Confluence now supports Open Social, allowing users to pull in gadgets to check Salesforce contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar and other items.
The new features in Confluence 3.1, an Atlassian product, show that dashboard environments are certainly in vogue as the social web becomes a pervasive part of the business user’s daily work life.
Wikis, though, are not a marketing term that has as much resonance. Enterprise collaboration is the holy grail. The release from Confluence shows the importance of open, collaborative services that provides the ability to stitch together different data sources into one environment.
With its new release, Confluence is adding a number of new features.
Open Social gadgets may be added by pointing and clicking. The upgrade to Confluence 3.1 includes two gadgets. Confluence Activity Stream displays a list of recent updates from a Confluence site. Quick Navigation provides Confluence search capabilities and suggests results while typing.
Here’s an example of how a gadget is pulled into Confluence.
Attachments may dragged and dropped into the Confluence environment. The idea being that Confluence can act much like a desktop application.
Support is now provided for Microsoft Office 2007. Users may view attached Office 2007 documents, such as PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets within the Confluence wiki page. Users may search inside files and edit documents.
Confluence is one of the leading service providers in the Enterprise 2.0 space. The service demonstrates how 2010 will see the continued integration of the open web within enterprise environments.
As Bill Arconati of Atlassian said in an interview: “It’s all about interoperability.”
