Atlassian has announced new automation capabilities for its Confluence collaborative workspace platform, allowing customers to set up rules that streamline processes and remove the need for repetitive manual work.

Automation is something that Atlassian has been investing in for a while and that has now become a core part of its platform, said Erika Trautman, head of product for work management at Atlassian. The company first rolled out new automation capabilities to its Jira platform in 2020, and Trautman said it will not stop with Confluence: it plans to launch additional automation functionality in other products in future.

"The value proposition for Confluence is interesting and a little bit different than it is for Jira, because Confluence is the place where your company's most important assets live," Trautman said. "It's where knowledge is shared and work advances."

As content continues to proliferate within organizations, it's vital that employees don't have to waste time trying to surface important information or become distracted by unnecessary or misleading noise, she said.

"There's a gazillion little tasks that just feel so unimportant and mundane and humans don't like to do them and therefore don't do them," Trautman said. "Automation [allows you to] focus on what matters most."

The new automation capabilities for Confluence are powered by the Atlassian platform, activated by triggers, conditions, and actions built into rules that can be customized to fit specific customer needs.

Confluence's new library of preconfigured rules allows users to automate common content management and lifecycle tasks, providing admins with the option to select preconfigured rule templates or use the low-code/no-code rule builder to create their own custom automation from space settings or global settings.

The templates offered by Confluence are:

• Add specific labels when a page is published by a certain author
• Archive inactive pages
• Publish new meeting notes
• Notify people about outdated content
• Replace a label on all pages
• Publish the same set of pages when a new space is created
• Remind teammates about incomplete tasks

Trautman said that if there are "really common use cases" that Atlassian sees bubbling up, it will add those to the to the library. She also explained that this initial set of preconfigured rules is designed to allow customers to just get their feet wet and to understand how it works.

"Then you can configure your own based on whatever your company, or your team, needs," she said.

All the new automation capabilities will go live on January 25 for Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise customers.

Atlassian adds automation to both in-house and third-party apps

In addition to launching new automation capabilities in Confluence, Atlassian has also announced it is deepening connections between Jira and devops toolchains and evolving support and incident operations with modern service automation.

By adding more connections between Jira and devops toolchains, developer teams can automate across the devops toolchain with native connections between Jira, Confluence, and release management tools, as well as bi-directional actions between Jira and Git tools.

Additionally, the new automation functionality in Jira Service Management accelerates incident response, liberates development teams from operational blockers, and allows business teams to deliver improved service experiences, the company said.

That means IT operations teams will now be able to automate manual tasks and run actions in AWS, while expanded connections between CI/CD tools to Jira Service Management will help to automate the creation of change requests. Users will also have access to a low-code/no-code form builder linked to Assets objects for business teams.

As for what's on the horizon for Atlassian, Trautman said we can expect to hear about more than just automation over the next 12 months: a core theme for the company will be reducing the friction in connecting apps and taking the heavy lifting away from users.

"Yes, you'll hear about automation, but also about analytics and how to gain a better understanding around what's happening with your data, and how we can make better connections so that the friction between the apps you use doesn't get in your way," Trautman said.