium licensing.
@Avni Barman@Divya Sriram What's the real reason this is being discontinued in one area of your business, but not others?
Removing a valued feature with the promise of replacing it with a better feature at some unspecified point in the future. Pretty poor.
I'm also a little skeptical about the quoted statistics on usage. I don't know how else you can properly manage document updates within Confluence. We've been looking at using Confluence as a replacement to Sharepoint. Actions like this make it very unlikely and consign Confluence to the 'vaguely useful Wiki tool' class.
The removal of Companion destroys me confluence space. there is a lack of alternatives. The process of downloading, editing and uploading ist not possible, as it creates many files in the download folder.
Working in a team on the same file in confluence becomes impossible because every user creates his own files in another folder.
Really! A disappointing step back to medieval times... Sharing documents, editing and updating them directly is a key feature we need. We deeply regret our decision to have moved into the cloud.
@Avni Barman This affected us today and like many others very disappointed a feature was removed with an alternative. Version control is very important feature for our artifacts and this will be much more time consuming. I think many have sum it up.
Could you not just leave it in place WHILE you work on a better solution?!?!? An imperfect tool is better than no tool. This is crushing my business analysts right now.
@Avni Barman ATLASSIAN TEAM "It is currently a very buggy experience with less than 0.02% of our users using it. Rather than investing team resources to fix this, we decided to put those resources into making this feature available natively in the editor"
OR
@Rachel Robins ATLASSIAN TEAM "I'm a technical writer on the Confluence Server and Data Center team, and just wanted to let you know that I recently confirmed with my team that we are continuing to invest in Companion"
Which one is it?
Sounds to me like the Atlassian Companion is continuing to be maintained, this isn't about what users want, this is a product decision to remove capability from Confluence Cloud.
Could you not just leave it in place WHILE you work on a better solution?!?!? An imperfect tool is better than no tool. This is crushing my business analysts right now.
This is what makes me think this is a security, legal or compliance issue. Perhaps infringement on someones patent, even?
@Rowan Page has hit it on the head - the reasoning doesn't make sense.
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I can understand that removing "buggy features" that are a bit ineffective is one strategy ... after all it is only one way of dealing with editing Office documents...
Reminds me of the Black Knight ... confident he can keep doing his job to the end ...
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
Whoever is making these decisions in Atlassian is certainly not taking the user experience into consideration. They remove the app at short notice, but don't give a usable alternative. It's not the first time they've done something like this.
I can't believe that the 0.02% of users number is accurate based on the comments alone from here. How did they come up with that figure? Something sounds wrong there.
Atlassian want everyone to switch to Cloud, but the cloud offering is worse than the on-premise solution. This makes no sense.
This kind of thinking is why my team is looking to switch away from Atlassian products.
For anyone only interested in version numbers - If you drag and drop the attachment onto the Attachment page, it'll still update the file and give a new version number, no need to delete & re-attach.
You can also still download the previous versions of the files if you edit the ?version= at the end of the view link, you just can't view them in the embedded viewer.
Edit: You can view them in the viewer by using the version drop-down in top-left. You can also drag and drop onto this window to upload new version, or click the Upload button, top-right
Disappointing all round. This has ended our attempts to unify our workforce onto confluence just as it was beginning to pick up - without this bridging tool it's just impossible. Gritting our teeth and using Sharepoint for everything not strictly development-related looks like the only option now, which is... Crazy.
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Ist die folgende Ankündigung bereits aktiv? "In Zukunft können Sie eine Datei direkt aus dem Medienbetrachter und aus dem Editor selbst ersetzen. Wir werden alle neuen Updates in diesem Community-Beitrag veröffentlichen."
Wenn ja, wäre ein Beispiel hilfreich. Das gelingt mir derzeit nicht, auch weil ich nicht weiß, was genau mit "MEDIA VIEWER" gemeint ist.
Meinst du das Office Word-Makro, eingefügt über einen Anhang? Auf den angezeigten Seiten kann ich die Datei im zweiten Schritt nicht aktiv bearbeiten.
Our whole tenant used this Companion app and the 'Edit' feature. We have spent huge amounts of time training people to use this feature to ensure proper versioning throughout Word and Excel docs...
With this feature removed, we now need to train them in;
Downloading the file
enable editing
making changes
make a saved copy
delete the originally downloaded file from the PC folder location
Change\Save the file to the exact file name of the original
Upload back to Confluence (to keep the file versioning structure)
The solutions that have been provided back by Support Staff and Documentation instruct us to Delete the file from the Confluence page, as if not understanding the versioning function and why this is important.
Concerned more features, perhaps even file versioning may be on the way out and will have to find out when it stops working?
Were the 0.02% of Confluence Cloud users engaged to discuss this app and feature set disappearing or were we supposed to be 'keeping an eye out' for Confluence articles to stay informed?
Is this a joke? This is a terrible user experience. Unbelievable. I have always promoted using Confluence to the rest of my organization outside engineering but now I don't see how I can. This was a bad move to do this without a replacement. At a minimum, a notice in the UI where I usually go to get the Companion App should have been presented to the user.
I guess OneNote and Dropbox will win the battle at my company. Ugh....
This is extremely disappointing. Just as I was expecting improvement on Companion (simultaneous editing etc..) everything went backwards. I will not be using Confluence on my next project for sure.
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