Hot on the heels of Atlassian Confluence 5.0, the latest release of its best-in-class content and team collaboration platform, leading enterprise software company Atlassian today announced Confluence Blueprints, a new and simpler way for users to create and share work within Confluence. Blueprints bootstrap the content creation and sharing process by providing page creation templates, instructional "placeholder" text and automated structure for organizing content once created. By helping non-technical users onboard faster, Blueprints will accelerate and broaden the use of Confluence across diverse teams and entire companies. A recent survey of Atlassian customers revealed a growing trend of non-developers using Confluence across product management, sales and marketing, and human resources teams.
Based on a decade of customer experience, Confluence Blueprints give teams a new and simpler way to create and share work. (Photo: Business Wire)
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"As we´ve grown from our first 10 employees to more than 500 HubSpotters, Confluence has grown with us, powering our culture of knowledge sharing and dramatically increasing collaboration across the company," said Jim O´Neill, CIO of HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company. "Confluence Blueprints and the "˜just-add-water´ page creation templates make it a no-brainer to get new users up to speed and enable them to add their contributions that much faster."
Confluence Blueprints Unlock Workplace Productivity
More than two-thirds of customers surveyed use Confluence as an intranet or knowledge management platform, yet many still struggle with common workplace productivity issues such as unproductive meetings, inefficient file sharing or unstandardized documents. Confluence Blueprints help alleviate these productivity roadblocks by making it easier for users to create content that is consistent, well-formatted, automatically organized, and easy to find. Atlassian is shipping three built-in Confluence Blueprints today to address some common team inefficiencies:
- Meeting Notes Blueprint: More than half of survey respondents reported that their teams suffer from a lack of focus during meetings, as well as clear action-items for followup. The Meeting Notes Blueprint helps teams make better use of meetings with easy-to-create formatted meeting pages to track people, agendas and notes. Each page features automated agenda distribution and simple task assignment capability with follow-up notifications.
- File List Blueprint: Seventy-nine percent of respondents reported having a hard time finding shared files that were either trapped in email inboxes or scattered across shared network drives. With the File List Blueprint, teams can easily share and access files "´ PDF´s, Office documents, images, and more "´ in one place that is easily searchable, versioned, and permission-controlled.
- Requirements Blueprint: Half of survey respondents said their development teams use Confluence most frequently. The Requirements Blueprint helps these teams more easily define, discuss, and organize product requirements by automatically versioning updates, facilitating discussion, and allowing the use of custom properties for tracking and reporting.
"We want to kick-start team productivity," said Sherif Mansour, Confluence product manager. "More and more, the teams involved with building software are growing and expanding to include business users. Blueprints will help take new Confluence users from zero to hero, and will help power users create more consistent, usable content."
Opportunities for Third-Party Developers through Atlassian Marketplace
Blueprints offer a new way for both customers and third-parties to extend Confluence. They are available today to the Confluence customer base of more than 36,000 teams through the Atlassian Marketplace, a business-to-business marketplace of more than 1,000 free and 200 commercial add-ons that extend Atlassian software products. In the nine months since its launch, the Atlassian Marketplace has generated more than $4 million for developers in the Atlassian ecosystem. Four Marketplace vendors have already partnered with Atlassian to build Blueprints available for download today, including:
- Strategy canvases by Comalatech for managing tasks and visualizing business processes.
- Online diagrams by Gliffy for building professional-quality flow and organizational charts.
- Polls by Simplenia for creating and sharing simple polls to make group decisions.
- Evernote Importer by StiltSoft to bring notes into Confluence for sharing.
Users can browse available Blueprints on the Atlassian Marketplace from within Confluence and easily request installation by their system administrators.
"With Confluence Blueprints the possibilities of effective collaboration are endless," said Nick Wade, director of Atlassian Marketplace. "Confluence Blueprints give developers a platform upon which to build an infinite number of customizations to address specific needs of every department and Confluence user within an organization. This is just the beginning."
Availability
More than 36,000 teams in 107 countries have realized the benefits of deploying Confluence, a best-in-class content and team collaboration platform. Confluence Blueprints work with Confluence 5, both of which are available today for a free 30-day trial, or can be purchased for onsite download or OnDemand cloud offering starting at $10/month for 10 users. The Confluence ecosystem features 286 authorized Atlassian Expert Partners and more than 480 free and commercial add-ons including Atlassian´s Team Calendars, available on the Atlassian Marketplace.
About Atlassian
Atlassian products help innovators everywhere plan, build and launch great software. More than 25,000 large and small organizations "´ including Citigroup, eBay, Netflix, Coca-Cola and United Airlines "´ use Atlassian´s issue tracking, collaboration and software-development products to work smarter and deliver quality results on time. Learn more at http://atlassian.com.
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