Metadata, User Profiles for Confluence & Scroll Translations by Communardo & K15t
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, organizations displayed all of the company news on one page that was visible to all employees regardless of language, location or role. Productivity was lost, and so were employees as they scrolled through headline after headline in search of relevance. But then, hope emerged in the form of personalized newsfeeds developed by a small group of forward-thinking IT leaders. This is their story.
The Challenge In today’s international enterprises, employees can be overwhelmed by the number of announcements, blog posts, and other content that appears on the intranet homepage every day. The problem is that much of this information is specific to a specific location or team. Meaning organizations have had to choose between either publishing everything (and risk overwhelming employees with information) or creating restrictive communications policies that limit what’s published to the intranet homepage.
This is the problem that Physik Instrumente, a leading manufacturer of nano positioning technology, grappled with. Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, the company has locations across Europe, America, and Asia. Michael Sauer, the company‘s Head of Collaboration and Intranet, wanted a way to create personalized newsfeeds based on an employee’s language, location, and role. He used a special blend of Marketplace apps (Metadata, User Profiles and Scroll Translations for Confluence) to solve this problem and deliver a powerful new user experience
The Apps Metadata for Confluence. Built by Communardo, this app lets you define metadata tags to create a consistent, well-structured wiki.
User Profiles for Confluence. Also developed by Communardo, this app allows the creation of custom profile fields and synchronizes user profiles with the Active Directory to ensure that they’re always up to date.
Scroll Translations. Built by K15t, this app makes it easy for enterprises to manage, deliver and translate content directly in Confluence.
Creating Personalized Newsfeeds Using these three apps, it was relatively easy to create personalized newsfeeds within Confluence.
First, Sauer employed User Profiles for Confluence to create custom fields for the location at which each employee works, the language he speaks and his role in the company. He then synchronized this information with the Active Directory to ensure that it is always up-to-date, even if the employee changes locations or roles. The app also allows permissions to be maintained automatically, reducing administrative overhead.
Sauer needed a way to tag news articles based on location and role. He used Metadata for Confluence to ensure that all articles are automatically delivered to the right audiences when they are published.
The configurability and associated possibilities of metadata go beyond the standard page properties in Confluence. Metadata fields/ sets can be prepared and allocated for the entire wiki, selected spaces, or individual templates. The queried fields can be predefined, for example as dropdown or radio buttons. Predefined fields ensure consistent spell.
ling of metadata throughout the wiki, eliminating all the headaches associated with free text entries. Now, when employees visit the intranet homepage, they only see news that is relevant to their location and role. Thus, an employee at the Karlsruhe location can see that the company party at headquarters is imminent, while – for example – a sales employee in Singapore does not.
Lastly, Sauer used the Scroll Translation app to ensure that news is displayed in each employee’s preferred language, as defined in their user profiles.