Is Confluence right for my team

[kevin lindsay]

hello

Some teams within the company I work for have recently started using Confluence as a way to share and store knowledge. These are hardware (IC) design engineers. I am considering expanding on this idea and use Confluence as a home page for a fairly large applications engineering team. Would this be a good tool to use?

Currently, our team is extensively using JIRA for bug tracking and Slack for team communication. We also use Smartsheet for product development progress, although I don't personally use it.  

What I would like is to develop a homepage that my team uses as a daily starting off point. To motivate the team to do this, the Confluence team page would need to pull information directly from the above mentioned tools and display relevant information.

Given that I am not (yet) savvy with Confluence, and am not a software engineer, does this sound do-able?  If so, what's the best way to get started? I have already created a basic personnal space with links to other spaces and how-to-articles, but have not been able to progress beyond that. I could pay for some InLearning or Atlassian classes to speed up, but, am wondering if there is a better way?

[Meg Holbrook]

Hey Kevin, 

Since you're familiar with Atlassian products, then you know the lengths to which Atlassians go to create a cohesive and integrated platform across their products. There are definitely ways to show JIRA project and issue links on confluence pages dashboard-style, and plenty of other third-party apps that have near-limitless functionality across loads of business tools. 

I think the better question is not whether or not Confluence can do it, but rather what the level of technical skill is available in your organization to make it do what you want.

The best thing to do, in my opinion, would be to take some Confluence training or poke around in the documentation. If you have more specific questions, the community is a great source of information once you've established a direction/mock up.  

Let me know if you have any questions and best of luck!