Combining Confluence with Lithium User Community

[Scott Genzer]

hi - I'm the community manager for RapidMiner and I notice that you (Atlassian) also use Lithium for this community. I also notice that you have nicely tied your Confluence pages to this community in look, feel, and navigation, as well as your training pages and so forth.  What platform are you using for training? How did you get the look & feel to move so nicely?

Tagging @Monique van den Berg

Thanks.

Scott

https://community.rapidminer.com/ 

[greg varela]

@Monique vdB Our corporation is investigating the installation of Questions for Confluence plugin as a central place for our Internal technology community to ask and get answers to common questions.  We already utilize the rest of the Atlassian stack. 

I am concerned that Atlassian doesn't use their own software. 

Can you elaborate on exactly how Questions fails to handle the factors you mentioned?
"The biggest reasons for that being robust integrated spam management and sheer scale."

What other reasons don't you use your own software?

It seems like your team must do a lot of customization to use Lithium. 
I'm just wondering why didn't your team spend the time updating the features of your own software vs customizing a different software product?

Scared to use Questions....

Thanks in advance for the info. 

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

It would be very odd if we were using anything else. 😆

You mean like say, using Lithium rather than Questions for Confluence for Atlassian's very own community Q&A site? 😆

[Daniel Eads _unmonitored account_]

Should be noted that filing support tickets on support.atlassian.com is Jira Service Desk powered (set up in a way that customers can only see support tickets they've reported or had shared with them). The support homepage is well integrated with Confluence so you're driven towards relevant documents rather than opening a support ticket for little things. While they are married very well, I believe a lot of what's on support.atlassian.com in terms of integration is custom. Confluence and Jira Service Desk do pair and integrate well together, but what you see on support.atlassian.com is a little more than what comes out of the box.

Bugs and feature requests as Monique mentioned are public on jira.atlassian.com.

[AnnWorley]

Hi @greg varela,

One of our product managers addressed similar concerns in this thread:

What is the future of Questions for Confluence?

She posted her contact info in case anyone wants to follow up further, but the Community concern was answered thusly:

Moving the community boards – the decision to move Atlassian Community to a new platform was the result of the broadening requirements of the Community. That is, the need for the Community site to encompass more than Q&A, and also to offer things like user-generated articles, product-specific landing pages and topical themes, which aren’t currently part of the feature set of Questions.

I hope this information helps your organization decide whether Questions is right for your internal technology team.

Thanks,

Ann

[Monique vdB]

@greg varela Lithium has a spam management tool that can review 1000+ messages/day and is 99% accurate in detecting spam posts. This would not be a concern for an internal community, but for an external community at this scale, not having this would be a problem. Spam overran Atlassian Answers in the end because of this. 

Our community also has millions of users and pageviews so our scale is massive. Let me see if I can get some info from the Confluence team on how high Questions might scale for your use case! I know a lot of our long-time community members were super happy with it and still don't fully love the Lithium experience. 

[bgannin]

The two apps, from a visual standpoint, continue to converge on the ADG3 standard, each playing to the strengths and limitations of their respective operating systems. If you notice major departures from either ADG3 or each other that stand out, please file a ticket.

With respect to a "more seamless [feedback] experience" - we are always open to suggestions, especially when filed as tickets for us to see voting and comments from all Sourcetree users. Threads on Community can get lost over time and are not ideal for tracking requests as much as they are beneficial for discussion.

Mac: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREE
Windows: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN

We are a small team so integrating a more complex in-app feedback workflow, potentially with third party dependencies, is something we approach very cautiously along with the need to balance other deliverables on each platform.

Brian Ganninger
Senior Mac Developer, Sourcetree

[Mikael Sandberg]

Sourcetree for Mac and Sourcetree for Windows differs a bit. The one for Windows follows the new design guidelines that you see on the web, and so far none of my developers have mentioned anything about it that it looks different then our other Atlassian tools, but then again, we are on Server and it does not have the new UI design yet.

[Monique vdB]

Excellent! The last CMX Summit had some outstanding speakers. You may also be interested in the CR Connect in Boston if that's closer to you. 

[Scott Genzer]

thank you @Andrew Golokha - yes I was thinking API to/from JIRA as well but the current volume does not justify in our current world. I guess it's reassuring that the "big kids" at Atlassian are doing the same. :)

@Steffen Opel _Utoolity_ - yes exactly what I was wondering!  Of course one could ask the same question why RapidMiner is using Drift's very basic chatbot engine instead of its own powerful ML tools....unless I followed with "Stay Tuned..."

[Monique vdB]

lol, @Steffen Opel _Utoolity_, yes, that would be super we---

oh, I see what you did there. 

🤣

[Andrew Golokha]

Support: we are looking for a more seamless transition from community to support ticket to documentation etc...

We don't have a seamless transition of public community threads to support tickets, but we can convert them manually on a case-by-case basis. I'm pretty sure Lithium API can be used for optimizing this process, but we haven't gone this route yet.

[Scott Genzer]

so yes I am a new CMX Pro member and was thinking of going to the next CMX Summit. I definitely would enjoy trading notes and beverages. :)

[Scott Genzer]

so no, we do not use Ideation that I know of. As for "most popular" on the community, the "Product Forum" pages are by far the most popular. Nothing even comes close. I also find that if I move info from "Blog" to "KB", I get at least a 2x bump in traffic.

[Monique vdB]

@Scott Genzer converting lurkers is always a challenge with community management! I hadn't heard about Drift, I'll have to check it out. 

I think " a little bit of everything" is basically a community manager's job description. Do you attend any community management conferences? At the next CMX or CR Connect, we should sit down and have beverages ☕️ 🍷 🥃 

Or at a Team Tour or Summit, of course!

[Monique vdB]

We use the Lithium APIs extensively. And we are rolling out new features over time  based on user and stakeholder feedback -- when we launched we didn't even have @ mentions!  :) 

[Scott Genzer]

oh and thanks for the kind words about our community.  I am the community manager, design team, moderator, chief bottle washer, etc... :)

[Scott Genzer]

haha so that's powered by Drift and it's phenomenal. It's a combo of automation and human powered. We're getting a huge engagement bump from Drift, particularly in getting newbies to move from passive to active user on the community. Plus it's synchronized with our CRM etc...

[Monique vdB]

Our Sourcetree experts (thanks, leaderboard) who may have thoughts: @bgannin, @Ana Retamal, @Mikael Sandberg, @Manju 

[Scott Genzer]

oh and @Monique vdB - just curious why you turn off the kudos and PM features here on Lithium? And do you make use of the Lithium APIs or just the LSI?

[Monique vdB]

@Scott Genzer I visited your community and really like it! Some community manager shop-talk questions for you: what's the experience for you with the "how can I help you" pop-up? Is it automated or manual? Do you use Ideation for your product or for the community itself? What's the most popular thing on your homepage? 

[Scott Genzer]

ah @Daniel Eads _unmonitored account_ thanks. That explains why it looks so seamless. Well done to all.

I'm interested (if you're able to answer at all...) about Sourcetree in particular as it's the only Atlassian desktop software I am even somewhat familar with. Everything we're talking about jumps out of product to the web:

This does not seem ideal from a seamless end-to-end user experience, no?

[Monique vdB]

From an end-user standpoint I have to say I love Jira Service Desk. It's intuitive and easy to grasp for a non-admin or power user of Jira. 

[Monique vdB]

It would be very odd if we were using anything else. 😆

[Scott Genzer]

ah ok I assumed so. :)

[Monique vdB]

Jira!