Waste is the enemy of any agile team. Identifying waste can be a great way to kick-off your continuous improvement process. Established teams often generate waste without knowing it. Teams tend to…
3 tips for finding your place in Atlassian Confluence
Logging into Confluence for the first time can be like logging into someone else's Facebook account. "Who are these people, and what are they talking about..?".
Confluence is the sister wiki offering for successful bug tracking software JIRA. It is made by Atlassian, an Australian company which focuses its energy on developing productivity tools for software developers.
Confluence can be a daunting place if you don’t know where you are, or whats going on. Here are some tips to help you find your feet and to start making it the centre of your collaborative day and not a dusty wiki-encyclopedia on the shelf.
Create and use your Personal Space
Everybody likes a place to call their own. Confluence allows every users to create their own Personal Space. This is a space just like all the other spaces, but you own it, you set the permissions and you design the layout.
A personal is a great place for keeping all your own documents handy, creating drafts, tracking personal meetings or just letting people know about yourself.
To get started with your Personal Space, simply click your avatar icon in the top right hand corner of any screen, and select “Create Personal Space” then follow the prompts.
Advanced permissions - Your personal space will inherit the default space permission set by your administrator. Check out this article for more information on custom setting the permissions for your personal space
Further reading - Setting Up your Personal Space
Favourite Spaces and Pages
Spaces
As discussed previously the Dashboard is the town square of Confluence, although like any bustling metropolis there can often be a little too much going on.
Setting favourite spaces lets us quickly sculpt the Dashboard to reflect the content we are interested in seeing when we log into Confluence.
In the list of Site Space on the bottom left of the Dashboard, click the star next to the name of the Space you want to set as a favourite (if you cannot see the space you are looking for, click the View All link at the bottom). Favourite spaces will now appear atop the list in a separate section titled Favourite Spaces.
Once you have chosen your favourites, you can use the Favourite Spaces Status Update feed. Which will now show you only the updates that occur inside your Favourite Spaces.
Pages
Setting pages as favourites lets you quickly return to them via the Pages tab of the Favourites section of the Dashboard. To set a favourite page, click the Options menu () on any page, and select Favourite.
Build your Network
Similar to Twitter, Confluence lets you follow other members. The Network tab in the Activity Feed of the Dashboard lets you see only the updates of those who you follow.
To follow someone either hover over their name link anywhere in Confluence and click Follow, or click through on their profile and click Follow on the top left of their profile.
With these 3 simple steps you will be well on your way to making Confluence the launchpad of your productive day. If you have any questions, leave me a comment below.
The first step towards learning your way around Atlassian Confluence is to understand how it is all tied together.
There are three tiers of information in Confluence: Dashboard, Spaces, Pages
Content Structure
Dashboard
The Dashboard is the central hub of Confluence; a town centre of sorts. It aggregates the latest and most popular information in Confluence in a social-media-style status feed. It also presents links out to focused content areas called Spaces. The Dashboard can be customised to provide a more personalised experience.
Think of the Dashboard as the Facebook News Feed for Confluence
Pro Tip - Click the Confluence logo in the top left corner at any time to go back to your dashboard
Spaces
Spaces are collections of pages around a common topic. You might have Spaces for teams, or products or even social activities (you can have as many Spaces as you see fit). Each Space has its own permissions for determining who can and cannot access the pages inside it.
Think of Spaces link Facebook Groups, they have their own timeline, members and subject matter based content
Pages
Pages are the atomic unit in Confluence. A Page is very much like a traditional document, it can contain text, files, or photos. Similar to folders and files, Pages are organised hierarchically in a parent child relationship with one another. Pages can be moved from parent to parent, or even from Space to Space.
Think of Page like Posts, individual pieces of content that can be reviewed, discussed and promoted.
Remember - Pages are created as children of the page you are viewing. Navigate to the hierarchical home for your page before you create it
With a solid understanding of the way Spaces and Pages related to one another, and can be accessed via the Dashboard, we can take steps to customise our experience.
If you have any further questions about the way content is structured in Confluence, leave me a comment below.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” -- George Bernard Shaw Communication is a core part of the human exp
Time is the most valuable commodity we have. Unlike money, every minute that goes by is another we can never get back. We have to maximize the time we have
Life as a parent explained!
Withouth realising it, I have found myself applying these techniques on a daily basis to get more out of each day
A great deal of Slack's success has come from its ability to allow companies to communicate internally in a fluid and transparent manner. Now the enterprise..
Slack take another step towards erradicating email in the workplace.
Adding user groups provides many productivity benefits:
Quick sharing to groups of people
Simplified permission configurations
User directory integrations
The question though, is will this functionality suffer the same abuse that the CC field does when it comes to distribution groups?
Either way Slack manages to remain ahead of the pack, and a thought-leader for collaborations solutions
Owlet is a smart device, built into a babies sock which monitors and notifies parents on their smartphones of their babies vital signs.
As a father, I can definitely relate to the anxiety a new parent feels when putting their bundle of joy to sleep at night. Owlet, a product from a startup company of the same name is a device that looks to allay some of those fears.
In short the Owlet is a single baby sock, which applies technology similar to that inside an Apple Watch to your babies foot. The devices monitors heart rate and oxygen levels, and communicates that information via Bluetooth back to your iPhone/iPad and its purpose build base station (also used for charging). Either the dock or your smartphone is then able to notify you if your babies heart beat or breathing changes or stops.
“Up all night so you don’t have to be. Owlet is the only monitor to give you one less thing to worry about. It’s also the only monitor to use hospital technology called pulse oximetry. Owlet is designed to alert you if your baby stops breathing. We’re silently watching over your little one to give you peace of mind, and maybe even a full night’s sleep.”
http://www.owletcare.com
How it works
Very similar to the peg they put on your finger at the hospital, or the sensor built into the back of Apple Watches, the Owlet uses pulse oximetry to calculate its measurements. The device illuminates the skin with a small light, so a sensor can monitor the subtle flushes of blood into the skin with each heart beat. Based on the frequency and amount of light that gets through it can estimate heart rate and oxygen levels.
The readings are periodically transmitted over low energy Bluetooth, which is the same way an Apple Watch communicates with your iPhone. This makes it safe for your baby, and ensures that it will not receive interference from other wireless devices.
It is powered by a rechargable battery, which Owlet reports to only require charging between naps once a day.
How do I get it
Owlet is now available on their website http://www.owletcare.com/. They are $249.99 USD (approx $345.00 AUD)
Check out their advertisement below to see it in action
…it keeps her vitals, keeps her heartrate, her oxygen, and its peace of mind. Helps get your through that newborn stage…
Do you have an Owlet? Do you know someone who does? I would love to hear your feedback (if I can get my hands on one, I will write a full hands on review).
Mike Cohn provides certified scrummaster training & agile training in order to build extremely high performance development organizations.
This is a common question for Scrum teams. Estimation often represents a stumbling block for productivity. Furthermore, without it, there is a disconnect with the business.
The key take-aways here are:
Estimation should be done before Sprint Planning to ensure decisions can be made based on estimates
New Backlog items should be estimated as they are added to the Product Backlog
Estimates are about making rough trade-off decisions. No need to split hairs.
On an ongoing basis, once per sprint I recommend that the ScrumMaster tell the team something like, “Hey, we’ve had five new user stories come in this sprint and we need to estimate them. Everyone plan on hanging around for a bit after tomorrow’s daily scrum meeting and we’ll play Planning Poker to estimate the new items.” Doing it right after the daily scrum helps cut down on the number of interruptions in total.
Hands-down, one of the coolest features of the new iPhone 6s and 6s plus is 3D Touch, that subtle touch mechanism that lets you quickly access common tasks fast as hell. Here are our 10 favorite shortcuts so far.
3D Touch is a very interesting concept. In a sense it feels like the iPhone is new again.
No unlike the Apple Watch, remember when we first got iPhones and downloaded gimmicky beer drinking apps and the alike? 3D Touch feels a little like that at the moment. We are waiting for developers to work out what to do with it.
At present I think the best features are the Keyboard cursor and the peek and pop.
You might have noticed that Apple have changed some of their trackpad gestures in OSX 10.11 El Capitan.
Many of the 3 finger commands have been changed only require 3 fingers. As a result the highly functional (and potentially under utilised) 3 finger drag option has been buried.
The good news is that it is still available, and I am going to show you how to turn it on and off.
How to enable 3 finger drag
Open System Preferences
Go to the Accessibility section
In the left menu select “Mouse & Trackpad”
Then click the “Trackpad Options…” button on the right
In the pop-up, check the “Enable dragging” box, and select “three finger drag” in the drop down menu
Thats it!
Hopefully this isn’t a sign of things to come, and Apple keep this option available to users in the future
Did this help you?
Let me know with a comment, or share it with a friend
N.B. your CSS might be at the top of your theme in the <style></style> tags or in the Theme Options > Advanced options > Add Custom CSS section of your blog.
You don’t need to spend money on an expensive theme to get your layout into columns. Give it a try and see how you go.
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