SoftComply Static Snapshots

Inspiration

SoftComply support the regulated and safety-critical domain customers on Atlassian stack. Our mission is to speed up and automate regulatory compliance for these companies. Even though a lot can be achieved on Atlassian already, there are still some gaps that our existing clients in the regulated domain companies are facing and need our support in. One of them is Confluence's dynamic content i.e. the content on every Confluence page is changing upon page refresh. This is perfect for illustrating the current state, but if you need to sign off the content or just create a fixed state report, then the dynamic macros that pull and update the info from other data sources is not helpful. In order to support out clients in their requests, our team decided to develop an app that allows Confluence users to capture and freeze any Confluence page at any point in time with the possibility to later see the page history and what has changed in it.

What it does

Data in Confluence and Jira are always DYNAMIC. When you add a Jira macro to your Confluence page, the Jira issues in the macro will be updated each time you refresh your Confluence page. To FREEZE THE CONTENT at a certain point in time, take a STATIC SNAPSHOT of the page with the SoftComply Static Snapshots app. You can MONITOR YOUR WORK PROGRESS and IMPROVE REPORTING with the SoftComply Static Snapshots that provide you a view of THE STATUS OF THINGS AT ANY POINT IN TIME.

How we built it

We used Forge and Confluence api to achieve the goal. It wasnt easy, but it was doable!

Challenges we ran into

Forge was not mature enough, thus we had to restructure the code many times. Also, customer data that you access can be more than just your test page ;) i.e. you have to handle rather large pieces of data securely and efficiently. Thus the security and performance were definitely the aspects we spent lot of time to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It's all built on Forge. Server-less elegant solution that uses all Atlassian's platform features. In other words, it's like any other native Confluence app.

What we learned

Using the latest technology can be tricky. Not everything is stable and not everything can be done as you think! Also, the usability can be affected if the technology just does not allow to do some specific things. So by using latest-latest tech stack you cannot get everything up and running in the first release as you may have wished!

What's next for SoftComply Static Snapshots

Next features include diff checkers, exporting and some additional support for the dynamic macros of Confluence. Diff is an extremely hard task and we could not finish it on time due to the complexity. We are currently developing it but grappling with the complexity of how the user sees the information of a snapshot and the data we need to store and compare to provide a human-readable and user-friendly comparison of snapshots. It's much easier to compare two live Confluence pages than the static snapshots!