Plugin inquiry for detailed Network diagram and Confluence table format
Asked by Neeraj Tiwari:

Two inquiries:

1) Currently we make our network diagrams on Microsoft Visio. They are usually very detailed and Visio provides all the templates required for building a detailed network diagram. so we were thinking if it is possible that there is a plugin we can use on Confluence to do this. So following are the things that we want to know in this regard:

i) We want to draw the diagrams directly on Confluence and save them there. Is there any plugin we can use? We are currently using yWorks diagram plugin to draw diagrams on Confluence. Apart from this, do you guys have any other better plugin. We have had issues with this plugin in case of labeling the arrows.

ii) We found this plugin: <https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.gliffy.integration.confluence> Does it do what we want ...as in detailed network diagram like we do in Visio?

ii) Also, we would like to import diagrams from Visio to Confluence. But after importing it in Confluence we would like to edit this diagram. Can we do this?

2) In Confluence tables if there are many columns, we have to manually scroll left-right or zoom-out in order to see all the columns which is not convenient. Is there any way we can create the tables in a better way or modify the existing tables so that we see all the columns on the same page in a browser? Just FYI: This happens in every browser.


Answers:
author: Jason Hensler
body: 1. I use gliffy for our instance and it works well for diagrams.

2. It does have network and computer objects, you can try it in their sandbox -\> <http://confluencedemo.gliffy.com/display/sand/Home>

3. [This post](http://www.gliffy.com/blog/2012/05/29/introducing-visio-imports-for-the-gliffy-confluence-plugin/) on their blog says you can import Visio docs into gliffy but, I have never tried it.


author: Macy Dalby
body: You should give Lucidchart a try! I recently used Lucidchart for creating network diagrams and it was super easy to understand. They have great online collaboration capability and it's really cost effective! Here are a few examples for you to check out: [www.lucidchart.com/pages/examples/network_diagram_software](http://www.lucidchart.com/pages/examples/network_diagram_software)


author: Daniel Borcherding
body: Hello Neeraj,

I have to echo Jason's sentiments. Gliffy is a great way of creating new diagrams and the plugin you mentioned is a great way of embeding these diagrams into Confluence. I do not have experience with the Visio import, but the document cited looks like a great read.

I wanted to touch on that last point. How is the table display not working for you? If you have a number of columns that will not fit horizonatally on the page how would you like this to be displayed instead? Is there too much whitespace in the cells of the table? If you could include a screenshot of this behavior it would be a great help.

comments: author: Neeraj Tiwari
body: Jason, Daniel: Thank you for your inputs and the links. They are really helpful.

Daniel, attached, please find the screenshots (the same page at 100% size and 50 % size) So, I think this is a normal, expected behavior wherein if we have lot of columns in a table. But we were wondering if there is any better way of displaying these columns in a table. Can we remove some whitespaces from these columns?


author: Neeraj Tiwari
body: ![](../../upfiles/confluence_tables_01_-_100%_3.jpg)

![](../../upfiles/confluence_tables_02_-_50%_1.jpg)

I am not sure whether you can see the images here or not?


Tags: diagram

table