Birdview for Confluence Cloud

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  App icon

Inspiration

Our inspirations came from the following observation:

1. Hard to gain context on our Confluence structure as not all spaces are shown, making finding information difficult
2. Default way of creating new contents doesn’t provide structural overview making structure planning hard
3. Navigating around Confluence is hard and slow
4. Hard to tell what a piece of content contains from the search result as Confluence content doesn’t have page description
   • The displayed results only display truncated content that might conceal the relevant info that a user is trying to search

What it does

Using the concept of mindmap, this add-on does the following:

1. Provides an overview of the whole Confluence structure
2. Provides a description of a content via the page description feature
3. Organizes content easily via drag and drop feature
4. Supports create and delete actions for Confluence content
5. Supports navigation to a targeted Confluence link
   • Each node on the mindmap contains a link to the page that can be clicked

How we built it

• All interactions with Confluence contents are done using Confluence Cloud REST APIs
• For data persistence, all are done using Confluence content properties API
• For tech stacks, we use the following:
  • Serverless
  • jsmind library
  • TypeScript
  • AUI

Challenges we ran into

• Current Confluence Cloud REST API doesn’t support moving pages between different spaces.
  • Due to this, the drag and drop feature only works for moving Confluence content within the same space.
  • This is a known issue and there’s already a ticket reported to Atlassian.
• Screenshot feature is not yet perfect and can be addressed as an improvement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we are proud of this add-on as it helps with productivity as such it:

• Reimagines the way users use Confluence for content manageme
  • Features such as create and delete actions and drag and drop features would increase productivity when it comes to content organization
• Makes information more transparent hence activites, such as planning, researching and decision-making will be faster.

What we learned

• What can and cannot be achieved via the current Confluence Cloud API.
  • Persistence using content and app properties.
  • Unsupported content movement across spaces.

What's next for Birdview for Confluence Cloud

• Performance optimization
  • This will arise as the total of Confluence content increases.
  • Roughly, this can be solved through filtered query, parallelization, etc.
• Mindmap personalization at user-level instead of just at system-wide level
  
• Support more actions via the toolbar.
  • Currently, the toolbar supports a few actions such as taking screenshot, zoom in/out, expand and collapse all.
  • More features can be added to the toolbar.
• Improvements on UX and UI.

Links

• This add-on can be installed in Confluence Cloud using this URL: https://aqsp52asdg.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/staging/
• Video demo can be found here

Built With

• atlaskit
• aws-lambda
• jsmind
• serverless