Synchronize Team Priorities and Improve Agility with a Newsfeed for Confluence

You know what a news ticker or newsfeed is — that eye-catching crawl or slider we all expect to see at the bottom of our favorite news and sports channels. It draws our attention to breaking news and gives us at-a-glance access to headlines and bite-sized information. It’s one of many effective techniques for directing the reader’s focus and ensuring that critical messages stand out from everything else on the screen.

In business settings we need to digest vast amounts of information, just to keep up, and the truth is that Confluence is a great tool on its own for sharing complex information.

But the sheer volume of data available sometimes makes it difficult to know where to focus, and it’s easy to miss the most important stuff — everyone on the team has access to nearly everything. That means the new challenge is picking the mission-critical information out of the noise.

Effective Messaging Strategy

Confluence offers an array of built-in and third party solutions that enhance the delivery of information, and none more powerful, flexible, and full-featured than the News Teaser plugin from Mohami.

Introduction to News Teaser

News Teaser collects blog and page content from other locations in Confluence and delivers it in customizable layouts — not just in ticker format, but as Pinterest-style tiles, or as stacked blocks with extensive options for customization. It drops into any page and can pull content from across your Confluence account, even from other spaces.

News Teaser lets you create dynamic displays that pull Confluence content using smart filters to cherry-pick blog posts and page content based on its date created or modified. You can display short or long portions of the source content, select customized layout options, and of course, provide a link that lets readers jump right to the source page.

The plugin is free to try and can make all the difference when it comes to getting your message across — to the team, your customers, and every stakeholder in the org chart.

Use Cases

Not just a gadget, the News Teaser has a wide array of practical applications, some obvious, some surprising. But many of the inevitable little annoyances that are just accepted as part of working on a team come down to missing information.

How would the efficiencies of your team improve if you had the right tools to nudge everyone to play their part — some of those people who routinely forget to commit code, fail to prepare for meetings, or forget to do their share of code reviews.

Some people need repeated reminders to do the simple things that make teams run smoothly.

Use case #1 — Communicate Goals, Schedule Changes, and milestones

It’s not merely setting targets that challenge leaders, but controlling the collective focus of the team, and keeping everyone in their lane when those targets change. No matter what, some team members miss that meeting where the release was moved up, where that proof of concept demo was rescheduled.

But News Teaser helps you make the important information hard to miss.

By pushing important information above the noise, you can bolster team engagement, promote a more thorough understanding of policies and procedures, and improve team cohesion.

Use case #2 — Deflect load from IT with outage notification

Reduce the communications load on internal support by publishing service interruptions and resolution status. No one needs to answer the phone and chat messages every 20 seconds when they’re trying to restore critical IT services.

Using News Teaser to instantly publish updates, keep the team in the loop, and set expectations can deflect calls and let the IT folks focus on getting things back up and running.

Use case #3 — Announce Business and HR Events

Don’t let the team or your customers miss important events like product releases or critical internal business milestones. People focused on their core mission can’t always track the business and HR issues that swirl around outside their bubble.

New procedures? Open enrollment notifications? Don’t let HR and vital administrative issues fall through the cracks.

Use case #4 — Turning the Team on a Dime

Maybe this is just a way to reframe use case #1, but it’s worth emphasizing how pushing urgent information can support true agility and quick pivots to new priorities. Maximize your team’s responsiveness and agility by shifting the whole team in lockstep as priorities change. Turn the ship less like an ocean liner and more like a racecar.

Use case #5 — Reminders for critical responsibilities

Maximize your team’s responsiveness and agility by shifting the whole team in lockstep as priorities change. Turn the ship less like an ocean liner and more like a racecar.

Use case #6 — More efficient, more effective meetings

How many meetings drag on needlessly just because of the lack of preparation by a few attendees? Effective meetings are about both preparation and follow up. The sprint retrospective, planning and task estimation. You’re tying up the entire team while some people do what they could have done beforehand.

After meetings, using News Teaser to highlight and reinforce decisions made, points of improvement, and resolutions that require action or specific behavioral changes from team members.

Features and Functionality

So how exactly does News Teaser improve your messaging effectiveness?

The plugin offers extensive capabilities to query information sources, build queries in Confluence search syntax to pull information from Confluence or Jira. Filter by keywords and date, customize layout, display with thumbnail or Pinterest-style cards among other options.

Macros Included…

News Teaser is actually several specialized macros in one package.

News Slider macro
Use the News Slider macro to display news from blog posts and pages with thumbnails and excerpts in a simple and beautiful slider.

News Teaser macro
Use the News Teaser macro to display news entries with thumbnail and excerpt in a Pinterest like cards layout or as a simple list.

News Ticker macro
Use the News Ticker macro to show off your latest breaking news from blog posts and pages in a simple news ticker.

News Ticker From List macro
Use the News Ticker From List macro to grab news from a bullet list specified in the macro body and display them in a simple ticker.

Feature Highlights

By now it should be clear that News Teaser is much more than a vanilla news feed text scroller display. It’s a feature-rich, highly customizable tool kit for grabbing the attention of readers, delivering information, and making it stick.

• Automatically display from blog posts or other pages: Easily collect news entries automatically from one or more Confluence blog posts or pages, from multiple spaces, and those with your specified labels! And optionally filter them by spaces, date, content, or labels.
• Option to display a summary — full or partial content: Choose whether you want to display a summary, a short excerpt, a long excerpt, or the complete content as news text.
• Select an image to use as a thumbnail: Specify which image attached to the source page or blog post you want to display as a thumbnail.
• Track and display contents and likes: Easily display social stats like the number of comments and likes to see which news are the most engaging.
• Link to content sources: Link news entries to corresponding pages or blog posts to allow users to go straight to the source and read the entire news.
• Responsive layout: All macros are fully responsive and mobile compatible.
• Customize output: Fully customizable macros to adapt the output to your needs. Specify a fixed number of columns, or select the responsive option for mobile compatibility. Set background colors and special colors for promoted content.
• Display blog excerpts as cards or columns, with custom background color…

• Display a Pinterest-style grid of cards…

• Display as a left/right, user-controlled slider…

• Or display as a classic single-line scrolling news ticker…

• Works with Dashboard plugin: Works best in combination with the Custom Dashboards plugin to display newly published posts in a stunning way on your custom dashboard, such that it draws the attention of all your users.
• Additional Options: Numerous other options give users additional control where it makes sense, like the option to show an error when it can’t find the content it’s configured to.

More Examples

Responsive, configurable multi-column displays.

Easily embedded with other content, or additional instances of News Teaser.

The bottom line

Somewhere in that wall of words on your team page are the key takeaways every member needs to know right now.

Displaying and managing volumes of documentation is clearly where Confluence shines, but pushing critical information to the team requires a particular set of capabilities.

If your team is already high-functioning, if everyone on your team consistently understands ever-shifting schedules and priorities, then you’re already in the zone.

But inevitably some people are more attuned than others to the process and responsibilities that make teams successful. Even the most talented team members need proactive intervention to make sure they absorb little or even big shifts in direction and focus.

But whether it’s for your team or your customers, effectively getting mission critical messages across requires enhancing the native tools that ensure they stand out from the wall of words on the page.

Try it right now

Want to try it for free? News Teaser and other powerful plugins from Mohami are available from the Atlassian Marketplace.

If you want proactive data delivery embedded in your Confluence pages, take a test drive of the News Teaser plugin.

News Teaser supports cloud, server, and data center deployments.

Your Confluence administrator can install the plugins with a single mouse click and you can experience the benefits of active messaging yourself, and take your team to the next level of focus and cohesion.

1. Log into your Confluence instance as an admin and choose Add-ons, or go to the Atlassian Marketplace.
2. Locate News Teaser and click Try it free.
3. (Consider trying Custom Dashboards for Confluence too.)
4. You’re all set! Click Close in the Installed and ready to go dialog.

While you’re in the Marketplace, consider trying Custom Dashboards for Confluence as well. News Teaser gets even better when used in combination with the Dashboard plugin, which is also free to try.

You’ll start reaping the benefits of proactive communication right away, and your entire team can experience News Teaser for themselves.

Mohami extends the Atlassian ecosphere with a suite of sensible, productivity-boosting macros that plug key gaps in functionality, unlock integration between platforms, and streamline development. View the complete range of macros at the Atlassian Marketplace here.