News from our Confluence development teams

What are our development teams currently working on? What's new about our social intranet suite Linchpin and the Confluence extensions (apps) that we have developed? It's time again to take a look backstage and read our latest work-in-progress update. (Please note that the following describes the development in progress and not yet finalized products or versions).

Do you want to know more? Then feel free to leave a comment or contact us live via the chat below on the right. We are looking forward to it!

Linchpin Mobile – Faster and more usable

Linchpin Mobile is currently the only solution that lets you access your Confluence Server instance from mobile devices. Even if you are running Confluence behind a firewall for security reasons, Linchpin Mobile's innovative technology ensures secure and straightforward access while you're on the move:

Thanks to new caching mechanisms, you can access the contents of your Confluence intranet much faster and with minimal data usage.

You can now use Confluence microblogs on the go with important new features:

Filter your microblog topics in the app as easy as in the desktop version. (This is automatically synchronized with Confluence.)

Being able to choose to display topics & spaces for microblog posts, you can always get a quick overview of what is relevant for you.

You can now delete invalid or incorrect posts.

Find your way around Linchpin Mobile easily with the revised navigation system.

Would you like to try Linchpin Mobile yourself? You can become a beta tester and download the app to your iPhone (App Store) or your Android device (Google Play).

More information about Linchpin Mobile

Linchpin Touch – Soon in the Atlassian Marketplace

With Linchpin Touch, you can make your Confluence Intranet accessible to all employees. When placed in central locations, your intranet functions like a smart whiteboard on large touchscreens. Employees without their own workstation can now be kept informed of all the important things happening in your company and they are integrated into your organization's information flow.

We are currently working on a simple configuration which will make Touch available to all Confluence customers via the Atlassian Marketplace:

Employees can quickly access important content using the sidebar and footer navigation.

You can easily arrange sidebar menu items with drag & drop in the administration.

You can personalize the sidebar to match the location of the touchscreen (e.g. displaying content for a screen installed at a location in Frankfurt).

More information about Linchpin Touch

Linchpin Theme – Customized starting spaces

With the Linchpin Theme app, you can give your Confluence instance a fresh, new look to match your company's corporate design. You can even design spaces individually.

Previously, you could use the Custom User Profile app to provide users with personalized starting spaces. This function has been added to the Linchpin Theme app directly:

Give individual spaces different designs, e.g. for different departments or for customer spaces on your extranet.

Define personalized starting spaces for users based on their profile data. (For example, all employees in the marketing department start in the Marketing space after logging into Confluence.)

More information about the Linchpin Theme app

App Center – Redesign and new features

In Confluence, the App Center lets you access all of your business-relevant web applications directly, easily and quickly. We revised the App Center's design as well as the individual apps, and simplified its configuration:

The uniform tiled design and the newly added categories make the App Center even more user-friendly.

The revised Apps macro lets you choose which types of apps you want to display on a Confluence page (e.g. my apps, mandatory apps, etc.).

You can add labels to apps to point out any special features of the apps (e.g. mobile-ready).

Provide additional information about an app using a new free text field.

Mark apps as new to highlight them in their category. You can also send an email letting your employees know about new apps once a day, which will help them adopt new applications faster.

Divide your apps into categories and subcategories and arrange them using drag & drop.

Check links to your apps directly from within the administration with just a click.

Find apps in the administration list faster with app icons.

More information about the App Center

Linchpin User Profiles – Add links and filter more precisely

A unique selling point of the Linchpin User Profiles app is its ability to search for users based on their profile data (e.g. for an expert search). You can use the Custom User List macro to create lists of users based on profile data such as languages and area of expertise and make these lists filterable.

These functions will be extended further in the next version of the Linchpin User Profile app:

Specify more than one filter in the Custom User List macro to generate even more precise lists.

Link free text fields with URLs and titles.

In version 2.5, you can create dynamic URLs using profile field data.

More information about the Linchpin User Profile app

Have you noticed? We renamed Custom User Profiles to be the Linchpin User Profiles app!

Enterprise News Bundle – Improved display of news items in Confluence

The Enterprise News Bundle is a mature solution for processing and presenting corporate news in Confluence - its an oft-requested feature and a key requirement for customers who want to use Confluence as their corporate intranet. (Asja Hermanns from B. Braun Melsungen AG believes this is most certainly the case.)

With the recently released version 2.0 of the Enterprise News Bundle, you can use the following new features:

Help users skim and understand the relevance and content of news items faster and more easily with the new introductory text.

Make authors' names visible or not without knowing CSS kung fu.

After we had worked on Cover Stories, now the news items themselves, as well as the Corporate News Feed and Personal News Feed macros have received a facelift.

( By the way, we've renamed Enterprise News Bundle to be Linchpin Enterprise News. Did you know it is one of the core apps in Linchpin, our Confluence-based social intranet suite?)

More information about the Enterprise News Bundle

Microblogging – More flexible with improved scaling

Microblogging for Confluence offers an additional channel for fast, transparent and modern communication methods at a team or company-wide level. In the upcoming version, Microblogging will be even more flexible:

Include microblogs in pages with one-, two- or three-column layouts: The microblog display now adapts flexibly and responsively.

Stay in touch with colleagues and customers while on the move via your microblog and Linchpin Mobile and don't miss out on an important discussion.

More information about Microblogging for Confluence

Navigation Menu Editor – More flexible link targets

The Navigation Menu Editor provides a clear structure within your Confluence instance, and allows you to navigate quickly to the most important pages with the classic top-level navigation. The new version 2.5 lets users reach their destinations even faster thanks to the following new features:

Save users from having to scroll forever on long pages and use anchor links instead to get them directly to the right spot on the page.

You no longer need to search to find the Navigation Menu Editor's configuration. It now has its own main menu item in Confluence's general configuration.

With the new Menu macro, you can easily integrate navigation into a wide range of Confluence theming solutions.

More information about the Navigation Menu Editor

All of the apps described above are components of the Linchpin social intranet suite, developed by us and based on Confluence. But they can also be used individually in your Confluence instance. Do you have any questions? Would you like to test the Linchpin intranet suite or individual apps with no obligation? Contact us, we would be delighted to support you in all aspects of evaluating and implementing a social intranet based on Confluence!

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Further information

Linchpin: Social intranet based on Confluence
Linchpin and the central Linchpin components are now Confluence Data Center compatible
Want to learn more about intranets? Have a look at the intranet portal in our Knowledge Base