Soundboard for Confluence

Soundboard Macro in Confluence

Inspiration

This is Clara and Jonas! 🙌🏼

We were having lunch together and were searching for a TikTok to find a specific sound. And we were asking ourselves: how often do we share TikTok, Reels, funny memes and sounds with our work besties every day? Because they are everywhere, TikTok sounds flood Spotify playlists, conquer Top 100 charts and are well known far beyond GenZ. You might say - this is only private, this has nothing to do with work. But the workplace has changed, it is 2022. At least a handful of Atlassian partners started sharing TikToks on LinkedIn, everyone wants to profit from the hype, the viral sounds. What do they all have in common? A sound. A sound that raises memories, a long forgotten song, or just a funny sound. They raise a sense of belonging, they create a culture. And that's why you share them with people who feel the same.

Now, why not take these emotions to create a shared culture in our companies? Let's give this culture a place in our workspace, let it be in Confluence, let it be inclusive. Let's have everyone be part of it. Back to our TikTok sound from lunch - we wanted a soundboard and we wanted it in Confluence right now.

And this, my friends, is ~~how I met your mother~~ why we built Soundboard for Confluence.

What it does

Soundboard for Confluence gives you the power to add and play your company's favorite selection of sounds at any possible occasion. Add the user-friendly macro to your team's dashboard, your personal space or your weekly ToDos page. Make team meetings more fun, entertain your office buddies or give shoutouts at the touch of the button! Do you need some examples? Glad you asked!

😓 You can't find the issue you were looking for anymore - 🎵 Oh No No No

🌽 You want to annoy your coworkers over and over again - 🎵 It's Corn!

⚰️ You think someone fucked up and shit's about to get real - 🎵 Coffin Dance

🏴‍☠️ Motivate your team for the new sprint - 🎵Pirates of the Carribean Theme Song

🍻 Half of your team is still hangover - 🎵 Drunken Sailor

☠️ Your dev team mourns because of EOL server - 🎵 Frozen - Let it go!

🚗 You want to annoy someone again - 🎵 Mario Kart Music

⏳ If someone is late to the meeting - 🎵 Jeopardy Think Music

🧑🏽‍💻 The Product Owner asks for a release on Friday afternoon - 🎵 The Office- Michael Scott No God No

🕶 You test your coworkers new cloud app and you actually like it - 🎵Noice meme

🐈 You wrote some badass code today - 🎵Thug Life

Features

✅ Add sounds in View Mode anytime (no admin rights necessary!, no need to edit the page!)

✅ Add an image and a title to your sound for a personal touch and a better user experience

✅ Global Macro: On macro to catch 'em all! Add the macro over and over again - all your company's sounds are already there so you can start right away.

✅ CrossPlay: Maybe the feature we are most proud of, because this is about real collaboration. Click on a sound and it is played for all your colleagues at the same time. Magic, isn't it?

✅ Invisible feature: Add a macro to a page and no one will know. Surprise everyone with a sound that you play randomly. Go to macro settings and hide the UI.

✅ Wiggle, wiggle: Get visual feedback when a sound is played. #accessibility

✅ Just like a tattoo - it's forever. No delete or edit button - we love it #noragrets

How to get started

Open a Confluence page of your choice, type /soundboard and open the Soundboard macro. It then should look like this: View Mode The page now shows all available sounds someone in your organization has already added. Now it's your turn! Add more sounds and try playing them to have fun with your colleagues. Trust us, we had a lot of fun!

How we built it and challenges we ran into

Soundboard for Confluence is a Forge app built on React & TypeScript. One of the key challenges was that the Forge Storage API does not support up- and downloading files. Also, to enable CrossPlay we have to push changes in the database to the users. To overcome these challenges we integrated Google Firebase which provides an easy-to-use interface for up- and downloading files as well as a NoSQL database that supports pushing updates to the clients out-of-the-box.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished the project within a week and a half and we are very proud of it. We have been using the app for a week now and our colleagues and business partners are lovin’ it. The app has improved our workplace atmosphere tremendously. We haven’t heard a single complaint. #greetingstoallofyou

What we learned

This was our first attempt at integrating Google Firebase into a Forge app. We found it to integrate very well and to be a valuable addition to the functionality that Forge provides. Especially, being able to push changes in the database to clients enables a smooth implementation of cool features like CrossPlay, which would not be possible otherwise (at least not as smoothly).

What's next for Soundboard for Confluence

Soundboard is already puuurrrfect. But there is always room to improve.

🏴‍☠️ Delete random: As we decided to keep all sounds with no exception, we want to introduce 'delete random'. This gives you the opportunity to press the delete button and one sound tile will vanish. But not without playing the sound for everyone once again. So if someone messed up you have the chance to start all over again.

👩🏻‍💻 WhoDis: A random sound is played and it wasn’t you? With this new feature you would be able to see who it was.

💙 Soundboard for Jira: This goes without saying. We need our Soundboard in Jira, too.