Workplace Connector for Confluence

Confluence page to be shared as a Workplace group post
Instant sharing to Workplace
Workplace group post originating from the Confluence page
Comments added to the Confluence page
Automatically synced comments in the Workplace post

Inspiration

We work for a company that uses both Confluence Cloud and Workplace by Facebook. Whenever a particularly important announcement or policy is created, it is often shared in both platforms. This means that the authors must spend time and effort to publish the same content twice. And the more frustrating part is that user comments are spread between 2 places and not synced with each other, so the visibility of comments and questions asked by other users is much less. This app will make sharing any important announcement, or information much easier.

What it does

Workplace Confluence Connector allows Confluence space admins to map their spaces to dedicated Workplace Groups. Then, whenever content in the space needs to be shared to Workplace, clicking a content action converts the content to markdown and posts it to the target Workplace group. Moreover, any comments that are added to the page are automatically synced with the Workplace post so that no update or discussion is missed.

How I built it

We used Atlassian's new Cloud development platform called "Forge".

Challenges I ran into

There were some challenges associated with using Forge in its beta such as:

Limitations around web triggers and handling of query params.
Given the sandboxed nature of Forge, React or arbitrary HTML can't be used in the Forge app. We had to rely on a somewhat small (albeit rapidly growing) component library.
Frequently released breaking changes.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud to have created one of the first integration apps for Confluence and Workplace.

What I learned

How to use a completely new development platform for Atlassian Cloud apps.
Better understanding of Workplace APIs.

What's next for Workplace Confluence Connector

This app is a prototype and was just built for this hackathon. There are a lot of ideas that we want to implement in the app to give its users more options and flexibility such as: