NEW: Confluence whiteboards for Jira

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community! 👋

I’m Jacob, a Product Marketing Manager on the Confluence Cloud team. Last week, Confluence began rolling out a new tool that takes Confluence beyond pages—now introducing: whiteboards!

We often hear our Jira customers say how much they rely on physical and virtual whiteboards to ideate on projects, plan sprints, and conduct retrospectives. Now, with Confluence whiteboards, Jira users can enjoy the power of Jira within the flexible and real-time collaborative benefits of a whiteboard—all while working in the same Atlassian platform!

Why use Confluence whiteboards with Jira

At Atlassian, we’re big fans of digital whiteboarding. Visualization is an essential aspect of Agile development. It’s likely many of you also already use a digital whiteboard. For anyone not on the digital whiteboard train, you may be wondering “why do I need a digital whiteboard when I already plan projects and sprints in Jira?” Or maybe “I like physical whiteboards, sticky notes, and index cards. Why overthink it?”

These are some of the main reasons we love Confluence whiteboards:

1. Remote work: Teams are often spread out across time zones and geographies. Now, brainstorming, planning sessions, and standups can all happening with everyone in the same place at the same time. Save yourself the trip. ✈️

2. Reduce rework: Once you’re done on a physical whiteboard, you have the tedious task of manually typing in all those plans and decisions into Jira. With Confluence whiteboards, you have a two-way sync and exclusive integrations with Jira that make it easy to create, organize, and update issues while seamlessly pushing those changes back to your Jira projects. 🔄

3. Centralized documentation: Pages, docs, and whiteboards are no longer scattered and are easily found and accessed all in one place. If you erase a physical whiteboard, all that work is gone. 😱

How do Confluence whiteboards work with Jira

With Confluence whiteboards, the possibilities of what you can do are nearly limitless. But let’s focus right now on exactly what it can do with Jira:

Import and freely visualize Jira issues

There may be times when you want to organize and visualize your Jira projects in an unstructured and flexible view. Within a Confluence whiteboard, you can quickly import existing Jira issues onto the whiteboard.

Convert stickies and shapes into Jira issues

Let everyone get their ideas down on stickies during brainstorming or planning sessions. Then vote on them and turn the winning ideas into actionable items in Jira by converting them into Jira issues.

Smart sections to action Jira issues in bulk

Since Confluence and Jira both live within the Atlassian platform, you can work faster and smarter. Create actions to automatically update Jira issues fields using smart sections in a Confluence whiteboard. Issues dragged and dropped into a smart section will automatically update assignee, labels, priority, or any other assigned field.

Smart connectors to create relationships between Jira issues

Mapping out dependencies has never been easier. Smart connectors allow you to draw lines between issues and push a record of those dependencies back into Jira—for example, visualizing which issues block each other.

Say goodbye to juggling multiple tools and say hello to a seamless, connected workflow. Introduce Confluence’s whiteboards to your teams and experience the power of whiteboards with Jira today!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Jacob Wisner 

Thanks for this information!  Three questions...

How does one group / ungroup shapes?  I did not see that in the shortcuts.  

What other templates are you considering adding?  For example, such as mind maps, whiteboards including Confluence macros for Jira data, etc.

I notice when shapes are grouped, then locked, and then unselected to perform other actions, the locked shapes can no longer be selected together for unlocking.  They must be individually unlocked.  Is this the expected behavior?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Jon Arendt]

Should I be able to see a Confluence whiteboard in the Project Pages in Jira?  I can see every other page from the Space, but I can't see the whiteboard.

[Shalu Pandey]

Hi @Jon Arendt - not quite yet but this is on our backlog at the moment. We are actively working on updating projects pages so it can be a full representation of all your documentation needs in JIRA. 

[Matt Ratcliffe]

Now that Whiteboards for Jira (third party app) is closing down will we see support for linking issues via parent? E.g. Initiative > Epic > Story?

Issue linking is good but a whiteboard is very useful for showing parent hierarchies.  

thanks

Matt

[Shalu Pandey]

hi @Matt Ratcliffe - to clarify the ask, would you like to be able to link whiteboards to Epics, Initiatives and other places in JIRA? do you have an example/image of where you do this today using the 3rd party app? 

[Matt Ratcliffe]

@Shalu Pandey Sorry for the delay, I didn't see this!

I've had another go and I can parent Initiatives to Epics (which is what I was previously doing):

Image above should hopefully make sense so that solves my problem, apologies!

I have noticed another thing, is there a way to link and have the parent field updated too? 

thanks
Matt

[David Tieman]

In addition to the question above about viewing the Parented Initiatives and Epics visually, can we change the card layout in the Confluence Whiteboard to include other fields such as the Parent field so we can see that value?