Just before Christmas, Atlassian announced new features for the new year: Automations & External Collaboration for Confluence. But what exactly does this mean for users? In this blog post, we will tell you the most important things about the new automations!
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With this, it is now possible to automate repetitive tasks and keep your Confluence spaces always clean and up-to-date. Every automation rule isn’t only created in the same interface and works just like it would in Jira: You define a trigger event, optionally add conditions and branches and Confluence will execute the defined actions. For example, it is possible to set the creation of a page or blog post as a trigger event, with the action that it gets labeled with a specific label and the condition that this only happens if it is created in a certain space or has a certain text in its title. Generally speaking, the possible triggers for the automation are either the creation or editing of pages or blog posts, mentioning users on the page itself, as well as adding comments and labels to a page or blog post.
Besides these content-related triggers, it is also possible to set a scheduled automation or trigger it through an incoming webhook of a third-party service. This is in particular practical if you for example want to get reminded in the form of an automated E-Mail about inactive content on a fix scheduled date.
This also brings to the possible actions, that Automations for Confluence can execute. You can create, copy, comment and archive pages automatically, add or remove labels and manage who is able to watch content under the conditions you define. As mentioned above, it is also possible to send notifications either via mail or MS Teams and Slack. And of course, since you are able to trigger actions through an incoming webhook, you can also send web requests.
Atlassian has not yet specified an exact release date for automations for Confluence. However, according to Atlassian, this feature will be available soon and will be fully rolled out by January 15, 2023 at the latest.
Automations for Confluence will be completely rolled out until the 15th of January 2023 and will then be settable by every space- and site admin. This includes personal spaces so that everyone can create automation for their personal content if they want to. Additionally, it will only be available for the Premium and Enterprise paying plan, while the feature in instances with the Premium plan will be limited to 1.000 successful rule executions each month per licensed user. Once the usage limit is reached, the automation will start to fail, until the usage is set to zero again the following month.
Nevertheless, it is a long-anticipated and great feature, that will make standardized revisioning and creating content much easier for everyone using Confluence Cloud.