Share and collaborate

Confluence has some great collaboration features. Let's try some of them out.

Most of these features are available to all users.

Like

You can like pages, blog posts and comments just as in your favourite social networking sites. Show people you care, run crazy 'can we get to 100 likes' challenges, how you use it is up to you!

Comment

You can add comments to pages and blog posts. This is a great way to get people communicating. The full editor is available in the comments field, so you can use bullets, add images, tables - if you can do it in a page, you can more than likely do it in a comment.

Let's add a comment to the meeting notes page you created earlier.

Go to your meeting notes page (hint, use the Meeting Notes blueprint shortcut in the sidebar).
Scroll down and enter a comment in the comment field.
Choose Save.

Comments are also threaded, so you can make your comment a direct reply to another comment. The Quote style in the editor also allows you to indicate where you are quoting another user.

Watch

Want a way to know when someone edits or comments on a page? You can watch it. This is a great way to monitor fast moving information.

Let's watch the meeting notes page you created earlier.

Go to your meeting notes page.
Choose Watch.
Choose to watch just this page or all pages in the space.

You will receive notifications by email and in your workbox when the page is edited or a comment is added. The workbox is located on the toolbar and shows all your recent notifications and tasks. You can customise how you want to be notified in your profile settings.

By default you will automatically be set to watch all pages you create. To stop watching, choose the Watch button and deselect Watch page.

Watching is particularly great for Blogs. You can choose to watch all blogs in a space, and even build an RSS feed to use in your favourite RSS reader.

Share and Mention

What if you have created a page and need a user to be notified about it? There are a couple of ways you can do this.

First you could share the page with the user. To share a page:

Go to a page choose Share.
Enter the name or email address of a user, autocorrect will provide suggestions as you type.
Enter a message and Share.

The user will receive an email and a notification in their workbox.

Another way to notify a user about a page or blog post is to mention them on the page or in a comment.

Go to a page and choose Edit.
Type @ followed by part of the user's name, for example @josh - autocorrect will search for the user

The user will be notified in their workbox and by email.

Some blueprints use mentions out of the box. For example when you enter a stakeholder in the decision blueprint they are automatically added to the page as a @Mention and notified.

Want to get really tricky? Mention someone in a task, and that task will automatically be added to their task list in the workbox.

Restrict

Sharing is wonderful, but sometimes you may want to make a page only visible to some users, or only visible to you. In other instances you may want to users to view and comment on, but not edit a page.

In this example you will restrict editing of the homepage in your project space to members of the 'project-team' group.

You can only apply restrictions to your own pages, unless you have 'Restrict Page' permissions in that space.

Go to the space homepage and choose Tools > Restrictions.
Choose Restrict editing of this page.
Enter a group name or username, for example 'project-team' - autocomplete will search for the user or group.
Choose Save.

A padlock icon appears on the page to indicate that the page has restrictions.

You can also access the restrictions from a button in the editor and from the padlock icon.

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