Atlassian Confluence 5 Essentials is a practical hands-on guide introducing you to Atlassian Confluence, a powerful enterprise collaboration tool for teams to create, share, and discuss their content.
This book will show you how to install and manage your own Confluence installation. You will learn how to configure and customize Confluence to adapt it to your organization and add value to your business. The chapters in this book are structured to guide you through all the key aspects of managing and using Confluence.
You will start by setting up your own Confluence installation and will be introduced to all the key features in subsequent chapters. With each chapter, you will learn important concepts such as creating engaging content, sharing information, and engaging users to collaborate with each other.
This book is an in-depth guide to all the essential aspects of Atlassian Confluence. Packed with examples and step-by-step instructions, this book will help you become a Confluence expert.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Confluence, will guide you through the installation process of Confluence and will give you a local installation, which will be used throughout the book. By the end of the first chapter you should have a running Confluence installation.
Chapter 2, User Management, covers how you can invite and register new users to join you in the content collaboration process. We will also go over how to connect Confluence to an existing user directory such as LDAP.
Chapter 3, Creating Content, is maybe the most important chapter, as content is king. We will go through the concepts of spaces, pages, and blog posts to explain how to add content to Confluence. Confluence's rich text editor has many features and in this chapter we will learn to master a large part of those by creating our first pages.
Chapter 4, Managing Content, focuses on how to find relevant content and how to use watches to keep track of you content. Confluence comes with a powerful search engine, which we will know all about by the end of this chapter.
Chapter 5, Collaborating in Confluence, goes into Confluence on a day-to-day basis. We will go into how to involve people in the content creation process using mentions and shares, and how to keep track of things using tasks. If you are on the road, Confluence mobile will keep you in touch with the latest content, tasks, and notifications.
Chapter 6, Securing Your Content, covers the options available for keeping your private information private. Confluence allows permissions to be set on a global, space, and content-specific level, giving us the fine-grained security an enterprise solution needs.
Chapter 7, Customizing Confluence, will go over the different features for changing the look and feel of Confluence so that we can add some company branding to our instance or just to a space.
Chapter 8, Advanced Confluence, covers many different advanced topics such as content templating, and working with metadata and keyboard shortcuts.
Chapter 9, General Administration, goes in-depth to find and manage add-ons to Confluence. Add-ons can add extra functionality or integrations. If you have problems with your Confluence installation and need support, this chapter will guide you to getting support from Atlassian or a local expert.
Chapter 10, Extending Confluence, focuses on some basics and possibilities of add-on development. By the end of the chapter you should know where to start if you would like to build an add-on, and on which level we can extend Confluence.
The Confluence installation used in this book will be the Windows standalone distribution (ZIP), which you can get directly from Atlassian at www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/download.
At the time of writing, the latest version of Confluence was 5.1.1.
You will also need several additional software libraries including Java SDK, which you can get from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html and PostgreSQL, which you can get from http://www.postgresql.org/download/.
If you have just started with Confluence, as a user or administrator, this book will give you a running start and teach you everything you need to know. Even if you have been using Confluence for a while now, this book can give you new insights and tricks on how to use Confluence even more efficiently.
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