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!

In this blog post, we’ll acknowledge the five essential features of Smart Terms that will make your work life a breeze.

1/ Global glossaries

Ranking top 1 is the glossary globalization feature.

“How can I make a glossary global?” is the most asked question from our clients.

Consistent terminology throughout Confluence spaces (departments) is essential to have everyone speak the same language and stay on the same page.

The first globalization option is “Enable global glossaries,” which highlights specific space glossaries across all spaces in Confluence to ensure consistency across all departments.

The second option, “Enable the option to make individual terms global,” gives you even more control by adding granularity to the glossary and making only important terminology (terms) shared across your organization.

Important to note: Globalizing glossaries doesn’t mean duplicating terms in all spaces. Only the highlight of terms on Confluence pages will be global across all spaces.

2/ Include & exclude terms of specific spaces

Smart Terms for Confluence offers two powerful options to help you fine-tune your glossary management.

The first option, “Include terms of these spaces,” allows you to choose specific glossaries you want to highlight in the current glossary without duplicating them.

e.g., If you are currently in the “Marketing Space” and want to include the “HR Space” glossary, ” to be highlighted in the current space.

Whenever a term from the “HR Space glossary” is added to a Confluence page in the “Marketing Space,” it will be highlighted automatically.

The second option, “Exclude terms of these spaces,” is generally used to exclude certain globalized spaces from being highlighted in a specific space.

e.g., You created a glossary in the “Global Terms” Space and configured the settings to highlight that glossary in all spaces. One space that’s not relevant is the “Privacy & Terms.”

To avoid confusion, you must exclude the “Global Terms” space from being highlighted in the “Privacy & Terms” Space from the space settings.

3/ Multi-language support

You’re working for a company and leading a project that requires close collaboration between team members in different countries, with different languages and different time zones?

Struggling to keep everyone on the same page?

You can count on Smart Terms‘ multi-language support that makes breaking down language barriers easier.

Create glossaries in more than 23 languages to improve communication across teams spread across borders.

Smart Terms for Confluence even provides extensive highlighting options allowing you to highlight terms in the user language and all translations simultaneously.

Check this blog post to learn more about creating a multi-language glossary.

4/ Disable the highlight feature on a specific Confluence page

Highlighting terms on Confluence pages can be a game-changer for collaboration and organization. But what if you don’t need the highlight on a specific page only?

No worries! You don’t have to disable the highlight for the whole space. A few clicks can disable the highlight feature on that specific Confluence page.

5/ Terms list macro

If you’re a Smart Terms user and haven’t used this macro yet, It’s that time!

The Terms list macro is a few clicks away from bringing a space glossary to a Confluence page. If you’re using Confluence pages as a reference for a knowledge base or for onboarding customers and newbies, the terms list macro would be the ideal option to organize and display important terms and concepts.

On Confluence Cloud, it’s possible to implement multiple glossaries from different spaces on a Confluence page, and the criteria used to filter the list of terms is Confluence labels.

Terms list macro best practice: Attach appropriate labels to each term to easily implement them into the list.

Are you missing some important tricks that can be helpful in Smart Terms for Confluence?

If you are, don’t worry! We got your back.

In this blog post, we’re going to bring out 3 use cases that are common among our customers and point out the solution from the options existing in the configuration of the Smart Terms.

Use case No. 1

The same term can be highlighted multiple times on the same Confluence page. You already know that, right?

However, what if that term is annoyingly repeated frequently?

What if you only want to fix attention on the first term only?

We got you covered!

Customization is crucial to existing as it considers each customer’s need.

It’s up to you to choose whether to have the term repeatedly highlighted on the Confluence page or focus only on the first term.

You just need to enable the option “First term only” from the general configuration, and that’s it!

Use case No. 2

This use case is sponsored by compound words!

A compound word is a blend of two or more words, like “autocompletion”, for example. They are a mix of words resulting in one word.

What if you only want the word “completion” to be highlighted? How can you do that?

The option “highlight substrings” is the perfect feature to allow the highlighting of a specific part of the term.

Of course, this is only feasible if the term is already added to the glossary.

Use case No. 3

Many languages have diacritics added to some of the letters in their words.

Those need to be highlighted as well! Don’t they?

Since we have multinational clients, this option was essential to build into Smart Terms for Confluence.

So, the default behavior of the “diacritics sensitive” option is detecting similar words with or without diacritics and highlighting them both, knowing that only 1 of those 2 words exists in the glossary.

In this use case, we only have the term “resume” added to the glossary. The highlight detects that “résumé” also exists on the Confluence page and can be the same as “resume” but with diacritics.

The engine highlights “resume” and “résumé”.

In another use case, “resume” is not the same as “résumé” and we don’t want the engine to detect the diacritics.

What to do?

Open Smart Terms configuration and enable “diacritics sensitive” to convert the engine to sensitivity mode, as shown in the Gif below.

The engine will only highlight the present terms in the glossary and ignore similar terms with diacritics.

Managing your glossary in Confluence is very important. It facilitates communication between your teams in Confluence and ensures the best content management accordingly.

We got inspired by our clients and prepared a best practices page that can be helpful for all Smart Terms users. These best practices will help users, especially newbies, understand better Smart Terms and the proper techniques for a glossary creation.

The contributors to efficient glossary management are your teams in Confluence.

Confluence admins, space admins, and users with terms creation permission have slightly different roles in Confluence. However, each role is important in delivering an organized and consistent glossary.

Guide for terms creators:

The below table gives detailed descriptions of the term attributes and their status in the term. This can guide terms’ creators to build an organized glossary within their Confluence spaces.

The reason behind this table is the importance of each attribute depending on the term usage. This importance varies from one company to another.

For example, labels can be required when you have a large glossary, especially when your company relies on labels as essential search criteria for Confluence pages, attachments, terms, etc. They help easily surface the term when searching.

The above example can apply to the related vocabulary as well if your Confluence admins require you to add acronyms, for example, to long expressions.

Guide for Smart Terms for Confluence admins:

We are working hard to provide solutions for different use cases of our clients.

The highlight is by far the most customizable feature in Smart Terms. Therefore, a table guide of the highlight options configuration can be a great help for Confluence admins as they have the privilege of accessing Smart Terms general configuration.

Guide for Smart Terms users: (Cloud only)

Smart Terms highlighters are different methods of highlighting terms within your Confluence pages depending on your use case and your need for the highlight.

Issues/improvements for Smart Terms app:

To be more organized in managing the team requests while using Smart Terms, you can create such a table and ask everyone to include their requests and indicate the status each time it’s updated in the Jira ticket. This way, you can track the team feedback and have an idea about what’s been raised and resolved and what has not. It can also help you avoid confusion about repeated requests.

This Confluence page can be used as a reference for the whole team.

Try Smart Terms for Confluence

Click to get this guide page

Most of our Smart Terms for Confluence customers are international companies and embrace hundreds of nationalities. Therefore, we granted them the opportunity to build multi-language glossaries all at once.

This blog post will show you the different aspects of multi-language support and explain the highlighting configuration of this feature.

Multi-language glossary creation

An important note to keep in mind is that you cannot create a term in your Confluence non-default language. In other words, if your Confluence default language is English, you have to add the term in English first and then add a German translation, for example. It cannot be the other way around unless you change the default language, and you cannot add a translation only. There has to be an original term first.

Creating a multi-language glossary has never been easier with Smart Terms. The app provides you with 2 different levels that permit the term translation creation.

• Glossary level: when you’re creating a new term from scratch. This is a newly added way of multilingual term creation. You’ll have to pass 2 steps as follows:

• Term editor level: is when you’re editing or adding a translation to an existing term.

Many of our clients ask about bulk creation; this is feasible with importing your glossary. Instead of adding hundreds of terms one by one in a space, just put them all in an excel sheet with their translations and import them directly from here.

To make this even easier, we offer you 2 different templates to use that you can find here.

Highlight Configuration

Highlight options

Many companies have different branches worldwide and hold hundreds of multi-national teams using the same Confluence instance with different user languages.

Would it be possible to highlight all terms’ translations simultaneously on the same Confluence page? Yes, it is possible.

Would it be possible to highlight terms only in the user language? Yes, it is also possible.

The multi-language feature in Smart Terms covers mostly all different aspects of the highlight, trying to provide all the possible highlight usage.

You may wonder about the best use cases of the above two possible highlight options. Well, here are some.

• Highlight all translations

You’re a company that shares Confluence spaces/pages with anonymous users such as clients to view their content and share documentation or information about work, products, or anything related. You may want to define and explain certain terms to these clients. They are of different nationalities, and you want to ensure that everyone sees the suitable language for them.

This option is for you. You can create the same content but in different translations and still ensure that terms will be highlighted in all translations available.

• Only highlight terms in the user language

You have mixed nationalities in your team, and everyone has his own Confluence user language set by their preferences. This option will highlight only the terms in the user language, not terms in the default Confluence language.

Example: 

The default language is English.

The user language is Deutsch ==> Only Deutsch terms will be highlighted.

We are thrilled to announce the release of a new version of Smart Terms for Confluence. We have been working hard on a complete revamp of the app and, precisely, the user interface. That unlocked several possibilities for new feature implementation and brought more stability to the app; perhaps one of the most requested features is multi-language support.

Want to find out what is new?

User Interface enhancements

Glossary

We designed new layouts for the Glossary display. You now have different modes: list, compact list, or grid. You can choose what suits you best.

We also enhanced the user interface of the instant search and filtering along with the letter navigation (as shown below).

Term editor

We introduce a modern term editor. You can add media easily, edit, and reorder through drag, and drop. We also combined the global highlight options in a configuration modal on the top right side.

Term History

Have you ever wondered if it is possible to get back and edit a previous version? No worries! We got this covered for you. 

Tracking your terms’ history is made simple. You can easily track a term definition each time it’s modified. You’ll also be able to roll back and restore a previous version if you want to. You can find the term history icon in the term editor, as shown below.

Multi-language support

Since most of our customers are international companies, we developed multi-language support to facilitate communication between teams internally while co-creating content within Confluence.

This feature will help you get the most out of your enterprise terminology by using different languages suiting your organization.

Now, you can enable the multi-language feature through the “languages” option in Smart Terms global configuration. We have more than 20 languages available that you can use in your glossary.

You may wonder if this will lead to a cluttered glossary with different translations. Well, not really!

You’ll be able to create and edit multi-language definitions and switch between them at your convenience as follows.

Once you have translated your definitions, you can select your preferred language from:

• Glossary: from the list at the top right side, select your language
• Term: from the term card, select the flag of the language

You have enabled multi-language support, but some users might not be interested in translating their glossaries? We developed an option to disable translation per space. 

Terms list macro

Along with the highlight option on your Confluence page, you may want to have the list of your highlighted terms inserted below the page content just in case you need them close to your sight. Some users would prefer to access content offline; they would use the terms list macro then export the page on Word or PDF.

Highlight Configuration

Some of our Smart Terms users have brought up questions about the highlight engine configuration that used to be puzzling with somewhat ambiguous options.

We split the highlight engine options into 3 sub-categories:

• Highlight
• Sensitivity
• Content and Titles

Headings and titles are no longer highlighted by default as shown below.

You can click on the term to view the definition on the pop-up screen. With the new release, you can also view the definition pop-up just by hovering on the term. Just enable the “Highlight on mouse hover” option from the global configuration, and you’re good to go.

We know this occurred. That’s why we thought of showcasing the below use case to you, thinking it might help you find your way in your documentation.

This use case is a fusion between Smart Images for Confluence and Smart Terms for Confluence.

Documentation of your apps is a crucial section, and it may suffer some ambiguity if you’re not putting it the right way.

As a lot of you use Confluence to share their documentation, these recommendations are for you.

Smart Images for Confluence integration

Documentation certainly needs screenshots to display the different app sections and layouts. You can enhance your documentation experience with Smart Images for Confluence.

You don’t have to struggle to put all images and screenshots in one place. Smart Images saves you time and, most importantly, space on your Confluence page.

Find out how to create sliders and galleries in your documentation.

Smart Images for Confluence is a user-friendly editing toolkit and is certainly not only about sliders and galleries. It’s so much more, as we call it, the all-in-one image toolkit.

Discover more about Smart Images use cases, and if you’re more of a visual person, you can check these infographics.

Smart Terms for Confluence integration

In the middle of introducing your apps, you surely encounter terms that you think should be defined for your customers as they may sound a bit unclear. Smart terms for Confluence allows you to highlight these terms and deliver transparent information and definitions.

For better customer communication, you can reinforce the highlighted terms with related vocabulary or media.

The above Confluence page explains it all.