The Atlassian tools and third-party plugins for Confluence are evolving all the time and at RadBee we’re always on the lookout for changes that might help to support your compliance and quality assurance needs. We’ve recently come across two gems. The first is a plugin that provides better control over reused content. The second is a brand new Audit Log available in Confluence 5.10.
Control your reused content with Include Version macro
Include Page is one of the most popular macros in Confluence. It means you only need to write blocks of content like your organisation overview or list of reference standards once, and they will automatically be replicated in other documents. A feature of this macro is that it always uses the most recent version of the included content. The dynamic nature of Confluence, where the content is refreshed each time a document is viewed, means that an may look different today than it looked yesterday, simply because included page has been modified elsewhere.
However, in some cases, content developers and quality managers need more control over content. The brand new ScriptRunner plugin for Confluence from Adaptavist meets this need, with a bundled macro called Include Version. This gives page authors the ability to decouple a particular block of included content from the automatic updates so when the included content is modified the changes won’t apply. And, as the name suggests, it means you can specify a particular version of the content to reuse.
If, for any reason you want to default back to using the latest version of an included page, it’s easy to set that up in the macro, and it will behave just like the Include Page macro.
This plugin offers loads of other capabilities and is well worth using for lots of other reasons, so I was pleasantly surprised that it offers this unexpected benefit.
Tip: To easily find all the page of your Confluence instance that use the Include Page macro, just enter the following phrase into Confluence’s search box: ‘macroName:Include Page’ and launch the search.
Better configuration control for your Confluence instance with Audit Log
Atlassian have just added an extra option to the configuration control and accountability tools for Confluence 5.10. Audit Log not only allows you to extend your site’s compatibility with FDA CFR 21 Part 11, it also actually promotes accountability for changes and can help in troubleshooting scenarios.
Audit Log will retain your change records for three years by default, but you can configure it to keep the records for as long as you need. Each change record indicates the time of the change, the user who made it and the details of the actual change. See a complete list of the details recorded on the Audit Log page of the Atlassian website.
Have you come across any new features in Confluence recently that you find helpful for quality management or compliance?