As another bumper year comes to an end I thought it fitting to recap all that happened in the world of Confluence in 2013. We’ve shipped tons of releases in the last 12 months – including new features like Blueprints, and improvements to existing features like search in Confluence 5.3 – all of which help our 15,000+ customers worldwide get more value out of Confluence than ever before.

In addition to seven major releases of Confluence and Team Calendars, we expanded the Confluence family with an all-new add-on: Confluence Questions. Needless to say, 2013 has been our biggest year yet and we’re not slowing down. Let’s count down the top 10 highlights of Confluence in 2013.

10. Confluence 5: New look, feel, and flow

A fresh start to the new year, our Confluence 5 release in February had an all-new, redesigned user interface and user experience – the result of months of tireless planning, user testing, and pixel-by-pixel optimization.

testimonial

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWQHBQOPTqk]

9. Blueprints: Best practices made easy

Hot on the heels of Confluence 5, we announced Confluence 5.1 and Blueprints at the First Look event held in our beautiful San Francisco office in March.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-68VOlKXqEQ]

Based on a decade of customer experience, Confluence Blueprints give teams a new and simpler way to create and share work. See them in action:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr8Te3AGdK8]

8. Decisions Blueprint: Decide faster, record forever

Thanks to the Blueprints framework shipped in Confluence 5.1, we’re now able to deliver you more best practices to solve common business problems faster than ever before. The Decisions Blueprint  was the first additional Blueprint we added to provide you with a simple, repeatable process for making decisions asynchronously amongst your team, and recording them forever in Confluence so you can reference them later. Start reaching decisions faster today.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2PK6vfF9hk]

7. Confluence 5.2: A whole new search

In August you witnessed Chuck’s epic journey to find buried mission-critical information at his workplace in InfoQuest.

infographic

Fortunately for you there’s Confluence – one place to centralize all of your team’s information, making it a whole lot faster to find later. In Confluence 5.2 we wanted to help you stop looking and start finding. So we introduced a whole new search experience to help you find the information you need to get work done, faster. Find information the first time and get on with your workday.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1qHyhBP4Eg]

6. Team Calendars 4: One calendar, many event types

Confluence Team Calendars has come a long way since its initial release in June 2011. Over 2,300 customers have benefitted from 19 new feature releases – drag-and-drop rescheduling of Jira issues and a beautiful new timeline view to name a few. In 2013 it got even better with an entirely new user experience in Team Calendars 4.

You can now create a single calendar for your team or project and fill it with different types of events – travel, leave, events, Jira versions, issues and sprints, and more. Here’s my team’s calendar to prove it.

calendar

5. Shared Links Blueprint: Build on shared knowledge

If your team is anything like mine, sharing links to web content is a crucial source of inspiration and information. We introduced the Shared Links Blueprint in September to give you one place to share, discuss, and store your links for reference later.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxqsaWldo00]

4. Confluence 5.3: Turn your knowledge into solutions

On October 2nd at Atlassian Summit, we announced Jira Service Desk – a modern and flexible service desk experience that streamlines customer requests, and boosts your IT team’s efficiency. Alongside its release we announced Confluence 5.3, making it possible to connect your Jira Service Desk to a structured knowledge base in Confluence to provide your customers with the answers before they ever raise a request. It’s complete self-service for your customers – no wait, no work, no worries.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_bbyLQpjQ]

3. Confluence Questions (Beta): Ask once, educate forever

Summit was full of surprises this year, none more so than a new addition to the Confluence family. Confluence Questions is an internal question and answer platform that allows you to learn from the collective knowledge of experts within your organization, then make it available to others, anytime. Try it today!

questions

2. Confluence 5.4: Integrated with Jira like never before

Christmas came early in 2013 for Confluence and Jira customers with the release of Confluence 5.4. It brings Jira into Confluence – and Confluence into Jira – like never before, so your team can build better software, faster. When we say seamless integration, we mean it. We’ve made agile best practices the easiest practice, for your team and every team.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZYGAvpxQc]

1. 100+ team members and counting

More exciting than any product release has been the growth of the Confluence team throughout 2013. We’re continuing to build for the future by investing in all areas of the product with new team members in engineering, design, product management, QA, support, tech writing, and marketing. Did I mention we’re still hiring(smile)

team

Bring on 2014

If you thought 2013 was big, wait until you see what we’ve got in store for 2014. On behalf of the entire Confluence team, thanks for all your feedback, all your votes, your ideas in 2013. We rely on your feedback and ideas to continually improve Confluence, so please keep it coming.

We wish you a safe, happy, and productive new year!

Top 10 Confluence highlights of 2013