5 ways Confluence can help your remote team stay in sync

The way we get work done has changed. More teams than ever before are fully remote, trading centralized, open floor plans for globally distributed virtual offices. Physical collaboration mainstays – think sticky notes and face-to-face meetings – have gone completely online, and to keep pace with the market’s ever-increasing speed, teams are moving away from email and spreadsheets to embrace more visual planning and collaboration as part of their digital transformation. They need the right collaboration tools and processes in their arsenal to bridge the global distribution of their employees.

Atlassian is doubling down on our investment in the collaborative work management market because we see an incredible opportunity to help companies adapt to their newly hybrid workforce’s changing needs. By unifying your work with our tools, your team can accelerate digital transformation through open teamwork.

Confluence is the one and only product on the market with the solution at scale. As a central repository for information, your company’s entire knowledge base is available at your fingertips. When paired with Trello as a work management tool, the two form an unstoppable system for planning, tracking, and executing work through asynchronous collaboration and without constant status meetings. When teams have access to self-serve, easy-to-search information, they’re better equipped to move quickly in a rapidly changing environment

Change is never easy

For many companies, working agile – or being adaptive and lightweight operationally – will not come naturally at first. This is especially true for those that have relied on analog collaboration for years.

Here’s how we’ll address their needs:

  1. Make important information easier and quicker to access. This is key for fast decision-making, and plays a vital part in helping organizations move with agility through uncertain times. We make it simple to organize, prioritize, and consume content for companies like Hubspot, John Deere, Northwestern Mutual, and other Confluence/Trello users.
  2. Empower employees with new views into work. Visibility into the work being done across projects and platforms helps you seamlessly maintain shared perspective and achieve big goals.

With those themes in mind, we’re rolling out the following upgrades to Confluence and Trello this month.

New Confluence features

Confluence is the heartbeat of the organizations that use it – it’s where work happens and where knowledge is shared. And as companies embrace a new hybrid model of work, we’re investing in Confluence as a solution to keep distributed employees organized and efficient.

Page insights in Confluence

Page insights: Sifting through immense amounts of content and choosing where to spend your time is difficult and time consuming. Rather than asking teammates (who no longer sit at the next desk in a physical office) which pages are the most important to review, we’ve added new insights to the top of each Confluence page showing total page views and, soon, estimated read time. At a glance, readers can see which pages are top priority and manage their time by knowing how long they’ll spend reading.

Bulk content management in Confluence

Bulk content management: We’re making it easier than ever for users to find the most up-to-date, important information by empowering content managers to clear out old pages in a snap. Excess, unnecessary, or outdated information bogs teams down and obscures what’s truly relevant. Users can soon clear away this content by selecting multiple pages to archive in one click. We’re also introducing more actions that can be executed on multiple pages at once, including moving, labeling, deleting, and exporting.

Smart links in Confluence

Smart Links: Companies need a central location for all knowledge, especially when it comes from external sources. Leaving your core workflow to open Trello, Google Drive, or Dropbox is disruptive and holds users back from an agile workflow. Confluence’s new Smart Links enable users to view important information from external sources without ever leaving their Confluence page. When inserting content, users can choose from a hyperlink or card presentation view, which will appear directly on the Confluence page, creating a seamless experience for readers.

Inline comments icon in Confluence

Simultaneous feedback: Without face-to-face interaction, teams need to find new ways to give feedback and collaborate on projects. We’re rolling out an update that will allow users to maintain workflow through continuous commenting. Soon, users will be able to incorporate feedback while they’re building a page by viewing, creating, liking, and resolving inline comments in edit mode. A new icon at the top of the page quickly navigates users to all inline comments on the page, surfacing all feedback at once to continue the virtual conversation. 

Trello table view beta

Visual, intuitive, and flexible, Trello is the central work management system for teams in organizations large and small.

Earlier this year, Trello launched advanced checklists to surface relevant information to users quickly, so they could manage work at a granular level. The ability to break a large project into manageable chunks and assign individual owners and due dates to each checklist item has been well-received by users, from city employees using Trello to manage complex urban planning projects to self-employed photographers balancing multiple shoots.

This is a game-changer for my remote org in managing multi-team projects – making sure everyone knows what their part is and when it is due, as well as how that plays into the big picture.

Chava Tzemach, Communications and Marketing Manager

Now, Trello is tackling work management at the macro level with team table view, the first in a series of options for users to see and manage information across boards in one place.

Table view in Trello

Trello’s table view gives visibility into the work happening across projects, individuals, and teams in an easy-to-read and simple-to-alter table format. The feature is available now as a beta that Trello users can request access to by visiting https://bit.ly/tablebeta.

Accomplish (virtually) anything as a remote team

With Confluence, Trello, and a wide variety of other Atlassian tools, you and your team can adapt quickly, stay agile, and seamlessly transition to a thriving remote work environment. We’re looking forward to working together!

Shaping the future of collaboration