Dear Community,
So the Confluence databases beta is out for a couple of weeks and there is surprisingly little chatter about it here, which lead me to do a lot of problem solving and discovering myself. I wanted to share my experiences so far with you and also ask you to add your opinions, problems and user stories about it.
Let's start with the positives:
- Base functionality is great and gives a lot more flexibility in filtering and extracting data compared to basic tables
- Integration with Jira works well, although some more functionality together with Jira automations would be nice.
- The views-feature is very helpful in structuring a big database full for different user groups and only showing them the data relevant for them.
- Integrating data from other databases via the entry link works fine as long as it does work,
which leads me to my gripes with it:
- Even for a beta feature documentation is absolutely barebones and field types like the entry link and it's corresponding fields are not documented in a way, that would make them easy to use.
- Entry link fields are missing configuration options - you can't specify which field/column they are taking the data from. If it's the wrong one, the only option to change it is to duplicate the column it automagically chose and delete the original one. Repeat until it took the correct one by chance.
- It was not made clear anywhere, that entry links only work within the same space, but not in between spaces, which severely restricts usability of this feature (aggregating data from databases you have access to would be a killer feature).
- When a database is embedded in a page, it can't be displayed as a knowledge base article over the service desk (only shows a link, probably because Jira doesn't know what to do with it) - if this is something that isn't being implemented, at least a warning about that would be nice.
So all in all it's heading in the right direction but definitely needs some more work to make it more intuitive and user friendly. I get, that it's still a beta, which is also why I opened this discussion, to give feedback and improve the end product.
Thanks!
