Confluence is getting more and more social

The conference “Confluence State of the Union” is a reference to the political speech the U.S. President gives at the beginning of each year. This is the opportunity for Atlassian to review the activities of the past year and to introduce the upcoming innovations.

Indeed,  Bill Arconati did present us a retrospective of the transitional year that Confluence went through, starting from his last presentation of the 4th version during last Summit, the one that was supposed to bring completely the software in full rich text edition.

This year was the opportunity to present a 4^th release of this new Confluence generation (Atlassian is now following a rhythm of 3 major releases per year) with the version 4.3,  already accessible in EAP.

The major new features include:

1. A notification system that will encourage you staying attentive to the tool, instead of passively waiting for email notifications.  This activity flux gather all the contents you might be interested in via an @mention system borrowed from twitter and integrated to Confluence since version 4.2.
   
   This functionality must be considered as the counterpart of your Facebook wall, pushing the similarity to include the mail logo indicating the number of unread notifications.
   
2. A task manager. The users were eagerly waiting for this functionality, especially since the end of third party solutions such as TaskDock. It takes the shape of a new list (right after the bullets and numbering) within the editor’s toolbar, and is based on the user @mentions to assign tasks.
   
   This will allow for example to traduce the actions decided during a meeting that notes would be written on a Confluence page.
3. A ToDo list. You will be able to create personal tasks and manage their prorities like in Google Task. In addition, you can turn your notifications into tasks in the same interface.
   
   You can deploy it via the corresponding checkbox.
4. The previous picture showcases the next feature I want to talk you about. Confluence Mobile is now natively integrated to the solution and it now beneficiates of a brand new design.