Tell me how you use Atlassian tools outside of their intended purposes.

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

Have you ever looked at a tool and seen how people use it, understand it, and work within it. Then suddenly you understand that the tool is much more than anyone had anticipated? You finally understand there is a much larger application for a single service tool then initially intended.

I’m always striving to push any tool beyond their designed limits. With that said, Confluence has become a great automation platform, BI reporting engine, and multi-tenant documentation site for us. What I am really interested to know is how is everyone else using an Atlassian tool to do something it was not intended to do but really moves the bar? Please share with as much detail as you wish. I really look forward to seeing what everyone is doing that is outside the norm.

Ideas like:
Confluence as a Recipe/Cook book for the family
Jira as a to-do Bucket list of life goals (Rachel Wright)
Trello as a shared book club

Please share anything you are doing outside of the day to day.

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Hi @NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE I couldn't agree with you more! I absolutely love Trello and I use Trello for absolutely everything, I don't know what I would do without it! I got a lot of ideas from the Inspiration boards. Have you checked this out?

https://trello.com/inspiration

You can save the boards and adapt your own style, rather than having to recreate from scratch!

Have a super day,

Jodi

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

@Jodi LeBlanc This is extremely useful! Thank you!

[Jonathan Smith]

Since I am supposed to know off the top of my head what groceries we need for the week, I now track those checklist items in Trello.

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

@Jonathan Smith Interesting, is the board shared with everyone so they can add their own grocery items?

[Jonathan Smith]

Private board with the Mrs. because no one needs to know how barren my cabinets are :)

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

@Jonathan Smith Are you setting reminders and due dates as well?

[Jonathan Smith]

No, I am just using the basic check box functionality at the moment. Just using these products very lightly outside of work.

[Meg Holbrook]

I tried to coerce my husband into using my Trello (my kids are on-board), but he is not keeping up this far. 

He likes the idea, but is just not the kind of guy that's used to following a calendar or schedule. The term "flies by the seat of his pants" comes to mind. 

[Jonathan Smith]

Update, I stopped using Trello to upkeep my grocery list :D

I use it more for keeping track of house projects and pressure cooking instructions.

[Meg Holbrook]

I love the idea of using Confluence as a cookbook! Even if my family weren't involved, it would definitely fill a gap for my own records. 

I've often thought about using confluence as an "adulting manual" that I can give to my kids when they're older. Use it to document my own processes for things like balancing a checkbook, paying your utility bill, filling your pantry with staples, etc. 

I think a lot about what would happen to my kids if something were to happen to me (thanks high-functioning anxiety). It is super self-soothing to think about taking everything I've learned as an adult and distilling that down into how to articles, lol. "Mom's brain on the internet"

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

OH! Adulting KBs within confluence would be awesome. If you do this, you can easily make templates and blog about them to share them out. If you do move forward on this, please keep me in the loop, this is fascinating! 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

We're using them for household management.

My other half knows I don't remember to do anything unless there's a Jira issue for it

We use Trello to try to remember what TV shows we like are on, and do shopping lists

Confluence has pages covering who pays which bills, what savings and investments we have, our wills (and copies of our parents ones), a network diagram, logs about the cat when she's ill, contact details, how-tos etc.

For a while, Bamboo was doing some of our house automation, but that stopped when the vendors improved their software so we didn't need it.

A contrived one - the systems use Crowd.  Don't need to, but it helps me practice and remember stuff. 

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

A home is a business. In many ways, this makes the most sense it clearly works for business life. The application for this is outstanding. Are you also using Calendars within Confluence for the family as well?

How did you get your other half to adopt using the Atlassian platform?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I didn't do things unless there was an issue to remind me!

[Meg Holbrook]

Maybe this is how I force adoption at home LOL!

"Sorry honey, it wasn't on the list."

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The place I was at before ran rather a large set of services, and had an operations team that refused to even look at the services until they had a Jira issue for it.

They weren't inflexible about it - the issue they needed could be as short as "please reboot server x".  They used it to organise their work and automatically have an audit and somewhere to talk about it. 

[Mike Armstrong]

I used to sit on the Board for a large competitive soccer club.  We used Trello boards to manage our soccer tryouts as we had several teams at each age group and used lists to move players from team to team as the coaches evaluated the players.  We also used the integration with Zapier to send out team offers over SMS.

We are also looking at using Trello boards to manage the formation of our recreational program teams, but it would be handy if there were one or two new features added to the platform - like the ability to physically link cards together so that when you drag one card from one list to a different list, linked cards would follow.

My wife manages something similar for church camp registrations and would love to see the same feature.

[NotTheRealStephenSifersNOPENOPENOPENOPE]

Sports team management within Trello, now that's something new!

How hard did you find the Zapier integration to be?

[Mike Armstrong]

I'm a digital marketing guy and found it all to be very easy to configure and the service itself was pretty solid.