Hooray, we can support the Volunteer Fire Department

As part of the CSR initiatives of Scandio and anarcon, our colleague Tina recently trained the Munich Volunteer Fire Department in the use of Confluence.

In the course of our long-standing Pledge 1% campaigns, our Scandians have already supported many great charitable initiatives with one percent of their working hours. But collaborating with the fire department is also something new for us and a clear highlight (I mean, who isn't a fan of the fire brigade?!).

But let's start from the beginning:

A few weeks ago, our colleague Tina conducted a training session on Confluence with 30 members of the Munich Volunteer Fire Department. The training took place - true to style - in the engine house of the department "City Center".

Confluence usage by the Munich Volunteer Fire Department

Confluence is a solution from Atlassian and can be understood as a digital workspace for teams where knowledge and collaboration meet. The employees of the Munich Volunteer Fire Department use the solution respectively as an intranet for blog and wiki postings, announcements, etc.

It is understandably difficult to find time for self-study on the optimal use of Confluence in addition to volunteering at the fire brigade, work, and family. This is where Tina comes in.

Divided into two groups, the participants were given specific tips and tricks for working with Confluence in a four-hour course in the morning and afternoon. The focus was thus on practical application. Key questions such as: How do I use Confluence as smartly as possible? How do I design content so that others want to consume it? How do I lay out pages in a way that is as "appealing and clear" as possible? were used to illustrate scenarios for everyday work with Confluence.

Three basic Confluence tricks we would also like to share with you:

1. Shortcuts
The integrated shortcuts make our work much easier and faster. Just press "/" and an overview of shortcuts available will be shown.

2. Inline Comments
Our next tip: On a Confluence page, comment directly in the text and not at the bottom within the comment field. Especially with long texts, the context a comment at the page bottom is referring to, is often lost. Inline comments remedy this situation by directly assigning the comment to the respective part of the page.

Simply mark the text part you want to comment on, then tap the appearing speech bubble and leave a comment.

3. Display of Secondary Pages
It is happening too frequently: You find an empty main page in Confluence, under which five secondary pages are "hidden". With the macro "Display child pages" you have (besides the already existing left-aligned page tree, which is sometimes a bit hidden due to the screen size) a clear view of the pages/page names which are structured below a main page.

The contact to the Munich Volunteer Fire Department was established by a former training participant of Tina's, who is involved in the brigade. The good news: You can get a training like this even without personal contacts. 😉 Because the elements of the training are part of the Scandio Academy program.