This page last changed on Jan 23, 2011 by jlargman.

This page is part of the guide to developing a knowledge base on Confluence Wiki. We have already shown you how to create your knowledge base space and how to use templates and formatting macros. We touched a bit on creating proactive communications in Creating your Knowledge Base Space, and discuss a bit further here.

Quick guide to proactive communications
  • A template is a page with predefined content that can be used as a prototype when creating other pages.
  • Confluence can either produce or consume rss feeds
  • Both the rss and blog-posts macro are a good way to show summaries

Proactive Alerts

Sending technical alerts to customers is a great way to keep customers and staff informed, and good way to reduce support load. At Atlassian we use the Knowledge Base both to consume and produce proactive content for which customers can opt in. This page describes how to achieve that.

Using Confluence as a producer

Using Confluence as a consumer

Even if your Confluence instance isn't producing your proactive content, it can consume and display it in a prominent way:

  • The RSS Feed Macro can consume content from any RSS feed on the Internet.
  • We use the Blog Posts Macro for It looks especially handsome in a panel, accentuated by an RSS image in a link. Here's the wiki markup:
    h4. Technical Alerts
    {panel:title=Important Technical Alerts for Confluence| borderStyle=solid| borderColor=#ccc| titleBGColor=#f93 | bgColor=#fc9}
    {blog-posts:content=title|max=5|sort=modified|spaces=CONFKB|time=30d}
    *[View more recent blog posts|http://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=CONFKB]*
    [!CONFKB:Confluence Knowledge Base Home^rss20.gif|align=right!|http://confluence.atlassian.com/createrssfeed.action?types=blogpost&blogpostSubTypes=comment&blogpostSubTypes=attachment&spaces=CONFKB&title=Confluence+KB+-+Technical+Alerts&labelString=techalert&excludedSpaceKeys%3D&sort=modified&maxResults=10&timeSpan=30&showContent=true&showDiff=true&confirm=Create+RSS+Feed|showTitleOnly=true]
    {panel}

    Note that the blog posts macro can display mail! Use it to highlight mail you've sent as alerts, after archiving mail.

Next Steps

You now have a good idea of how to do proactive communications. Next up, consider Additional Plugins for a Knowledge Base in more detail.

Document generated by Confluence on Sep 19, 2011 02:37