Confluence for Enterprise: Are You a Group or a Team?
Groups and teams are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Many organizations confuse the two thinking they have a team when in fact what they have are groups. Oftentimes, the cause of confusion is the platform they are using.
In this article, we will differentiate between groups and teams, and we will show you how Confluence can help your groups become teams.
Groups and Teams
According to Bonnie Edelstein, “A group is a bunch of people in an elevator. A team is also a bunch of people in an elevator, but the elevator is broken!”
When you analyze this statement, you will realize the main difference between a group and a team. A group is just a group of people with different goals but a team is a group of people who work together toward a common goal.
In a business setting, a team environment is often more effective than in groups. Problems could arise when groups consider themselves as teams when in reality they are merely individuals working independently and not collaborating. This setup could have a negative impact on the organization's goals.
The tools or platforms an organization is using could partly be blamed on the wrong notion. For instance, most businesses nowadays use a tangle of disparate tools in multiple ecosystems. Examples of these tools include Microsoft, Google, Sharepoint, Dropbox, and more. When there are too many tools all over the place, collaboration becomes more challenging.
Confluence as a Collaboration Tool
Confluence is multipurpose in nature, and this is the reason why we promote it for enterprise collaboration. As a collaboration tool, it works as a workspace, intranet, knowledge base, and filing cabinet all in one platform.
Here are other reasons why you should use Confluence for your organization:
- Allows users to easily find information needed
Confluence's hierarchical page structure, internal links, search capabilities, and activity feeds let you easily find what you are looking for. Both content creation and collaboration can be easily done too. It has an intuitive page editor that lets you create content from scratch or use a template and macros. You can then collaborate with your teammates by adding comments, using the @ mention function, or giving them edit access to the content you are creating.
- Allows users to incorporate add-ons from Atlassian Marketplace
The Atlassian Marketplace is where you can purchase add-ons that can extend or enhance Confluence's native functionality. One good example is an app called Contract Signatures for Confluence. It's a useful app for creating and managing contracts. Another famous add-on is the Custom Jira Charts for Confluence which lets you create beautiful and interactive charts for your reports.
- Works as your source of truth
If everybody in the organization is working in Confluence, it can become your only source of truth. Having a single source of truth helps avoid confusion and lets everyone easily find the right information needed.
Jira Confluence integration
Jira Confluence integration is very simple, and once done, it allows the different teams and departments to work together. If your support team is already using Jira Service Management (JSM), one of the top benefits of the integration is that it allows you to use Confluence as a knowledge base. What this means is that you can now create a dedicated space containing all relevant information such as how-tos, FAQs, troubleshooting instructions, work-in-progress notes, and more. You can then link your space to your JSM project.
When you use a collaboration tool such as Confluence, it breaks down the normal practice that groups consider normal. In other words, it breaks down the practice of saving information in their inboxes, personal storage systems, and other unintegrated tools. When all these people have access to the same tool and start collaborating, that is the time when teams are made.