Meet VMware
VMware is a multinational company with 18,000+ employees and a recognized leader in cloud and virtualization software and services. They were one of the first organizations in the cloud space, and since their entry into this space, it’s been a rocket ship ride to the top.
Greg Kullberg, a Senior Product Technical Marketing Manager for VMware, is responsible for working with engineers to enable field counterparts with new features and functionalities that come from product releases. He is in charge of scaling content to hundreds of people globally, and it is essential for this delivery process to be scalable and efficient.
The challenge
Greg was first introduced to Confluence through his past employer and brought his toolset knowledge to VMware. Working with Confluence, Greg found information was stored on separate pages and sometimes in multiple spaces, and locating information took a long time because it was scattered and unorganized. Greg and his team needed some level of data organization to prevent wiki pages from becoming cluttered with too much information and difficult for people to find.
Greg discovered there was functionality he needed that was not available in Confluence straight out of the box. He needed something with true form-based entry and highly configurable reporting capabilities. In order to support an organization that required corporate training and global enablement, Greg had the following challenges:
- Find an effective way to scale the delivery process.
- Create a method to promote efficiency by preventing potential duplication across project teams.
- Look for a way to provide transparency between teams.
Scaffolding Forms & Templates for Confluence by Appfire makes it extremely user friendly to enter data consistently and query it afterwards.
Greg Kullberg, Senior Product Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
The solution
Scaffolding Forms & Templates for Confluence by Appfire clearly defines and edits structured data, allowing Greg to turn the VMware Confluence instance into a truly collaborative data hub. Using the app, he can now quickly set up forms, house all wiki data, and eloquently display key data in common templates.
The Scaffolding Forms & Templates app also contains macros for creating permanent templates and editable forms. This offers the ability for data to be entered into a form on the fly, increasing real-time, constant collaboration with the ability to view charts and dashboards. Additionally, Greg is now able to build logic into reporting queries to show alerts inside reports, such as when a project is almost due or even past due.
Reporting for Confluence by Appfire is a powerful framework for extracting and presenting information in Confluence. VMware’s Confluence instance contained a wealth of information, including unstructured content, structured content, metadata, and stacks of usage data. Scaffolding Forms & Templates works seamlessly with Reporting for Confluence by Appfire to create reports based on structured data. Reporting for Confluence has given VMware the ability to report on content with great flexibility across various areas of Confluence.
Today, Greg consistently uses Scaffolding Forms & Templates and Reporting for Confluence to develop outlines for meetings with his manager. Through the use of Reporting for Confluence, rolling up data has been incredibly simple. The app allows him to quickly show pie charts and graphs with dynamic data. In addition to rolling up data, the Reporting for Confluence app also provides drilled-down details. At any point in time, VMware employees can see what other teams are doing, which not only scales knowledge but also provides visibility into efforts and reduces duplication of work.
Free-form pages make consistency hard at scale. Scaffolding brings structure to Confluence with templates, forms, and dynamic reports.
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