Build engaging and standardized team spaces with Blueprint Creator

Pulsing with energy and enthusiasm, focused, and working together to achieve key goals while making sure that everyone knows what is happening and is recognized for their contribution… that sounds like the perfect team! Today we're going to be talking about how to build engaging and standardized team spaces with Blueprint Creator.

While perfection may be elusive, we can certainly aim for excellence in our teams. A significant part of that excellence is determined by the team environment that we create. Distributed teams and homeworking mean that more team interactions are happening in an environment or space that is online. That, in turn, means that the online space for those interactions needs to foster contributions, discussions, and progress between team members.

Confluence from Atlassian was built with such needs in mind. A team can create a space in Confluence that becomes a wiki for the team. The space can contain individual pages, news and blog articles, comments, mail, and RSS feeds, for example. It can be customized with a banner or logo that establishes the team’s identity. Overview pages can summarize the team’s mission and objectives, along with a team calendar or roadmap. Another great way to take your collaboration to the next level is with Linchpin Intranet. Linchpin is a social intranet tool that provides your teams with a hub for their daily work.

Linchpin Team Space

(Linchpin team space)

These capabilities help engage team members, but we also need to ensure that the team is focused. Spaces in Confluence are a great resource that can be used virtually without limit. However, if everybody in the team created their own spaces without a common format or direction, things could quickly get messy. You might get the team engagement, but you could lose out on alignment and effectiveness.

Confluence also provides templates and blueprints for teams to put common structure and organization into their spaces to meet this challenge. 

  • Templates are pages with predefined content. Confluence includes several standard templates. An administrator can also create specific templates that can then be made available to the team.
  • Blueprints are “super-templates,” offering more functionality and extending to entire spaces, as well as individual pages. Confluence includes several standard blueprints. You can also make your own blueprints if you have specific programming skills (Velocity and Java).

(Creating a new page from a blueprint)

Structuring Confluence space content via a template or a blueprint can help team members to immediately see what the latest project news is, for example. The handy predefined layout means the latest news is always in the same place on the same page. Similarly, templates and blueprints can help ensure that all required information is always included in a status report (date, author, version, and so on) by displaying corresponding placeholder fields to be filled out each time.

(Create new space from space blueprint)

It’s rather like the menu in your favorite restaurant. You know immediately where to look for the starters, the daily special, etc. because they are always in the same area of the menu. Some sections group together different food dishes and beverages that you can have brought to your table. But what if that menu layout or content now needed to be changed, for example, to include a new takeaway section?

Coming back to Confluence team spaces and to templates and blueprints, there are 3 choices to change layout or content:

  • This time with a blank page, you can start again instead of an existing template or blueprint. But blank pages are not always easy to populate (the infamous “blank page syndrome”).
  • You can learn how to program your own template or blueprint. But as part of a team with a mission, you may have more important things to do with your time.
  • You can use an intuitive, user-friendly tool like Blueprint Creator from Seibert Media to make the blueprint you want quickly and easily.

Blueprint Creator lets you create custom templates and blueprints for pages and spaces in Confluence without any programming. You can avoid time-consuming workarounds like copying and manually editing your content. You can include multiple placeholders of different types like checkboxes and date fields on a custom input form with input dialog forms to capture all the information you need from team members as they make their pages.

(Setting up a space blueprint)

Blueprint Creator can help you bring excellence and focus into your team spaces by making them optimally engaging and standardized. It brings you the advantages of blueprints and templates without their disadvantages.


Get to know Blueprint Creator

Want to know more about the Blueprint Creator for Confluence? How about a no-obligation trial? Check out the Blueprint Creator on the Atlassian Marketplace, or contact us now to see how Blueprint Creator can work for your teams and Confluence spaces!

Read more about Blueprint Creator!

The Blueprint Creator website for Confluence
Blueprint Creator: How to use blueprints for uniform blog posts in Confluence
Blueprint Creator for Confluence – blueprints for spaces now available
Templates and blueprints in Confluence
Properties: Capture and display information in Confluence cloud


Create a project space
Learn more about Creative Commons licensing and //Seibert/Media

 

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