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.

The timeline has been designed to give organizations time to plan. Key milestones include 2026, when new customers will no longer be able to purchase DC subscriptions; 2028, when existing customers will lose the option to expand their licenses; and finally, 2029, when support and updates will officially end. Until then, customers can continue using their DC environments while preparing for the future.

What This Means for Our DC Customers

For teams currently running on Data Center, this announcement may raise understandable questions: What will happen to my existing setup? How will this impact my daily operations? When do I need to act?

In simple terms, you can continue using your DC apps for now. However, over the next few years, you will need to plan your path to the Cloud. After March 2029, your DC environment will no longer allow edits, updates, or expansions; only viewing will remain possible. Atlassian’s intention is to give every customer sufficient time to evaluate their options, design a migration plan, and make the move without unnecessary disruption.

What You Need to Know About Our Apps

At Creativas, we want to assure you that you are not alone in this transition. All our apps are already available on Atlassian Cloud, ensuring continuity for your teams when the time comes to migrate. Our portfolio is not only Cloud-ready but also Cloud Fortified and backed by SOC 2 Type II certification, which means you can trust our solutions to meet the highest standards of performance, reliability, and compliance.

As an Atlassian Gold Marketplace Partner, we are deeply committed to supporting our customers through this change. We provide clear migration pathways and hands-on assistance, from evaluating your current setup to mapping out the steps needed for a smooth migration. For customers who want more tailored guidance, we also offer one-to-one meetings to discuss specific requirements, and we provide live demos so you can see exactly how our apps perform in the Cloud environment before making the switch.

Moving Forward with Confidence

Atlassian has confirmed that future development will focus on Cloud, while support for Data Center will be gradually phased out. Over the coming years, DC products will no longer receive new features, and customers will need to plan when and how to migrate.

With our apps already in place and our support services designed to ease the journey, you can be confident that your organization will make this transition smoothly and successfully.

If you would like to explore what this means for your team, visit our profile on the Atlassian Marketplace or get in touch with us directly. We will work with you to ensure that your transition to Cloud is carried out in a structured and well-supported way, aligned with your organization’s requirements and timeline.

In short, Smart Courses brings rich LMS capabilities directly into your Confluence environment, so your teams learn in the same place where they collaborate.

Recurrent courses notifications

Many compliance or certification programs require periodic refreshers on a schedule. Smart Courses’ recurrent courses feature automates this process. When a course is set as recurrent, it automatically repeats after each interval; any expired sessions are reset when a learner revisits the course. In practice, this means a learner must retake the course on the new schedule.

The latest update adds email alerts for expired sessions. Now, whenever a learner’s prior session in a recurrent course lapses, Smart Courses sends them an automated notification. This expiration email prompts the learner to retake the course, ensuring nobody misses a mandatory refresher. Administrators can set up an annual or quarterly training and trust that the system will both reset progress and nudge learners to complete it on time.

• Expiration notifications: Learners now receive an email when their previous session expires, reminding them to relaunch the recurring course.
• Automatic session reset: Once the recurrence period ends and the learner revisits the course, Smart Courses resets the session so they can begin the new cycle fresh.

These enhancements make Smart Courses ideal for compliance workflows. You get a complete in-Confluence compliance LMS (with exams, pass thresholds, insights, and more) that automatically handles session renewal. With email reminders built in, both managers and learners no longer need manual follow-up – the system keeps everyone on track.

Multilingual learning and up-to-date translations

Global teams need training in multiple languages. Smart Courses already supports multilingual courses: you can enable up to 24 languages and add translations for each course, even using an AI translation engine to speed up translating the course’s content. In practice, an employee can switch the course player to Spanish, French, or any other enabled language and view the translated content immediately. This avoids duplicating entire courses: everything is managed under one course ID in Confluence.

The new release improves translation management by flagging outdated versions. Now, if you edit the default (source) language of a course after translations exist, Smart Courses marks each translated version as outdated. Course editors will see a clear indicator on any translation that no longer matches the default content. This makes it easy to spot and update older translations. For example, if you update the English course text, the Spanish and French versions will show that they need review. Translators can then use the built-in AI “translate” button (if enabled) to quickly refresh the content. The result is that every learner always sees accurate, up-to-date course material in their language.

• Multi-language support: Smart Courses handles up to 24 languages with AI-assisted translation, so you can offer training to global teams without duplicating work.
• Outdated translation alerts: When the default language of a course is updated, any existing translations that are no longer aligned are highlighted in orange, so administrators can quickly identify which versions need revision.
• Missing Translation alerts: If a course already includes translations but some parts of the content haven’t been translated yet, Smart Courses highlights them in red, making it easy to see what’s incomplete.

Together, these features ensure no translation “falls behind” when you update a course. Administrators can confidently maintain training content in multiple languages, knowing that Smart Courses will both translate new content and alert them to any outdated material.

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.

Our app turns Confluence into a powerful learning platform, letting you build and manage interactive courses right where your teams already work. And now, with our latest Smart Courses for Confluence update, we’re making it even better and easier to use by improving clarity and adding valuable insights.
Let’s explore what’s new.

What’s New in Smart Courses for Confluence

A brand new landing page (Cloud)

Every course in Smart Courses now begins with a completely redesigned landing page, giving learners all the essential details upfront, before they even hit “Start.”

This new layout provides a comprehensive overview, including:

• Course title, description, and thumbnail
• Categories and difficulty level
• Estimated duration and total number of sections
• Last updated date and learner progress
• Number of learners enrolled, course ratings, and feedback

For exam-based courses, the landing page also displays:

• Number of exam attempts remaining
• Hover messages explaining the minimum passing score

This update brings transparency and clarity to the learning experience, helping learners feel informed and confident from the first click.

Learner feedback in course insights (Cloud)

Previously, learner feedback was either sent by email to course contributors or accessed through the app via Global Insights or the Course Editor, where you’d see all feedback grouped from different users.

With this release, we’ve added a dedicated Feedback column directly within Course Insights, allowing you to view feedback per learner, right alongside their performance data.

This means you can now easily understand how each individual learner felt about the course, without leaving the insights view. It’s a faster, more contextual way to connect feedback with learner outcomes.

Smart Terms Glossary and Smart Courses LMS integration ( Cloud & DC)

With our new Smart Terms integration, your courses can now include interactive, highlighted terms perfect for definitions, acronyms, or key concepts.

Just highlight a word or phrase inside your course, and link it to a Smart Term. When learners hover over that term while playing the course, they’ll instantly see the definition pop up without leaving the page.

This works in all the major areas: the course player, preview mode, text, and HTML component. And it’s available for both Cloud and Data Center.

It’s a simple way to make your learning content more interactive and easier to understand.

Version history now shows the publisher name (Cloud)

Working together on course content is now easier to manage and track.

The Version History panel now shows who saved each version, when it was saved, and includes a link to the editor’s profile.
This added visibility helps teams stay aligned and ensures that everyone knows who made which changes and when.

Whether you’re reviewing updates, restoring a previous version, or resolving conflicting edits, knowing the author of each change helps maintain clarity, prevent confusion, and improve accountability throughout the course creation process.

Use Case Example:

Imagine your compliance team is rolling out mandatory security training across departments. Multiple contributors are involved; one adds policy updates, another adjusts quiz questions. Suddenly, a team member notices a critical section was removed.
With version history, you can instantly identify who made the change, why, and when, so you can quickly validate, revert, or refine the content without slowing down the training rollout.

This collaboration ensures the accuracy, quality, and consistency of learning materials, especially when training content impacts regulatory compliance or employee onboarding.

App performance improvements

We have made key performance enhancements behind the scenes to boost speed and responsiveness across Smart Courses.

Whether you are opening a course or navigating between modules, everything now loads faster, so your team can focus on learning, not waiting.

In the course editor, loading times have been significantly reduced, nearly 3x faster, delivering a smoother, more efficient authoring experience for course creators.

In addition, we’ve renamed “capsules” to components to reflect their modular nature better and make course creation more intuitive. Settings that affect the entire site.

Try it all today

These updates are now live in your Smart Courses for Confluence instance.

From clearer course previews and more innovative feedback management to term highlighting and multilingual support, this release is all about making your learning experience more useful, more interactive, and more global.

Ready to explore what’s new?

Head to your Smart Courses dashboard, or visit our documentation to learn more.

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.