How to create a social collaboration tool using Confluence.
Asked by Alok kumar Singh:

Want to create a social collaboration tool using Confluence, but cannot go ahead after creating spaces and pages.


Answers:
author: Nicole Samel
body: Hi Alok kumar Singh,

If you are interested in a social app, I'd love to recommend you try Microblogging for Confluence.

Microblogging for Confluence allows for a seamless and direct exchange of information with your team directly in the collaboration system.

Just like Twitter and Facebook, a microblog in your own Confluence enables short, spontaneous communication and quick distribution of information without switching context and media - directly in Confluence with all it's comfortable features.

The microblog can be used flexibly for quick communication about a project, a product or within a department. It is also a suitable channel for information that is not relevant to current tasks: status updates about personal availability, communication of ideas that can be discussed and developed in a microblog, suggestions of interesting links or web content, including personal comments, reminders and tips for colleagues and more.

Microblogging for Confluence means less obsolete push emails, instead more visibility of ideas and related exchange, more efficiency in communication, more transparency and more fun!

Best wishes,

Nicki


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: There's no question here.

Confluence is a sort of wiki, which means it's already a "social collaberation tool". You need to define what you actually want it to do on top of being a wiki?

comments: author: Alok kumar Singh
body: I understand Nic that it's already a "social collaboration tool". What I want is to have a social network kind of thing using confluence. But I am not able to go ahed from creating space and pages.


author: Alok kumar Singh
body: Okay I am going to put it this way.....

I want to build something like Yammer for my company. As confluence is a social collaboration tool, so I thought of using this.

As of now I can only create space and the create pages like home page, blog page and so on. After that I am stuck.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I'm sorry, but that's still not a useful thing to say.

\>to have a social network kind of thing using confluence.

Define it - you need to work out what you actually want to do.

\>I am not able to go ahed from creating space and pages

But what are you trying to do? What does "go ahead" mean here?


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Right, that's a bit more useful.

Confluence is not designed to do that sort of thing, it is aimed at the "documentation" more than "news feed". You could quite easily use the built-in blogs/news to get part of the way there, but it'll require more training than yammer does.

Or you could have a look at <https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.adaptavist.confluence.bubbles>

I must admit I dumped yammer when it inflicted an annoying chat function on us (I love chatting sometimes, but it's up to me when I'm active, not some idiot on a website forcing it on me), but if you want to replicate that, have a look at "hipchat"


author: Alok kumar Singh
body: I got it Nic, but the problem is there is not enough documentation on how to go ahead with this, as I am stuck with mere creation of space and page.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: You said you were creating spaces and pages. Are you actually stuck on that?

As for documentation, it's there. There's lots of it. It can help you with a lot of stuff. Documentation is great, but it's often let down by search, or not being extensive enough to cover every single user's idea.

This goes back to the actual question again - what do you want from it? It's fine to say "I want something like Yammer", but you need to define how you want to use it, try to get there on a dev/test system, or live if it's new, and when you get stuck, ask for help. You need to be specific on what you are stuck on, other wise you will only get generic answers. Such as "try Community Bubbles". I can't suggest more than that because I don't know of other similar stuff, and you haven't told me anything more specific

I'd also point out that trying to replicate Yammer completely is pretty pointless - you need a lot of technical expertise with Confluence (or whatever other way you try to do it) and the time to spend on duplicating it. In your case, it's probably going to be cheaper, quicker and easier to simply use Yammer.