"How do I upgrade Confluence documents with Dashboard Hub macros?" Find out in this episode of Appfire Presents: The BEST Demo Show by Appfire! Gorka Puente shows you how macros can help you customize Confluence pages for individuals or groups (and even make them look like dashboards if you want).
About the guest
Gorka Puente is a Principal Product Manager at Appfire. Gorka has a PhD in Web Information Systems and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and he has 10 years of experience in the Atlassian ecosystem.
About the show
The BEST Demo Show by Appfire brings in experts who can show you how to overcome common IT challenges using best-in-class Atlassian apps. Every episode features 15 minutes of valuable advice on how to do your work better and faster.
For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode:
How do I upgrade Confluence documents with Dashboard Hub macros
Kerry: Today we’re going to learn how to upgrade Confluence Documents with Dashboard Hub macros. To help us with that is Gorka Puente, principal product manager at Appfire. He has a PhD in web information systems and a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and he has 10 years of experience in the Atlassian ecosystem. Stick around for 10 minutes of really valuable information.
Gorka, thanks so much for joining me.
Gorka: It’s my pleasure.
Kerry: How do I upgrade Confluence Documents with Dashboard Hub macros? I have a feeling you know. Do you want to show me?
Gorka: I do know. I’m super excited because Confluence is my favorite product ever. I’ve been working with wikis for quite a long time and I really like Confluence, so I’m probably going to be super excited while explaining this.
Dashboard Hub, there is another demo with it. For knowing more about Dashboard Hub, there is Dashboard Hub for Jira demo where you can create dashboards super easy, super quick, with a lot of different metrics, more than 70 metrics, template integrations, and you can have really nice dashboards like this one. But today, we are going to focus on our documents in Confluence.
Kerry: There’s a great article that you wrote at Appfire.com about how to set up your corporate wiki, so I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Gorka: That’s right. I liked to write about that because it was a long time since I did something talking about pure Confluence and not apps. So, our audience can go there.
Different from Dashboard Hub for Jira is that we get macros, which are key when we write our documentation because we can introduce pieces of information, we can introduce metrics, indicators, charts in our documents. This is a normal Confluence space, and you can see this is integrated. We have different pages here, our really nice macros integrated right in the content. Super lean.
One thing that is also nice is you can regulate your users depending on the user or depending on the group so they can see different content when they access Confluence. We can have the marketing team accessing a set of pages with an initial dashboard, we can have the engineers go to another place, seamlessly, they don’t have to do anything. I’m going to show you how to create the filter rules to regulate users.
Here we can create our rule that is going to say let’s regulate to a page that is going to be Dashboard Hub homepage. Let’s regulate for now all users. We click save, we go to our rule. Whenever anyone in this wiki accesses the wiki, they are going to see the dashboard homepage. If we remove this, what users said was a really sad page that no one wanted to see ever because it’s super sad – sorry, Confluence – we can go a step further and say not for all users.
I want, for example, the user Gorka because he’s an engineer and he needs to know about how to align things, so this person whenever he accesses he is going to see this page. We can have different rules to prioritize depending on users or groups. We are going to say that for the rest of the users, engineers and the rest, they are going to access the page we saw before.
With this user, we are going to access the one we saw before. But if we go to another session with Gorka, whenever he accesses, he’s going to see the landing in Mark’s page.
Kerry: That’s specifically for this user?
Gorka: Yes, for this user. We can say for this group of users, too, or a different group of users. We can have three groups of users accessing one page with this dashboard. Not only is this a page where we embed the dashboard, but they could also access here a dashboard that we select.
Another we can say is here they are accessing with still a sidebar, it looks like a page. What can we do to look more like a real dashboard? We select show content always as a dashboard. In this case, I’m going to remove all of the rules.
Kerry: You removed all the rules?
Gorka: I’m going to do this so we can see different rules. We are going to set this so everyone is going to see the page we just saw, but as a dashboard.
Kerry: As a dashboard, okay.
Gorka: Remember, we got this page and there is a sidebar, there are buttons here, there are to write comments, it’s a page and it looks like a page. It’s a dashboard because it has metrics on it, but what happens when we selected this as our dashboard when the user accesses here, there is no buttons on the top, there are no comments, there is no sidebar, it’s a real dashboard. It’s a page, yes, but no one knows that it’s a page.
See the difference? This is a page. This is a nice dashboard that users can access.
Another thing we can have here, I got a lot of information. How can I have all of this information be displayed to my team? Let’s edit this dashboard so you can see that. This is still Dashboard Hub, although we have all of these nice configurations.
We can have a slideshow. In this case, this I not recommended at every three seconds because you don’t want to get your team mad. For the sake of the demonstration, I’m going to put every three seconds you’ll see a new slide with new information.
Kerry: Oh, yeah, that would make people upset.
Gorka: Yes. Here when we have this, this is the page, we update this, we click, and every three seconds we are going to have new information appearing like a slideshow automatically. If we have this, we are going to see the information. Again, I don’t recommend every three seconds.
Kerry: You can see how fast that is.
Gorka: But you get the idea. Let’s just stop this.
Kerry: You’re just showing us the functionality. I get it.
Gorka: That’s the idea. Of course, we can create gadgets with information right from Confluence. We have the pending tasks. One of the big things in Confluence for me is tasks.
Tasks are usually hidden. If we work with a period in a space, how can we have all of the tasks of that space in a single place so that we know what’s missing? You have to go to your profile and see your tasks. There is not a way to display that easily.
Here, we have a gadget that displays all of the tasks of a specific space. We have also a gadget that can let you create SQL query to return pages and we can have, for example, all of the pages created this month. Of course, this is dynamic, and we can see all of the information here.
I just wanted to show you this.
Kerry: So, you can make that display anything you want?
Gorka: Yes. You can query with SQL and you can say all of the pages that were updated in the last week with the labels engineering and sort by creator and label, for example. You can provide different columns and different properties.
Kerry: That’s exciting.
Gorka: Yes.
Kerry: People only see what they need because you set the rules so they’re going to get just exactly what they need.
Gorka: Yes, and it’s not chaos like many of our Confluence instances.
Kerry: Total chaos.
Gorka: Where you see all of the information from everyone. When in the company there are more than 100 people, imagine with 1,000 people or 10,000 people, it’s a nightmare. This is the way.
Kerry: That’s exciting. What’s going to be new with this? Dilbert is pretty new, the weather report is pretty new, I don’t remember seeing that before.
Gorka: The next things, we are working on more integrations with Big Picture, with Github, new metrics from FeedBucket.
We just released a nice dynamic filter in the bar so you can have different perspectives of the same dashboard. You can filter all of the gadgets in a dashboard, if say you want to see only your metrics related to you. Also, the epic progress report, which is going to be super useful for many customers.
Kerry: Appfire.com for all of that, the marketplace as well to check out the app. If you want more demos, some of which feature Gorka Puente, visit Hub.Appfire.com.
Gorka, any final thoughts to add?
Gorka: No. Just use Dashboard Hub for Confluence because Confluence is awesome. Although, Dashboard Hub for Jira has many more instances, I recommend for Confluence.
Kerry: For Confluence and for Jira, you can get either, but you like Confluence. You have a special place in your heart for Confluence.
Gorka: I do.
Kerry: Gorka, thanks so much. Thank you for stopping by. We’ll see you next time on The Best Demo Show by Appfire.