Confluence: 5 tips to increase productivity for admins and end-users

[#1]

Are you wishing there were more hours in the day to check items off the to-do list, or trying to find new and creative ways to accomplish more in less time? Harness the productivity already built into your Confluence instance with these 5 tips to optimize Confluence and reclaim your day.

1. Utilize Advanced Roadmaps for Jira in Confluence

2. Implement Analytics

3. Stay in sync with Team Calendars

4. Try out Templates

5. Master Macros

Tip 1: Utilize Advanced Roadmaps for Jira in Confluence

Does your organization already use Advanced Roadmaps in Jira? Bring the benefits of better planning, higher visibility, and greater team alignment into Confluence when you embed Advanced Roadmaps for Jira into your Confluence instance. Join key stakeholders in the spaces where business goals are built and tracked and share how work progresses across multiple projects and teams. When changes are saved to your plan in Advanced Roadmaps, they’ll automatically update on all places where it’s embedded in Confluence, as seen below.

Advanced roadmaps are designed to empower teams at scale, enabling you to plan based on capacity, track dependencies and manage competing priorities.

Learn how to bring Advanced Roadmaps to Confluence.

Tip 2: Implement Analytics

As your growing team creates more content in Confluence, keeping an abundance of pages and spaces relevant, useful, and easily findable can be challenging. Not only does a cluttered Confluence provide a challenge for your end-users as they try to navigate content, but these outdated pages may be impacting performance as well.

With Analytics for Confluence, get a clear understanding of what pages and spaces are being used or which can be archived, and never worry about having to manually report on and search through outdated content again. Analytics data helps Admins identify and report on:

• most viewed content

• usage and activity trends across your site

• frequent contributors and viewers

• spaces with few views that could potentially be archived

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/analytics-1044780333.html

Tip 3: Keep your company in sync with Team Calendars

Team Calendars help teams share their schedules to stay organized, communicate availability, and track projects easily. With Team Calendars for Confluence Data Center, you can create calendars to track events that affect your teams, such as release dates, project milestones, or holidays. You can even embed a calendar on a Confluence page to make important dates more visible. As well as adding your calendar events, you can populate your calendars automatically, with data from Jira or your favorite third-party calendar apps.

Team Calendars provides one place for fast-moving teams working in Confluence to connect async.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf716/team-calendars-1108682617.html

Tip 4: Try out Templates

Use Confluence templates to scare away blank page syndrome. When you add a new page in Confluence, users don't have to start from scratch; instead, base the new page on a template. From product requirements to marketing plans, there's a template that’s a perfect fit for your project.

A template creates a framework that can break a major process into actionable, bite-size pieces. Spend less time formatting your pages, and more time completing work with templates. Templates can help teams clarify goals, set realistic expectations, and assign accountability.

Some useful templates to try are:

• The meeting notes template will help you and your team collaborate on notes and follow-up tasks. 

• The requirements template allows you to capture your software/hardware product requirements, and create related Jira issues from the page.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/create-a-template-296093779.html

Tip 5: Master Macros

Confluence macros are special add-ons that allow you to extend the functionality and design of Confluence content. Customize Confluence to better serve your organization by visually enhancing how content is displayed, structuring content in a more organized way, or even completely changing the functionality of a page. Using macros helps you extend your Confluence pages' capabilities, allowing you to add extra functionality or include dynamic content.

With various Macros to choose from, customizing Confluence to better meet your organization's needs only takes a few clicks. Consider these macros to boost productivity, or create a macro of your own.

Task Report macro

Add the Task Report macro to a page to display a list of tasks. Filter the tasks by space, page, user, label, created date, and more. On a page, you can assign a task to a user and give it a due date, then the Task Report macro can summarize any outstanding tasks with a meeting notes page, a space, certain assignees, or across Confluence globally.

Table of contents macro

The Table of Contents macro helps users navigate lengthy pages by summarizing the content structure and providing links to headings used on the page. The best part is you don't need to do anything except add the macro; once you've added it, it'll automatically detect headings and add them to the table of contents.

Tip, Note, Info, Warning, and Panel macros

Often when creating documentation, there are elements of a page that you want to highlight or draw the viewers' attention to. Confluence ships with the Tip, Info, Warning, Note, and Panel macros, which will help you focus a viewer's attention on a particular part of your content.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/macros-139387.html

[Craeg Strong]

Excellent summary!   I also like the "children display" macro, it is probably the one I use the most, along with status and code snippet.

[Taranjeet Singh]

@Claire Chisholm Thank your for sharing these Confluence tips! Super useful!

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

Thanks. I have recently started using Analytics a lot. It helps me archive a lot of ideal SPACE.

One thing though - archiving SPACE in Confluence seems to ineffective when compared to archiving Projects in JIRA. It just lets me categories SPACES. We should atleast be able to hide SPACES from users after archiving them.