That’s the gap Smart Tables and Smart Terms close.

Smart Tables gives structured data a functional home inside Confluence.

Smart Terms ensures terminology is defined and consistent across pages.

Used together, they turn Confluence from an archive into a working knowledge system.

What Confluence does well and where it stops

Confluence excels at documentation. It’s a collaborative wiki where teams capture decisions, brainstorm ideas, and store information. Spaces and pages make it easy to organize work, and integrations with tools like Jira keep everything loosely connected.

But when your documentation becomes operational, Confluence shows its limits. Tables in Confluence are fine for static content, but you can’t filter, sort, or calculate within them. If you need to slice data by priority or generate a quick chart, the answer is usually “no.” Teams end up exporting to spreadsheets, and those spreadsheets become the new source of truth while Confluence pages go stale.

Teams often try to address this with glossary pages, tooltips, or expand macros. These solutions can work temporarily, but they rely on manual linking and individual page authors remembering to apply them. Over time, definitions drift, duplicates appear, and terminology becomes inconsistent across spaces.

Smart Terms solves this by introducing a centralized terminology layer for Confluence. Instead of defining terms manually on individual pages, teams maintain a single glossary in which each term includes an official definition, synonyms, and related documentation. Smart Terms then automatically detects these terms across pages and highlights them with consistent tooltips. Because the definitions are managed in one place, updating a term once updates it everywhere, ensuring that teams across the organization use the same language and understand the same meaning.

This is the ceiling: Confluence captures knowledge well. It doesn’t operationalize it at scale. Smart Tables extends Confluence’s data capabilities. Smart Terms extends language governance.

Use case: Transforming onboarding with Smart Tables and Smart Terms

Consider how a growing technology company uses Confluence to onboard new employees. Before adopting Smart Tables and Smart Terms, the onboarding process looked like this:

• A long page titled “New Hire Tasks” listed steps like “Set up your laptop,” “Complete security training,” and “Read the architecture runbook.” Managers copied this list from a spreadsheet, so some formatting broke, and deadlines and assignees disappeared.
• Acronyms such as “HLD,” “QA,” and “SOC2” peppered the document with no explanation. New hires had to ask someone or search the wiki, hoping to find a page that defined them.
• Managers couldn’t see who had completed which tasks without reaching out individually, and any updates had to be made in multiple places to keep the spreadsheet and the Confluence page aligned.

Step 1: Converting the task list into a Smart Table

The team decided to turn their New Hire Tasks page into a Smart Table. Instead of a static list, they created a structured table with columns for the task description, the responsible person, due dates, status, and priority. Each column used the appropriate field type dates for deadlines, a user field for assignees, and a status field for tracking progress. Because the data was now structured, managers could filter tasks to see which ones were overdue or assigned to specific departments. They could also sort tasks by priority and generate quick reports without leaving Confluence.

Step 2: Defining internal language with Smart Terms

While setting up the Smart Table, they noticed that many tasks referenced specialized terms like “SOC2 training,” “HLD review,” and “MFA enrollment.” To avoid confusion, they compiled these terms into a Smart Terms glossary. Each term included a clear definition, a link to the relevant policy or documentation, and, where appropriate, synonyms or acronyms so that different variations of the same concept could still be recognized and explained consistently. For example, “HLD” was defined as “High-Level Design document used to describe system architecture and components.” The glossary also provided translations for teams working in multiple languages.

Once the terms were defined, Smart Terms automatically highlighted them in the Confluence page. New hires could hover over “HLD” or “MFA” to see the full definition without navigating away from the task list. Because the glossary was centralized, updating a definition once ensured consistency across all pages and spaces.

Step 3: Enforcing consistency and tracking progress

With Smart Tables handling the structure and Smart Terms handling the language, the onboarding page became a living document. Managers could watch task progress in real time, filtering by status or assignee. New hires understood every term they encountered, and if a new acronym cropped up, it was easy to add it to the glossary and have it highlighted everywhere.

By keeping the task list in Confluence rather than exporting it to spreadsheets, the team reduced duplication and version-control issues. Smart Tables’ built‑in formulas automatically calculated completion percentages, and a pivot view summarized onboarding progress across departments. Meanwhile, Smart Terms maintained the company’s internal language. Even as processes changed, the glossary could be updated once and reflected throughout Confluence.

The result

Combining Smart Tables and Smart Terms turned a confusing onboarding checklist into a structured, self‑explanatory experience. New hires completed tasks faster because they knew what each step required. Managers saved time by filtering and reporting directly in Confluence. And everyone began using the same language, reducing miscommunication and reinforcing company standards.

Bringing it all together

The problem of outdated pages, copied spreadsheets, and inconsistent terminology is not unique to onboarding. Any process that involves structured data and specialized language, from compliance tracking to product roadmaps, suffers when Confluence is used as a static archive. Smart Tables solves the data side, giving you a place to filter, sort, and calculate without leaving the page. Smart Terms solves the language side, ensuring that everyone reads and uses the same definitions across the wiki.

By adopting both, your Confluence space evolves from a collection of documents into a working knowledge system. Data stays fresh, language stays clear, and your team stops losing knowledge to siloed files and context‑less jargon.

What really sets Smart Terms Apart is its precision and customization. Instead of relying on automatic guesses or generic suggestions, every definition, highlight rule, and translation is intentional and admin-controlled. It doesn’t try to infer meaning it enforces the correct one. Smart Terms gives teams the power to define terms once and apply them consistently everywhere, with complete flexibility over how they appear, who sees them, and how they behave on Confluence pages.

From fine-grained highlight rules to space-level overrides, multilingual glossaries, logographic indexing, and rich definition pop-ups with media, Smart Terms is built for organizations that want reliability and customization, not shortcuts.

Highlighting Engine & Customization

Smart Terms’ highlight engine is highly flexible. You can fine-tune exactly how and where terms are highlighted:

• Auto-highlight or manual: Choose to automatically mark all terms when a page loads, or not. A toggle button on each page lets users turn highlights on or off (If disabled by space/global settings).

• Visual style: Pick your highlight colors and style, set the background color, text color, and underline/bold/italic style.
  You can even add custom CSS for special styling.

• Hover vs click: Control interaction by enabling “highlight on hover” or forcing users to click a word to see definitions. (We’ve seen product teams disable hover so users must click, while support teams keep hover on.)

• First vs all occurrences: Choose whether to highlight only the first occurrence of a term per page, or every occurrence. This avoids overwhelming pages with repeated highlights if desired.

• Substring & sensitivity: Turn on/off substring matching (e.g. highlight “mar” inside “Smart”). Toggle case-sensitive and diacritics-sensitive matching to prevent unintended highlights (e.g. treating “API” differently from “api” or handling accented characters).

• Content targeting: Enable or disable highlighting in specific parts of pages, headings, page titles, links, code blocks, and even blog posts can all be individually toggled.

When you hover or click a highlighted term, a definition pop-up appears with all details (term title, definition text, media, related terms, etc.). If a term has multiple definitions (e.g. an acronym vs. a full phrase), users can slide between them in the pop-up. Related terms or synonyms flash briefly to draw attention, helping users explore your custom glossary easily.

Smart Terms supports space-level and user-level rules. Admins can disable highlighting globally or for specific glossaries.

Likewise, each space can override settings: in one real-world example, an “Accounting” space simply turned off all highlighting, while a “Product” space enabled highlighting with a yellow, bold style and disabled hover. Individual users can even disable Smart Terms on their profile if they prefer. This per-space/user flexibility means you can highlight terms differently for each team without affecting others.

Multi-Language & Logographic Support

Smart Terms is built for global teams. You define terms in a default language, then add translations as needed. You can create a new term and immediately choose multiple languages, or add translations later via the term editor. Bulk import of multi-language terms from Excel is also supported for fast setup.

When highlighting, Smart Terms can mark up all translations at once or just the user’s language. For example, if your Confluence pages have content in English and German, you can highlight both English and German terms for a mixed audience.
Or you can choose “only user language” mode: a German user will see only German-term highlights, while an English user sees only English terms.
This is ideal when different groups share pages (e.g. an external audience of mixed nationalities sees all translations, or a multicultural team each sees terms in their own language).

Smart Terms even handles logographic languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). It applies language-specific indexing so those terms sort sensibly in glossaries.
For instance, Japanese terms are indexed by gojūon order, Chinese by character stroke count or Pinyin, and Korean by the initial Hangul consonant.
If the app misdetects a language, you can manually fix the index letters. This support means you can build a truly multi-language glossary in Confluence – even for CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) text without hassle.

In addition to translations, Smart Terms supports alternate terms and meanings. Each term can have multiple definitions, synonyms, or related terms. For example, the term Item might have two meanings (“Incident” vs “Ticket” in one example) that users can toggle between.
Related terms link together as a “vocabulary,” so clicking one can flash others. You can attach images, videos, or diagrams to any term, too. In short, Smart Terms becomes your central terminology library: a terminology management for Confluence that covers all languages and complexities.

Use Cases and Benefits

Smart Terms helps teams maintain a single, unified vocabulary across the company while still allowing each department to manage its own terminology. A global glossary can hold the official definitions everyone agrees on, while teams like Product, Support, or Marketing keep space-level glossaries for internal jargon. This setup gives every group the flexibility they need without losing a shared source of truth, maintaining communication clean, and avoiding conflicting definitions.

Highlighted terms also make documentation easier to understand. When someone reads a Confluence page, they can hover over or click a term to instantly see its definition, synonyms, related terms, and even rich media. This reduces confusion during everyday reading and helps new hires settle in faster by allowing them to immediately grasp the meaning of acronyms and technical phrases without leaving the page.

Because every team works differently, Smart Terms adapts to each documentation style. Support teams can use hover highlights with a blue underline and strict case sensitivity, while Product teams prefer bold yellow highlights on click. Accounting might disable highlights entirely. This flexibility ensures each department presents terminology in a way that fits its workflow and audience, all without affecting other spaces.

Centralizing terminology also reduces redundant work. When a team updates a term, whether the meaning shifts, a new synonym is added, or an acronym needs clarification, the change is automatically applied everywhere. Teams no longer lose time re-explaining definitions or correcting misunderstandings. Everyone stays aligned with less back-and-forth, fewer errors, and far more consistency across documents.

Smart Terms also supports multilingual documentation, which is especially helpful for international teams or client-facing spaces. Terms can be translated into multiple languages and highlighted based on the reader’s preferences, or highlighted in all available languages at once. This makes joint work across regions far smoother by removing language barriers and ensuring everyone understands terminology in their own language.

In environments where documentation is central, like engineering wikis, support knowledge bases, product manuals, and onboarding guides, Smart Terms enhances how teams consume information. Readers get definitions right in the flow of the page, authors avoid cluttering documents with extra explanations, and admins maintain terminology centrally. By combining rich definitions, customizable highlighting, and multilingual support, Smart Terms turns Confluence into a clearer, more aligned workspace where terminology confusion disappears.

Why does great documentation often fall short?

Even the most well-written Confluence pages can leave readers confused or disengaged. Common challenges include:

• Inconsistent terminology: Different authors may use different terms for the same thing, making content more challenging to follow.
• Language barriers: Teams spread across countries often need documentation in more than one language.
• Lack of visuals: Complex processes are hard to understand without visuals.

Creating well-structured documentation in Confluence

To document effectively in Confluence, start by organizing your content in a dedicated space. For example, create a Knowledge Base space to get a workspace with built-in article templates and a homepage that uses search and label macros. Within the space, maintain a clear hierarchy and tagging: label each page with descriptive topics so the homepage and macros can automatically group related content. Also, define page templates so every documentation page follows a consistent layout (sections, headings, formatting).

Use Confluence’s formatting and macros.

Write your pages using Confluence’s native formatting tools. For clarity, break content into headings, bullet or numbered lists, and sections. Then add built-in macros to aid navigation.
For example, insert a Table of Contents macro at the top of any long page, and it will automatically list links to all the headings on that page.
Use Info, Tip, or Warning panels to highlight key notes or cautions within your text. You can also use the Anchor macro to create named bookmarks (e.g. a “Back to top” link) that you can link to from anywhere in the document. These built-in features make your documentation more user-friendly and easy to scan.

Collaborate on drafts

Use Confluence’s draft-and-review workflow to polish content before publishing. When you create a new page, immediately restrict its permissions (e.g., visible only to your team) to keep it private while drafting. Then write your documentation and share the page with colleagues for feedback: reviewers can leave inline comments (by highlighting text) or suggest edits directly on the page. This keeps feedback tied to the correct context. After revisions, remove restrictions and delete any placeholder comments so the final version is visible to all intended readers.

Track versions and updates

Confluence automatically versions every saved change. Encourage team members to watch key pages or the entire documentation space. Confluence will then notify them whenever those pages are edited. To see exactly what changed, use the Page History feature. The history view lists all past versions with dates and authors; you can compare any two versions or restore an older version if needed. This ensures you can track edits or recover content if something was changed incorrectly.

• Watch pages/spaces for change notifications.
• Use Page History to compare or revert versions.

Smart Terms vs Atlassian AI definitions

When it comes to defining unfamiliar terms, Confluence offers two approaches. Atlassian Intelligence’s “Define” feature lets you highlight a word on any page and click Define to get an AI-generated explanation right there. This provides instant, context-based definitions without any setup.

By contrast, Smart Terms is a glossary app: admins create and manage a permanent list of term definitions (with synonyms, images, translations, etc.), and the app automatically highlights those terms across your Confluence pages. Smart Terms also allows control over where and when to highlight terms, and provides a centralized glossary your team can search and explore.

How Smart Terms and Smart Images work together in Confluence?

Define and standardize your terminology with Smart Terms

Smart Terms allows you to build and maintain a glossary inside Confluence. Once a term is added, it can automatically appear highlighted across your pages, with definitions and translations available in a highlight popup.

Key features that make it essential for documentation:

• Auto-highlighting: Your terms are automatically detected and highlighted across Confluence pages. You can also enrich them with related vocabulary. For example, if you add Artificial Intelligence (AI) to your glossary, both “AI” and “Artificial Intelligence” will be highlighted and linked back to the exact definition, ensuring no one gets lost in acronyms.

• Highlight popup: Hover over (click on) a term to instantly see its definition without leaving the page. Unlike Atlassian’s built-in Smart Definitions, Smart Terms tooltips can include rich details: a short description, synonyms, and translations, giving your readers real context instead of just a simple dictionary-like definition.

• Multilingual support: Provide translations so every team member can read in their preferred language.

• Centralized glossary: Update once, and changes appear everywhere. Even better, Smart Terms gives you complete control over where and when terms are highlighted. You can choose to highlight terms globally across your workspace, or limit them to specific spaces, pages, or even sections, making the highlight engine both powerful and flexible.

Make visuals better with Smart Images.

Smart Images lets you add interactive elements to images, diagrams, and mockups inside Confluence. You can guide readers through complex visuals without needing long paragraphs of explanation.

Key features that improve documentation:

• Image maps: Clickable points on images that display text, links, or media.
• Image annotations: Label different areas for clarity.
• Multiple image layouts: Showcase your visuals in different ways, such as image sliders for step-by-step walkthroughs or galleries to group related diagrams and screenshots. You can also create clickable image maps, where product mockups or diagrams become interactive and guide readers through each component.

Steps to use both apps

Here’s how to combine the two apps effectively in your documentation workflow:

1. Identify key concepts & visuals
   • List essential terms, acronyms, and process names.
   • Select diagrams, UI screenshots, or workflow charts that support your content.
2. Build your glossary in Smart Terms
   • Add definitions, synonyms, and translations.
   • Enable auto-highlighting for instant in-page tooltips.
3. Upload and annotate images in Smart Images
   • Place hotspots to explain each part of your diagram.
   • Link hotspots to glossary terms, related pages, or additional resources.
4. Embed both in your Confluence page
   • Glossary terms appear naturally in your text.
   • Annotated visuals break up content and make it interactive.

Use Case: Sofia’s global team

Sofia is a team lead at a multinational tech company. Her Confluence workspace is full of documentation for product development, onboarding, and support. But her team faces three challenges:

1. Diverse languages: Some members prefer English, others work in French, Spanish, or Japanese.
2. Different learning styles: Developers want detailed technical definitions, while designers prefer diagrams and visuals.
3. Inconsistent terms: New hires keep asking what internal acronyms mean.

Here’s how Sofia solved it with Smart Terms and Smart Images:

• She created a central glossary in Smart Terms with translations for each key product term. Now, when anyone hovers over a term, they instantly see its definition in their preferred language and even some visuals.
• She replaced static diagrams with Smart Images. For example, her product architecture diagram now has clickable hotspots showing component details and linking to relevant Confluence pages.
• When onboarding new hires, they can explore documentation without needing to ask. Sofia tooltips and annotated visuals explain everything in context.

The result?

Faster onboarding, fewer repeated questions, and higher documentation adoption across her global team.

中国  |  日本  |  한국

“Hello” doesn’t always look like hello.
It could be こんにちは, 안녕하세요, or 你好, and if your team operates across Asia, you’re seeing all of them in your Confluence pages.

But can your Confluence Glossary keep up?

Global companies require more effective ways to manage knowledge and collaborate across languages and cultures. Confluence is already one of the most powerful platforms for organizing information, building company knowledge bases, and improving teamwork.

However, for companies operating across Asia and using logographic languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK), maintaining consistent terminology becomes particularly challenging.
That’s where Smart Terms for Confluence comes in. It refines glossary management, solves multilingual search challenges, and makes Confluence an even stronger tool for global businesses.
On the other hand, if inconsistent terms, buried multilingual content, and frustrating search experiences are slowing down your global teams, you need to discover how Smart Terms transforms your Confluence into a unified, searchable knowledge hub across all CJK languages.

Why do global companies choose Confluence?

Confluence is used by thousands of teams worldwide for one reason: it simplifies knowledge sharing.

With Confluence, you get:

• Centralized documentation for everything from project plans to technical guides.
• Real-time collaboration with comments, inline feedback, and document version history.
• Powerful search features to find what you need quickly.
• Global accessibility from any location or device.

It’s flexible, powerful, and customizable. However, global teams often face one persistent problem: maintaining multilingual consistency.

Confluence: the foundation for global collaboration

For multinational teams operating across East Asia, Confluence provides essential infrastructure through space management and robust integrations.

Its knowledge management core acts as a centralized repository, while collaboration tools, such as real-time editing and commenting, are available.
In addition, documentation templates maintain terminology consistency, and global accessibility ensures 24/7 availability across time zones.
But while Confluence lays a solid foundation for collaboration, one critical piece remains complex for multinational teams: managing terminology across languages.
Without a structured, multilingual glossary, even the most organized Confluence spaces can fall into confusion, especially when dealing with East Asian languages like Japanese, Korean, or Chinese.

However, without a structured glossary in Coufluence, this can cause:

• Misunderstandings between teams
• Inconsistent terminology in customer communication
• Wasted time searching for the right content

Why do multilingual glossaries matter for multinational enterprises?

Unified knowledge across borders

Companies operating in China, Japan, Korea, and beyond often face the challenge of maintaining consistent terminology across different languages and scripts. A term like “User Guide” may appear in Confluence as 用户指南 (Chinese), ユーザーガイド (Japanese), or 사용자 가이드 (Korean).

Smart Terms for Confluence ensures that these variants are centralized, searchable, and properly indexed.

Enhancing knowledge retrieval

When employees search for terms within a glossary, the indexing system matters. Poor indexing of logographic languages leads to inefficiencies, misunderstandings, and inconsistent usage. Smart Terms addresses this by introducing intelligent, language-aware indexing, which enables smoother access to information.

New feature spotlight:

Smart Terms for Confluence: logographic language indexing (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) support

Smart Terms for Confluence now includes advanced indexing:

• Simplified Chinese (简体中文): Indexed using Pinyin transliteration. Terms like “学生 (xuésheng)” are automatically sorted under “X,” while “苹果 (píngguǒ)” falls under “P.”
• Traditional Chinese (繁體中文): Organized by stroke count, allowing terms like 第一章 to be found systematically based on character structure.
• Japanese (日本語): Sorted using Gojūuon order based on Hiragana/Katakana. If a term is Kanji-only (e.g., 学生), Smart Terms defaults to Chinese rules unless Hiragana is appended in brackets, such as 学生 (がくせい).
• Korean (한국어): Indexing follows the initial consonant rule based on Hangul structure. For example, 가 (ᄀ) is filed under “ᄀ” (Giyeok), 나 (ᄂ) under “ᄂ” (Nieun).

Page definitions macro & custom indexing

In addition to multilingual indexing, Smart Terms introduces the Page Definitions macro. This feature scans a Confluence page and displays all highlightable glossary terms used within it, complete with their definitions. This provides readers with instant context, helps new team members learn company terminology more quickly, and ensures that no important definition goes unnoticed during reviews. Additionally, when exporting to a PDF file, you can view all the terms within the exported page.

For greater flexibility, Smart Terms for Confluence provides custom indexing. If automated language detection encounters mixed scripts or rare characters, users can manually assign the correct index letter to ensure every term is perfectly organized.

Glossary re-indexing: update pre-existing glossaries

Need to apply the new intelligent indexing to an existing glossary?
Smart Terms for Confluence supports bulk re-indexing. Here is how you can do this:

1. Export the existing space glossary.
2. Re-import it into the same space with “Update existing terms” enabled.
3. Preserve attached images or files by disabling “Reset existing terms media.”
   This allows legacy glossaries to be upgraded to the new, powerful indexing rules without losing valuable assets.

Use case: a global software company operating in APAC

Company: A global software company with HQ in the US, R&D in Seoul, customer support in Tokyo, and marketing in Shanghai. All teams collaborate via a centralized Confluence knowledge base in their native languages, but apparently it’s not enough!

Challenge: Inconsistent glossary terms caused confusion and slowed workflows. Japanese support agents were unable to locate key Korean or Chinese documents.

Solution: Smart Terms for Confluence:

• Shanghai Marketing: Used Pinyin-based sorting.
• Tokyo Support: Adopted Gojūuon indexing.
• Seoul R&D: Implemented Hangul consonant rules.

Result: The entire multilingual glossary became interlinked, instantly searchable across all teams, and correctly indexed for each CJK script. Confusion dropped, and finding critical information became easier.

Try Smart Terms for Confluence today and empower your global teams!

While Confluence offers a strong structural foundation, it falls short when delivering interactive training, terminology management, and real-time performance tracking all are essential for a successful onboarding program.

Effective onboarding isn’t just about giving new hires access to information it’s about delivering structured learning, ensuring consistent understanding, and measuring progress along the way. That’s where the limitations of static documentation become clear.

• Training matters because employees need to understand not just what to do, but how and why, through engaging, structured experiences.
• Glossaries matter because internal language and acronyms can confuse new hires and slow their integration.
• Data tracking matters because HR teams need to monitor onboarding effectiveness, identify bottlenecks, and report on results.

To address these challenges without leaving Confluence, we created an integrated solution:

• Smart Courses: Build and deliver interactive training modules with quizzes, capsules, and progress tracking.
• Smart Terms: Maintain a dynamic glossary that automatically highlights terminology across Confluence.
• Smart Tables: Track onboarding progress and metrics with live data visualizations and advanced spreadsheets.

Together, these apps transform Confluence into a powerful, all-in-one platform that supports your entire onboarding journey, from the first login to full productivity.

In the sections below, we’ll walk through how this works in practice using a real-world use case: onboarding new employees across departments.

Use case: new employee onboarding program

An HR manager must ensure that every new hire understands the company’s processes, culture, and expectations and becomes productive as quickly as possible. However, achieving this is not easy.

Why does training matter?

Structured training gives new hires the knowledge and confidence they need to succeed. Without it, onboarding becomes inconsistent and slow. Interactive, trackable courses ensure everyone follows the same learning path at their own pace.

1. Smart Courses for Confluence for onboarding training

1.1 Featured Courses

With the Featured Courses option, HR teams can now highlight the most important or time-sensitive training modules directly within the course catalog. By marking a course as “featured” in the catalog configuration, it automatically appears at the top, ensuring that new hires can easily find and access critical content, such as compliance training, company culture introductions, or mandatory onboarding sessions.

1.2 Course editor and learning capsules

Using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you can create interactive learning capsules that combine videos, quizzes, documents, and even existing Confluence pages, transforming static content into dynamic onboarding experiences. These capsules support various learning styles while reinforcing knowledge retention through built-in quizzes and assessments. Whether you’re onboarding new hires or delivering compliance training, Smart Courses makes it easy to design structured, multimedia-rich courses that keep learners engaged and on track.

1.3 Course catalog and configuration

Once created, courses are listed in a searchable course catalog, making it easy for new employees to self-enroll in required training. The catalog includes filters and tags to facilitate navigation, enabling users to quickly locate courses relevant to their role, team, or onboarding stage. This ensures a personalized and efficient learning experience.

1.4 Assign Courses and Continuous Assignment

Smart Courses enables automated course assignments, enrolling users as soon as they join specific Confluence groups. With Continuous Assignment, you can set due dates, send reminders on custom schedules, and personalize notification messages, ensuring timely, hands-off delivery of onboarding training.

1.5 Insights and reporting

With Smart Courses, you don’t have to guess how training is going you get real-time insights right within Confluence.
See who’s enrolled, who’s completed what, and how each person performed in quizzes, all from a built-in dashboard.

This helps you quickly identify drop-offs, pinpoint knowledge gaps, and continually improve your content. Whether you’re onboarding 5 or 50 people, you’re always in control and fully informed.

1.6 Multi language

Smart Courses’ muti-language feature empowers global teams by delivering training in over 24 languages, ensuring inclusivity and consistency across diverse workforces. Administrators can set a default language and add additional languages to courses, with the option to utilize the AI Engine for bulk translations of course content.

Why a glossary matters

Every company has its own different cultural and language backgrounds. Without clear definitions, new hires get confused or disengaged. A built-in glossary ensures consistent and accessible terminology across all onboarding materials.

2. Consistent terminology with Smart Terms for Confluence

2.1 Term highlighting

As learners navigate Confluence pages, Smart Terms highlights defined terminology in context, linking directly to glossary entries so users can quickly reference definitions without leaving the course content.

2.2 Multi-language glossary

Even with diverse backgrounds, cultures, and languages, Smart Terms simplifies communication by offering a multi-language glossary. It allows you to create and manage glossaries in over 24 languages, ensuring that each user sees terms in their preferred language, enhancing clarity and inclusivity across your Confluence workspace.

Tracking progress

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Tracking progress, quiz scores, and completion rates helps identify knowledge gaps and optimize onboarding. Filters and charts make it easy to monitor performance by role or department.

3. Real-Time data and visualization with Smart Tables

3.1 Live Spreadsheet macro

Embed fully interactive spreadsheets into Confluence using the Live Spreadsheet macro, allowing HR and managers to update onboarding checklists, forecasts, and training schedules collaboratively.

3.2 Table filters and charts

Apply advanced table filters to slice and dice onboarding data, such as filtering by department or hire date, and generate table charts to visualize completion rates, average time-to-competency, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).

3.3 Pivot tables and supported functions

Use pivot tables to summarize performance metrics across dimensions (e.g., role, location). Leverage Smart Tables’ extensive library of supported functions for calculations SUM, AVERAGE, IF, and more to build dynamic reports that update as source data changes.

Bringing It All Together: One platform for all

Switching between tools wastes time and breaks focus. Keeping training, terminology, and tracking inside Confluence ensures a smoother, distraction-free onboarding experience for both HR teams and new employees.

By combining Smart Courses (LMS) for structured training, Smart Terms for consistent terminology, and Smart Tables for live data visualization, your onboarding program becomes a self-contained ecosystem within Confluence. New hires engage with interactive courses and instantly access glossary definitions. You gain actionable insights through real-time dashboards, ultimately accelerating time-to-productivity and ensuring knowledge retention.

Whether you’re launching a global compliance initiative or scaling technical training, Creativas’ suite of Confluence apps empowers your team to deliver, manage, and measure learning with unprecedented efficiency.

Ready to transform your onboarding experience? Explore our apps from the Atlassian Marketplace:

Smarter workflows: Atlassian’s Confluence-Jira integration

A new update makes it easier than ever to work across Jira and Confluence. You can view and edit linked Confluence pages and whiteboards directly inside Jira, using a new side-by-side mode. This enhancement enables you to reference documentation, check requirements, and make updates without opening a new tab or losing focus, keeping all necessary information in one workspace.

To use the new view, open a Jira issue in full view, navigate to the “Confluence content” section, and click on any linked page or whiteboard. The content will instantly open next to your Jira issue, allowing you to read or edit it without leaving your workflow. If needed, you can even expand the view for easier editing.

This improvement helps teams work faster, stay aligned, and manage documentation more efficiently all without breaking their stride.

The new connected experience between Jira and Confluence highlights how important it is to not only link information but also to ensure everyone interprets it the same way.
That’s where Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira comes in, strengthening collaboration by creating a shared understanding through consistent terminology.
And with Rovo AI, available for free, teams can take this even further by quickly accessing and understanding the right information across their documentation.

The Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira glossary enhances collaboration by automating terminology consistency across documentation and workflows, linking glossary definitions and providing instant tooltip definitions.
Smart Terms ensure that teams have a shared understanding of key terms, thereby reducing miscommunication and aligning efforts accordingly.

Miscommunication over terms like “sprint,” “MVP,” or “ROI” can lead to delays, rework, and frustration. Smart Terms for Confluence Glossary and Smart Terms for Jira Glossary ensure consistent terminology across your documentation and workflows.

“Rovo AI is now free and included for every Confluence, Jira, and Jira Service Management user no extra license required.”

The power of Jira and Confluence in modern workflows

Jira and Confluence form the backbone of collaborative work for thousands of teams, enabling them to track tasks, share knowledge, and synchronize data in real-time. But inconsistent terms like “sprint” or “MVP” breed confusion.

Smart Terms fixes this: it auto-links glossary definitions across both tools, reduces onboarding time and ensures compliance.

Why terminology management matters

Whether you’re onboarding new hires, aligning developers with product teams, or ensuring compliance, a shared glossary is critical. Without it:

• Confusion reigns: Teams misinterpret requirements or deadlines.
• Time is wasted as Employees search for definitions or redo work.
• Quality suffers: Inconsistent terms lead to errors in reports or code.

Smart Terms solves these challenges by integrating directly into Confluence and Jira, turning your static glossary into a dynamic, AI-powered resource.

Key features of Smart Terms

1. Automated term linking
   Instantly highlight and link glossary terms in Confluence pages on Jira tickets. No manual tagging required.
2. Centralized glossary management
   Define terms once, and sync updates across Confluence and Jira. Perfect for hybrid teams.
3. Tooltip definitions
   Hover over any term to see its definition, reducing context-switching.
4. Cross-platform sync
   Ensure alignment between technical (Jira) and documentation (Confluence) teams.
5. Customizable workflows
   Assign term owners and track changes.

Use Case: Accelerating Onboarding for a Tech Startup

A rapidly growing Tech company struggled to onboard new developers and compliance officers. Their Confluence documentation was sprawling, with conflicting definitions of terms like “AML” (Anti-Money Laundering) and “PCI-DSS” (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard).

The Smart Terms Solution

1. Created a unified glossary
   The team built a centralized glossary in Confluence with definitions for industry terms, technical acronyms, and project-specific jargon.

2. Enabled auto-linking
Smart Terms automatically highlights glossary terms on Confluence pages and Jira tickets. New hires could hover over “MVP” in a Jira task to instantly see its definition.

3. Enforced consistency
When the compliance team updated the “MVP” term in Confluence, Smart Terms synced the change to all linked Jira epics, ensuring everyone used the latest criteria.

4. Reduced repetitive queries
Tooltips cut down Slack messages asking, “What does this acronym mean?”

Results

• Onboarding time decreased: New team members grasped workflows faster.
• Fewer missed requirements: Clear terms reduced scope misunderstandings in Jira.
• Improved audit readiness: Consistent terminology simplified compliance reporting.

What are the best features of Confluence for Onboarding?

Confluence offers several features that make it ideal for onboarding:

Confluence streamlines the onboarding process by providing a centralized knowledge base, ensuring all new hires can access essential information without searching through scattered sources. With real-time editing and commenting, teams can collaborate on onboarding materials, fostering continuous improvement. (Read More)

Integration with Jira connects project documentation with task tracking, clarifying responsibilities and project statuses for new employees. Customizable templates standardize the onboarding process, while interactive checklists help new hires track their progress. (Read More)

By leveraging these features, organizations ensure a structured, efficient, and engaging onboarding experience that helps new team members integrate smoothly and contribute faster.

The Future of onboarding: Confluence and Smart Terms in action

Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira is a glossary and definition engine designed to enhance communication across teams. It bridges communication gaps by:

• Auto-highlighting Confluence terms like “BoC” or “IP” across Confluence pages and Jira tickets.

• Providing contextual definitions in Confluence with hover-over popups for extended explanations.

• Syncing updates globally: Change a definition once, and it updates everywhere.

Smart Terms for onboarding helps new employees quickly grasp essential concepts, minimizing confusion and speeding up their integration into the team.

How does Smart Terms enhance onboarding:

How to Start in 5 Minutes

1. Install Smart Terms from the Atlassian Marketplace.
2. Create a Glossary: Define key terms and organize them by category.
3. Enable Live-Highlighting: Customize how terms are highlighted in Confluence and Jira.
4. Train Your Team: Show new hires how to use itduring onboarding.
5. Iterate and Improve: Use AI insights to refine your glossary over time.

Cross-Functional Collaboration in Confluence and Jira

A typical cross-functional business team could include a product leader, someone from marketing, along with a representative from sales, and possibly other functions, depending on the industry. Of course, Atlassian’s collaborative tools are essential here. Not only Confluence and Jira but all of Atlassian’s products are built to enhance teamwork by connecting all departments through shared documentation and project management systems. Now, it is common for each one of these departments to operate within their own silos, with their own specific goals, data, documentation, and processes. So, even if all departments are using the same tools, Confluence and Jira, in this case, it’s most likely that they are using them in different ways and for different purposes.

In marketing, Confluence and Jira work hand-in-hand to support project organization and communication. For example, marketing teams use Confluence to plan campaigns, share creative assets, document strategies, and centralize resources. By organizing content in Confluence, marketing teams ensure that all documentation is accessible to everyone whenever needed. Hence, it’s easier for everyone, from content creators to strategists, to stay on the same page. Then, they rely on Jira Work Management to break down plans into actionable tasks, set timelines, assign responsibilities, and track the progress of each campaign component from content creation to launch. With Jira, marketing teams manage the real-time execution of different plans, maintaining clear deadlines, workflows, and status updates across projects. Therefore, these two tools provide a synchronized workflow when combined together. In this case, adding a synchronized glossary for Confluence and Jira ensures that every member of this marketing team operates from the same definitions, promoting a clear understanding within one team.

But it’s not only the marketing team that can combine Confluence and Jira to manage their work. In fact, sales, product, or any other teams can use Confluence for information-sharing and Jira to monitor updates or insights depending on their workflow. Hence, when we’re in a case of cross-functional collaboration, having consistent terminology across Confluence and Jira is crucial to avoid terminology confusion across departments.

Smart Terms: one glossary for Confluence and Jira

Smart Terms is a glossary for Confluence and Jira that further enhances teams’ workflow, solidifies alignment, clarifies goals, and strengthens collaboration within the same team or in cross-functional teams by allowing them to access and update a shared vocabulary. So, in cross-functional collaboration, all team members can contribute to the definitions that matter most for the project, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

A cross-functional collaboration between sales, marketing, and product teams is essential to maximize efficiency, better understand customer needs, and align goals. When these teams work in sync, a company can gain a strategic advantage. For example, Insights from sales can inform marketing approaches, refine product development, and ultimately create a better customer experience. When these teams work together in Confluence and Jira, each department can quickly view others’ progress, access updates, and avoid redundant efforts. Our team recognizes Confluence and Jira’s complementarity, so we made sure to integrate Smart Terms with both tools to bridge the terminology gap between department-specific jargon.

If you have been a part of one of these departments, you know that there are many common terms that hold small but also significant differences depending on their context. For example, a term like “lead” usually means a marketing-qualified lead to the marketing team, a lead who has indicated their interest in what a brand has to offer. However, to sales, it could refer to a sales-qualified lead, a lead that has a high probability of converting into a customer. Another example is that product teams might use the word “feature” to describe an internal project component, while marketing interprets it as a customer-facing capability ready to be promoted. This is where Smart Terms comes in handy and ensures that all teams are aligned on the exact meaning of critical terms.

This is why including Smart Terms for both Confluence and Jira isn’t just a nice-to-have for your team but instead a powerful tool to:

• Ensure consistency across teams by avoiding differing interpretations of terms.
• Enhance efficiency by providing accessible definitions wherever they are mentioned on both platforms and reducing time lost to clarify terms.
• Promote cross-functional understanding by bridging gaps between department-specific jargon.
• Support scaling knowledge by keeping track of all essential knowledge as teams grow or change.

Bridging the gap with Smart Terms

To better illustrate how this works in practice, let’s take an example of a SaaS company with active marketing, sales, and product departments that are struggling to keep their teams aligned. Marketing is running campaigns and using terms like “pipeline acceleration” and “conversion rates” in the different reports shared across the platforms. On the other hand, the product team strictly used “pipeline” to refer to development work. Sales, meanwhile, had a completely different interpretation of “conversion” than marketing, as they associated that term with the late-stage deal process.

To avoid confusion, delays, and misunderstanding of deliverables and priorities, this team uses Smart Terms to standardize terminology across the board. Adding key terms such as “pipeline,” “conversion,” and “lead” ensured that every team member could instantly access the definitions whenever they encountered those words in Jira or Confluence.

So, to get your glossary for Confluence and Jira, start by installing Smart Terms for Confluence and Smart Terms for Jira from the Atlassian marketplace.
Here, both apps must be installed on the same organization’s cloud-based URL. You will also need to install Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira browser extension to allow terms to be highlighted. And if you’re still hesitating, Smart Terms for Jira is free for all Smart Terms for Confluence users. So you only buy one and get the other for free, it’s great, isn’t it? (you can also use this as an argument in case you have to get any purchase approval first )

Once your app is all installed and running, you can go ahead and create your glossary by adding terms to different Confluence spaces.

To highlight your terms in Jira, go to Jira settings, toggle the Sync available Confluence glossaries to automatically highlight the space
glossaries set in Confluence, or select the space glossaries from which terms can be highlighted in Jira. And, of course, you can add more customization and configure the appearance of terms per project from the Project settings.

And that’s it; you’re all set. Now, teams no longer have to guess. A quick hover-over or a click-on of the highlighted word mentioned in Confluence or Jira displays the term definition, media, and related terms. It helps your team to get the correct, context-specific definition that everyone can refer to, keeping everyone in this cross-functional collaboration aligned without needing clarification emails or follow-ups.

And to further improve understanding, you can create related terms in Smart Terms for Confluence to better illustrate how some terms are connected. Having related terms helps clarify complex concepts in your glossary for Confluence and Jira and makes it easy to navigate with direct links between related terms.

So there you go; using Smart Terms for both Confluence and Jira doesn’t just prevent miscommunication, it also empowers teams to move faster and with greater confidence. And if you want to know more about Smart Terms, here are 5 essential features you need to know about Smart Terms for Confluence, and how AI can help you set your glossary for Confluence with Smart Terms.

Do you still have any questions regarding Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira? Don’t hesitate to book a demo. Let us get to know you and answer your questions!

Whether you’re a seasoned Smart Terms fan or just starting out, this blog post is your way to master the art of glossary building. We’re here to guide you through creating a term from scratch, showing how easy it is to enhance your workspace with a well-designed AI glossary for Confluence. Ready to change how you handle glossaries in Confluence? Let’s get started!

Start an AI glossary for Confluence

Begin with a precise and informative title, ensuring it’s easily searchable within Confluence. Then, with just one click, let Smart Terms’ AI feature provide you with a well-crafted definition. It’s quick, accurate, and designed to save you time and maintain a powerful AI glossary for Confluence within your workspace.

What’s cooler is that it can generate alternative definitions unlimitedly until you find the perfect one.

The video below explains how to start your AI glossary for Confluence easily.

Related vocabulary

Expand the reach of your term by adding related vocabulary, including acronyms, synonyms, slang, and more. This feature doesn’t just enrich your term; it ensures that all variations are highlighted across Confluence pages, enhancing visibility and understanding. 

Add labels

Organize your terms efficiently by adding Confluence labels. This not only aids in categorizing but also simplifies searching within the glossary.

Enrich your AI glossary for Confluence with media

Attach images, videos, pdf, and HTML to give context and color to your terms, whether an attachment or a link. In Smart Terms, the richer your glossary is, the more interactive the experience gets.

Enhance communication with related terms

One of Smart Terms’ standout features is its ability to connect terms using predefined relations that you can manage from Smart Terms’ general configuration. 

A relation can be created depending on the use case you need to create an interconnected glossary, making it easier for teams to navigate and understand complex terminologies.

Note that multiple relations can be applied to a single term.

To create a related term from scratch, you first choose the predefined relation and then search for the relevant term(s) to connect it with. 

Once you create these relations in a term, they are reflected across all related terms. Additionally, the primary term displays a nested view of these connections.

And That’s a Wrap!

Transform your Confluence glossary from static to dynamic with Smart Terms. Bring your AI glossary for Confluence to life with all the options provided by Smart Terms and elevate the experience with AI features.