Confluence and Outlook

[Steve_Hastings]

HI there. I'm a new user of Confluence and I love it. What I'm staggered to see though is that Atlassian declines to build a native link into Confluence for Outlook. Outlook is not a pretty program but it's still a global standard for mail, calendar and tasks. I found ways to link calendars but I cannot find any inbuilt functionality or apps for Confluence Cloud for linking Outlook mail or Outlook tasks. Forgive me if I'm missing something here. At the moment for example when I generate tasks in Confluence I'm copy and pasting them to Outlook. Pretty dumb way to do this. With Outlook emails I'm saving them as PDFs and adding them as files to Confluence. Dumb again. This is probably an old subject for you long term Confluence users but I'd love to hear your and Atlassian's views on this Confluence /Outlook relationship subject. Many thanks, Steve (Melbourne, Aus)

[Meg_Holbrook]

Hi Steve!

I was using the JIRA for outlook addon for a bit and it was a little clunky, so I tossed it. With that being said, I do agree that there should be a stronger connection with Outlook for all of the Atlassian task tracking and scheduling functions within both JIRA and Confluence. 

I think the biggest move towards managing confluence for me was actually getting away from email altogether, which entailed making really solid JIRA boards, and linking to our confluence instances in specified spaces. 

In this way, I'm using the infrastructure that Atlassian built to best work together, and now am relying more on email for the day to day noise instead of project/documentation management and deadlines. In email reminders, I'm substituting the actual content for links to Confluence and JIRA pages. 

Best of luck to you, let me know if there's any ideas you want to toss around. 

[Steve_Hastings]

Meg, thank you so much for those valuable thoughts. I'll investigate your ideas...