Atlassian confluence overview_au_gs_powerpoint

Editor's Notes

• #2: The Confluence overview deck is designed to serve as an introduction to Confluence, Atlassian’s team collaboration platform.
• #3: In the Confluence Overview deck we’ll cover: Why Confluence is a great tool for the evolving workplace See how teams use it Learn how Confluence can grow with an organization Look at different ways Confluence can be deployed, and Understand why people love Confluence and have made it the collaboration tool of choice for their organization.
• #4: Today’s workplace looks very different than just a decade ago. Teams are dispersed, people are on the move, individual offices are on the decline in favor of open work spaces, and a new generation accustomed to actively sharing thoughts and ideas is now dominant in the workplace.  Generational shift 1/3 of workforce is now millennial, larger than than any other generation in the workplace. Source: Pew Research Centerhttp://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/11/millennials-surpass-gen-xers-as-the-largest-generation-in-u-s-labor-force/ Impact: Businesses need tools that address today’s new communication styles. More job movement Less tenured employees change jobs at a rate 3x that of more tenured employees.Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm Impact: Information needs to be tied to the organization, not the employee. Distributed teams 79% of people always or sometimes work in dispersed teams Source: Harvard Business Reviewhttps://hbr.org/2014/12/getting-virtual-teams-right Impact: Teams must work cross culturally and support work/life balance.
• #5: The transition to the modern workplace calls for modern tools that are aligned with the way people work, where they conduct business, and their communication preferences. Business tools can even support company culture, making it either more top-down driven, rigid, and bureaucratic or more open, adaptable, and efficient. In a recent survey by Atlassian, fielded by Nielsen in April 2016, we found that people surveyed were very interested in the benefits of of an open culture and work environment. Collaborate 60% of respondents wanted tools that help gain easy visibility into what their teammates are working and to contribute to that work. Communicate 72% of respondents want technology that fosters transparency and open communication throughout their company. Building a community 87% of respondents want to be a part of company that values transparency and openness and teammates that they can trust.
• #6: This brings us to Confluence a powerful platform for teamwork and collaboration. Since 2004, from document creation to project collaboration, companies have discovered that Confluence is a game- changing way to share ideas, build community, and get work done in today’s workplace. Confluence embodies three primary product development principles relevant in today’s workplace: Everyone has a voice Information flows freely, and Work gets done
• #7: Since it’s beginning more than a decade ago, over 30,000 businesses have chosen to use Confluence to help teams work most effectively from startups to Fortune 500s, including: BraintreeNASA DowJonesDockerHomeawaySpotifySotheby'sTinderAerLingusAmgenIlluminaCamerican International (Shout out to Ethan!) Vanderlande Following are a few details of customers’ experience with Confluence.
• #8: All teams can benefit from Confluence. It often grows organically within an organization, starting off with the software development team and spreading out from there. Today all kinds of functional departments use Confluence, from technical teams and project management groups, to marketing, HR, legal, and finance. The more people in an organization that use it, the more value teams get from it. Here is how three primary user teams find value in Confluence: Software teams use Confluence to collaborate on product releases and other software related projects. With strong JIRA integration, these teams can move easily between the two platforms and add context to their detailed tasks in JIRA right within Confluence! IT teams can easily create documentation within Confluence to help their team find answers fast and resolve issues faster. Teams can also scale their IT service desk and use Confluence as an integrated knowledge base for their customers. In a recent evaluation of teams using JIRA Service Desk (JSD) and Confluence, we found that Confluence was able to deflect up to 45% of IT tickets, freeing up IT team members’ time to concentrate on other tasks at hand. Business teams such as marketing, legal, HR, and more use Confluence to create and document contracts, outline marketing programs, run projects, stay in touch with product and development teams, view workflows, and more, all from one central location.
• #9: Docker was using a mix of email, word processing, and spreadsheets for content collaboration and documentation. As Docker began ramping up in 2014, they realized they needed a more centralized system for maintaining communications and preserving tribal knowledge. They also needed a an easily accessible and streamlined process for managing software engineering plans and resources. That’s where Confluence came in, helping to put work in one place and get everyone on the same page, starting with the software team and branching throughout the company.
• #10: Spotify Challenge: 100% of IT requests were being submitted via email into a single inbox, and email scales badly. No way to manage tickets in categories or queues, lead times were long, and customer satisfaction was dropping Solution: Integrated JSD with Confluence to provide better user experience and one place for entire IT team to manage it’s queues. Confluence helped create a self-service knowledge base of articles for common questions Benefits: IT team has categorized 100% of its tickets and seen an 8x increase in articles contributed to the knowledge base. Just as important: IT has made its mark within the company. Quotes: -“We have raised the profile of IT at Spotify. We are seen as a center of innovation" -“Even in a large corporation, IT can provide personal level of service to each and every employee."
• #11: Dow Jones Challenge: Employees needed a way to share info and collaborate across distributed business and technical organizations. DowJones had used wikis in the past but a lack of a solid WYSIWYG editor hurt widespread adoption Solution: Now use confluence to document their work and their systems, technical leads leverage it to evangelize best practices, and project managers use the tool to document product requirements and communicate scope, status, issues, risks, and more. They found a collaboration solution that all kinds of users could use to document, communicate, and share their systems, processes, projects, and ideas. Benefits: Confluence was originally intended for technical teams to document their systems, but it’s now being used to communicate and collaborate across all groups and divisions - growth has been organic. Confluence provides a central place for all of the company’s diverse information needs, better communication, and real collaboration across groups. Quotes: -“how do you measure the true value of people sharing ideas?" -“another great thing is that , unlike email, confluence creates permanent records that are easy to follow. when you’re in a distributed work environment that becomes a big issue"
• #12: Now we’ll discuss some of the primary use cases for Confluence.
• #13: Over 75M pages have been created in Confluence. People develop pages in Confluence to share information broadly in blogs, take meeting notes, report on project status, create project tasks, develop roadmaps, write how-to-documents and much more. Since Confluence is flexible and expansive, there is no limit to the types of work that can be developed within it.
• #14: Existing documents can also be brought into Confluence so no information is ever lost and you can easily continue existing work within Confluence. You can also view and comment on various file types from within Confluence, such as: Microsoft Word docs MS Excel spreadsheets MS PPT presentations PDF files HTML XML source & .txt files Zip Files
• #15: Confluence organizes work in a consistent and logical manner that makes it easy to find and track work. Spaces Spaces are content anchors, serving as mini-­sites for teams, projects, and departments. If needed, each space can be separately managed with its own administrator, permissions, and theme. Pages organize your content into lower­-level groups, i.e., create a page for a particular team activity, or for a feature in a product, or for a chapter in a book. Trees are the structure of pages in a space. Some pages (parents) will be what other pages (children) attach to, forming a “tree.”
• #16: Three popular uses for Confluence are: Documentation - Confluence provides a great way for teams to create and share all kinds of documents in order to retain team knowledge. Project Collaboration - Once a document is created, teams can collaborate and discuss it using likes, @-mentions, and comments, and close the feedback loop to get stuff done. Knowledge Base - organize and share work with your team, and discover information from other thought leaders in your company. Let’s start with the most popular use of Confluence: Project collaboration.
• #17: A project often starts with the creation of a page—once team members are looped in and the page is published the real work begins as team members discuss challenges, debate ideas, and bring the page to life. If the team comes across any stumbling blocks, issues can be tracked and resolved within Confluence so the project moves ahead quickly.
• #18: Let’s meet Scott Holden and Moontracker V2.5 Scott is a senior project manager at a mid-size company for astronomy and space enthusiasts. He is in charge of project management for the next release of the Moontracker mobile app. Let’s look at how he and his team use Confluence to start the build of a new version of their app.
• #19: To release Moontracker v2.5, Scott starts by creating a new page within Confluence, and choosing a product requirements document template so he can get started right away and avoid the hassle of formatting or thinking what type of foundational information needs to be included. He can always modify the template in Confluence. When he creates the page, he can also decide where in Confluence it will live—he chooses the Mobile Dev Team Project space. He can always change its location afterwards.
• #20: Scott finishes populating his PRD by: @-mentioning the relevant contributors to his project… It is a great way to start involving the whole team from the very beginning without even calling a meeting.
• #21: …. Linking other relevant documents to provide more context Adding rich media, in his case mock images for the app, but video and other media types can also be incorporated. and assigning tasks to his teammates
• #22: All of Scott’s development issues/tasks are tracked within JIRA, Atlassian’s agile project management software. Confluence is often paired with other Atlassian projects to add more context to work, in this case it is Scott’s app development project. Scott connects Confluence and JIRA so he can: Display the corresponding JIRA issue on this product requirements page Create new JIRA issues within this page as they arise and create reports to display within Confluence for the rest of his team and stakeholders
• #23: Scott has now completed his PRD and he’s ready to share it with the team. He sets his appropriate viewing and editing restrictions for his page, and hits publish so he can begin collaborating with his team! Atlassian takes an "open first" approach to its documentation. By default, documents are open to the everyone, to benefit from input from all parts of the organization. But, depending on the organization or document, information can easily be restricted.
• #24: Projects happen when pages come to life. The next phase of Moontracker v2.5 will show how publishing a single page turns one person’s work into dynamic project collaboration.
• #25: Once a page has been published, collaboration begins and notifications will begin to appear when someone likes or comments on your page, @-mentions you, or shares a page with you.
• #26: Notifications appear in the upper right hand corner of your Confluence page, your email, and the Confluence Cloud mobile app (for cloud customers only).
• #27: Clicking on the notification icon will show you a series of interactions teammates have been having with your content. Clicking on a notification will take you to a summary of their input in your inbox so you can respond immediately, or you can jump directly to the page.
• #28: Inline comments, such as the one Scott received from Mia on the product requirements page, allow you to discuss a specific section of work or comment on attached files/images. No more long file names or messy track changes! Discussions can be resolved and tracked right on the page itself so everyone is aligned.
• #29: Page comments, such as Harvey’s and Mia’s, allow you to comment at the bottom of the page on the overall content and offer thoughts and feedback. Everyone who is part of the page discussion will be notified of these comments and the ongoing discussion, if they choose.
• #30: Documentation is everything you think it is: a set of documents. A compass for your average end user. A playbook for the software engineer in you. In a more technical space, documentation is usually text or illustrations that accompany a piece of software, explaining how it works, how it operates, and how to use it. Software teams may refer to documentation as it relates to product requirements, release notes, or the design of the software. Technical teams will use documentation to explain code, algorithms, APIs, and more as it pertains to a piece of software. Externally, documentation often takes the form of manuals and user-guides for system admins, support teams, and other end users. All kinds of documents hold teams together to help them function at their best. Confluence provides a way to create these documents, share them, and organize them in one place.
• #31: Whether it’s simple meeting notes, design reviews, or in depth project retrospectives, all documentation should aim to accomplish 2 main things:- Inform users - Help users be successful Why is documentation important Documentation helps users and teams: Create consistency Align on projects, processes, and procedures Minimize workload. The right documentation helps onboard teammates quickly and efficiently, so they can start getting work done right away. Improve company culture. Documentation makes a statement about how you treat both your external customers and internal employees. Help the people you need to help, guide them, be supportive, and have a friendly voice and tone.
• #32: Confluence helps organize work, create troubleshooting documents, and deflect service desk tickets. The single-point-of-access it provides to a variety of information and projects helps organizations get things done more quickly and liberate ideas–meaning the next big thing may come from the most unlikely of places.
• #33: With Confluence, information sharing removes roadblocks to resolve issues faster and reduce duplicate work Documentation can be easily found and visible to reference at any point in time.
• #34: Confluence is a standards-based program with broad functionality built into it. Developers have also used its open APIs to build hundreds of apps for it—all available from the Atlassian marketplace—so you can do more with it and customize it to your needs. Let’s learn more!
• #35: Want to do more than just build a basic page? Add a macro to your page! Macros are native to Confluence and can do everything from posting a status icon on a project to embedding JIRA issues into your release notes on Confluence. Explore and have fun.
• #36: If you want to do even more with Confluence, you need look no further than the Atlassian marketplace, one of the largest B2B marketplaces in the world—and it has over 650 add-ons available for Confluence for both cloud and server customers. Atlassian also has hundreds of excellent partners (we call them experts) around the world who are ready and excited to help customize your instance of Confluence.
• #37: Some of the most popular add-on categories for Confluence are: Theming options to brand your Confluence site Diagramming options to add visuals to your pages Document management which include convenient tools that let you do more with your documents (formatting, organization, etc.) Other popular categories include: Workflow, integrations, and more.
• #38: So, how do teams deploy Confluence? There are several options, depending on your needs.
• #39: To implement Confluence within your team, Atlassian offers cloud, server, and data center (for enterprises) options, with pricing dependent on the number of users. Cloud - we host and setup your Confluence site in the cloud for you. This is generally the best option for teams who want to get started quickly and easily, and for teams who don't want to manage the technical complexity of hosting themselves; pricing is monthly (can also do yearly) Server  - you host Confluence on your own hardware and you're able to customize your setup however you'd like. This is generally the best option for teams who want to manage all the details of the setup and don't mind the additional complexity of hosting themselves; pricing is a one-time payment  Data Center - same as server in that you host Confluence on your own hardware but DC is at scale and useful for enterprise companies. It gives you high availability, performance at scale, and disaster recovery for uninterrupted access; payment is yearly.
• #40: Confluence is core to the overall Atlassian suite, just ask the 72% of our customers who already combine Atlassian products. Confluence integrates well with other Atlasssian products like JIRA software and JIRA Core, JIRA Service Desk, and HipChat to cover all aspects of project collaboration.
• #42: So why should you Confluence? It offers one place to: share ideas, build community, and get work done it is use and trusted by over 30,000 organizations of every size and from every industry it has first class JIRA software integration it is extensible and flexible enough to grow with your team and organization
• #43: Thank you! If you have more questions on Confluence, please visit any of the above sites or reach out to Atlassian and its expert partners for further information.