From three-person groups up to huge enterprises with thousands of employees, all teams have something in common: collaboration is the key to success. Unfortunately, there’s no cut-and-dry formula that works across all types of organizations. Teams are tasked with continuously creating readable content, locating and organizing work, and guaranteeing the right eyes see the most important information.
Confluence is a universal collaboration tool that provides a platform to build, organize, and connect on work in one place – from pretty much anywhere. More than 90 percent of our customers are communicating with their teams around the world with our Atlassian cloud products. As we transition away from server toward a cloud-first future, we’re putting all of our focus on helping teams do their best work together, no matter where their desks are.
Our customers choose cloud for many reasons, but three consistently stand out: time to value, ROI, and innovation. In this article, we’ll highlight exactly how YOU can benefit from quicker utility, get more bang for your buck, and drive advancements, all in Confluence Cloud.
Faster time to value
Confluence Cloud enables teams to scale faster and accelerate time to value so they can ship new products and services quickly and efficiently.
Atlassian Cloud saves our team time, which saves us money.
Evan Lerer, Director of Engineering, Redfin
Create content faster
You’ve got ideas, and the new Confluence Cloud editor has everything you need to execute them. As you type, choose from dozens of macros with the slash command. It’s basically the world’s most helpful assistant, giving you the tools you need to move work forward seamlessly.
The team found that the new Cloud UI was much cleaner, unobtrusive, and more flexible.
Sky Frostenson, Director of Program Management, VSCO
The blink of an eye isn’t fast enough for you?! Challenge accepted. We’ve launched more than 80 new easily accessible templates in the cloud that shorten the time from idea to execution even further. You can scroll, search, preview, and swap templates in the sidebar, and before you know it, you’re building a page with best practices built in: meeting notes, project trackers, status reports, blogs, onboarding guides, and beyond.
In the days of old, hyperlinks and copy-pasted URLs were your only options for embedding content into a Confluence page. Now, we’re out here living in the 22nd century with Smart Links. Smart Links allow you to preview files from a third-party tool like Google Drive, Figma, or Dropbox on a page – no need to click a mysterious link to view its content in a separate tab. Preview or fully embed that file on your Confluence pages automatically, like this embedded Jira roadmap below.
Work smarter, not harder
The cloud’s super-charged and improved search capability is powered by machine learning that analyzes what you’ve already looked at in order to predict what you’re looking for next. Confluence Cloud even suggests the most relevant colleagues when at-mentioning them on pages. That means no more typing the full first and last name of your teammate John because there are 20 Johns at your company. The cloud’s search is connected among Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence, meaning increased search relevancy.
Part of working smarter is focusing on the right things and picking up work quickly, so we built an improved and always-present top navigation. Indulge us in a Marvel comics analogy, if you will: think of the navigation as your trusty Captain America – you can always count on it, and it’s always there to get you what you need. And think of the new homepage as your Iron Man – modern, constantly in the headlines, and customizable for your needs.
Take Confluence mobile
You can also access your work wherever you go on the iOS and Android mobile apps. Confluence Cloud has a totally unique mobile app from Server with additional functionality, including dark mode, custom notifications, and site (and instance) switcher.
ROI
As we continue to learn more about what works for you, we’re adapting and upgrading the Confluence Cloud admin experience. Confluence Cloud admin gives you total control over your instance with troubleshooting options, bulk actions, and advanced space permissions not available in Server.
To keep teams focused and spaces organized, admins can archive, delete, and adjust handfuls of pages at once, which isn’t possible on server. Plus, admins can make sure only the right people have access to the right content, based on where users are located and their IP address ranges.
To create better content, you need to know who is engaging with your content, and what better way to do that than to know who looked at it? Confluence Cloud Analytics sheds light on site, space, and page views over time. You can view it in-product or export to Excel. Admins can use this to track product adoption across the organization.
Innovation
No one knows the way you work better than you do, and the Confluence Cloud team is constantly innovating to help you help yourself. We’re invested in building ahead of your needs; so you will always get the latest and best of Confluence in Cloud. That innovation manifests in new features like workflow automation, integrations with other tools you’re using, and extensibility, so admins and end-users alike get more done.
More real-time collaboration
We know that effective collaboration drives greater innovation, and getting your team involved faster helps you get great work done faster. This is why we’ve launched inline comments in edit mode – a feature that will be unique to the cloud. Rather than switching between two tabs to read inline comments and then make the edits, all the information you need is available on a single page.
You can even insert macros like emojis and dates directly in comments to drive greater alignment, making commenting better and more seamless on the cloud.
Integrate more to do more
Confluence Cloud has many of the same integrations as server, in addition to a few unique ones. Those unique to the cloud include Google Drive, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Zoho, and Opsgenie. Plus, some familiar integrations like Slack and Trello offer more functionality in the cloud.
We’re adding literally dozens of new apps each month, so be sure to visit the Marketplace to see all the options available for Confluence Cloud.
By moving to Atlassian Cloud, we have freed up our time so that we can focus on improving our own software instead of babysitting on-premise infrastructure.
Josh Costello, Sr Solutions Specialiast, Nextiva
Explore for yourself by signing up for a free account, or try our new free migration trial if you’re already on Server.