I'll fess up, I'm a Twitter fanboi. When I'm not at work, I'm @mattnhodges and when I am, I'm the @ConfluenceGuru. There's a little gem that was shipped in Confluence 3.1 which makes monitoring your multiple Twitter accounts, and tweets about your company, a breeze.

What is it?

An incredibly useful macro that often goes unnoticed is the Widget Macro. In short, it allows you to embed multi-media content from other web sites into your Confluence page. It supports a bunch of different web services, including Twitter.


Where can I find it?

1. Select 'Widget' from the 'Insert Menu' in the Rich Text Editor (requires Confluence 3.1+)


2. Select 'Widget Connector' from the 'Macro Browser' (requires Confluence 3.0+)


How can I use it?

1. View Multiple Twitter Accounts

I display the tweets from both of my twitter accounts on my personal space homepage. All you need to do is enter the URL for your Twitter handle into the URL field in the Macro Browser. For my @ConfluenceGuru account, the resulting wiki markup is:

{widget:url=http://twitter.com/ConfluenceGuru}




2. Monitor Twitter Mentions

There is a lot of talk about Atlassian and its tools on Twitter. Those of us in the Product Marketing team make a conscious effort to monitor mentions of the company and our respective products and contact customers who may need some help or who have some insightful feedback for us. With the Widget Macro that was shipped in 3.1 you can now display the results of a Twitter search on a Confluence page. I have a page setup which displays mentions of Atlassian and all of our tools. Again, all you need to enter is the URL of your Twitter search into the URL field in the Macro Broswer. In the case of searching for mentions of Atlassian, the resulting wiki markup would be:

{widget:url=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=atlassian}

Try it for yourself!

Jump into the Confluence sandbox and try it out. Be sure to follow @ConfluenceGuru if you'd like more hints and tips about using Confluence.

If you are anything like Atlassian, your Customer Service and Sales teams probably use Salesforce.com. With the release of CustomWare's Salesforce.com to Confluence Connector 2.0, integration with your CRM and wiki just got a lot stronger.

What's New?

With enhanced integration and flexibility this release hosts numerous fixes and updates and, in conjunction with CustomWare's open source Reporting Plugin, now includes powerful reporting functionality of Salesforce.com data from within Confluence. Business users now have easy access to the information they need without having to navigate to another system.

1. Customisation of reporting fields in Confluence from Salesforce objects

2. Integration with Confluence plugins to provide intuitive display of information

3. Introduction of the salesforce-reporter and the advanced soql-reporter macros to provide greater flexibility for data retrieval

Want to try it out?

Contact CustomWare to request a 30 day evaluation license. Click on the download link below for access to the connector and installation instructions.

This is the second of two guest posts by Erik Eccles from TaskDock, a Confluence plugin that lets you assign, track, and complete actions within Confluence and email.

Our second post in this series focuses on stepping up the involvement of the people beyond Confluence's core constituents. Companies with non-technical adopters such as finance, HR, sales, and marketing consistently cited the ability to reach this audience as a challenge. Here are the approaches we took to solve the problem.

Make Confluence Inclusive

Similar to how we approached the issue of stale content as described in our last post, we looked to increase involvement by focusing on channeling content and conversation through Confluence. This required us to make Confluence inclusive to varying user types, skills, and systems.

Leverage Email

Our first step in making Confluence more inclusive was to embrace one major competitor to content systems, email, and work towards making it another way to interact with Confluence. This video shows how we extend Confluence functionality beyond its walls and into email to involve more people via a familiar environment.

YACS (Yet Another Corporate System)

Email completion is one example of removing the perceived "yet another system to use" barrier by no longer requiring a user to log into Confluence to contribute. A large marketing division is using the email completion functionality to deliver tasks for updating documents. To complete the task, an assignee simply replies to the email, attaches the updated document, and then it is automatically posted to the correct page without any additional steps. Consultants have leveraged the email functionality to engage their customers in Confluence without requiring them to access the system.

Provide a Clear Call to Action

Next, we focused on increasing involvement by delivering users with clear calls to action when working in Confluence. TaskDock's inline approach meant we could associate tasks to specific content in Confluence and pair it with system actions such as commenting, editing, and managing attachments. Currently, users arrive at the dashboard or page where they can browse, search or with v3.1 create content from the quick start buttons. We took it further to include specific tasks, the associated pages and content, as well as links to easily complete the actions.

See a few examples in the video:

Focus on Completing Tasks vs. Managing Them

Tracking user actions gives us the added benefit of knowing when things are done.  As a user completes a task we can automatically "clean up" their task list by marking it complete as well as notifying the requester to keep the ball rolling. The clear purpose here is to focus users on actions versus the actual task management. This video will walk you through a few examples:

Put it all Together

Hopefully, through these posts, you've recognized some tricks to drive content and communication through Confluence to reignite your content, projects, and people.

Our approach would not have worked if our customers had not provided the wealth of feedback over the past year. If you wish to try some of these steps yourself, head to our Plugin Page or to taskdock.com/download to download TaskDock with a free included evaluation (no license needed to get started).

It's probably no surprise that Atlassian uses Confluence to everything. I estimate that at least 75% of the business content I interact with on a daily basis resides in our internal Confluence instance. All the projects I'm working on...the blog posts I'm writing....the meeting notes I take...the goals my boss wants me to accomplish...the company's sales numbers. All of these reside inside of Confluence.

Why use Personal Lables?

So with this much important content residing Confluence, how do I organise and manage it all? The simple answer: personal labels.

Many times I can quickly find the Confluence content I need using Quick Navigation. But sometimes I forget the name someone else gave to a page. For example, I keep searching for a page called "Customer Prospects" but the page is really called "Pending Clients." Goodness knows why someone used that name but, with private labels, I can label the page however I'd like.

How Do Personal Labels Work?

Adding your personal label to a page or blog post is simple:

1. First go to the page that you want to label.
2. Click the 'Add Labels' link beside 'Labels'.
   This will open up a form with an input field and a list of 'suggested labels'.
3. An input field will open below the existing labels. If available, it will also show you a list of 'suggested labels'.
   
4. To add a new personal label, type it in using the format 'my:label'.
   (You can enter more than one label, separated by commas.)
5. Click 'Add' to add the label.

To go back and navigate your personal labels, just go to the dropdown menu under your name and select "personal labels." You'll then see all your personal labels displayed.

Since we launched the Confluence SharePoint Connector just over a year ago, we've gotten tremendous uptake from our customers. Hundreds of customers have found SharePoint's more structured document-management capabilities to be a great complement to Confluence's free-form wiki collaboration capabilities. The SharePoint Connector creates a far more powerful SharePoint wiki by letting you:

• Embed SharePoint lists into your Confluence page through the {sp-list} macro
• Embed Confluence pages into your SharePoint site using the out-of-the-box Confluence web parts
• Perform secure, federated search between the two platforms
• Maintain single-sign-on and common user management between the two

So it's with great pleasure that we announce our latest release, the Confluence SharePoint Connector 1.1. This release has many performance and configuration improvements that will make your integration between Confluence and SharePoint even better. Altogether, we've resolved 30 outstanding issues across a number of areas. To see a complete list of improvements, see our Confluence SharePoint Connector 1.1 release notes. In the mean time, here's a summary of what we've improved:

Enhanced Federated Search

The previous implementation of search relied on SharePoint indexing Confluence's cached search index. The new implementation of federated search performs a live search against Confluence's content making federated search faster and more accurate for end users. Plus it's easier for administrators to set up in the first place making a better experience for everyone. 

Alternative SharePoint URL

In the previous version of the SharePoint Connector, Confluence accessed SharePoint through the same URL as every SharePoint user. In SPC 1.1, Confluence can connect to SharePoint through its own URL, such as a URL that is only available from behind a firewall or VPN. This can drastically improve performance and also resolves problems where the SharePoint installation uses an authentication protocol not supported by Confluence, such as NTLMv2 or Kerberos.

Curious to Learn More?

You can read more in our release notes, download the Confluence SharePoint Connector from our website and follow the installation guide.

To learn more about all the features available in the SharePoint Connector, check out our website at atlassian.com/sharepoint or watch the video below: