This page is part of the guide to developing a knowledge base on Confluence Wiki. We have already shown you how to create your knowledge base space and how to use templates and formatting macros. We touched on creating proactive communications in Creating Your Knowledge Base Space. Now let's discuss it further. Quick guide to proactive communications: Confluence can both produce and consume RSS feeds. Both the RSS macro and the Blog Posts macro offer a good way to show summaries. On this page:

Proactive alerts

Sending technical alerts to customers is a great way to keep customers and staff informed, and good way to reduce support load. At Atlassian we use the knowledge base both to consume and to produce proactive content that customers can opt into. This page describes how to achieve that.

Using Confluence as a producer

• Working with Blog Posts describes how to produce blog posts in Confluence.
• Emailing a Page is a great way to send email messages to users or an email distribution list.

Using Confluence as a consumer

Even if your Confluence site is not producing your proactive content, it can consume and display the content in a prominent way:

• The RSS Feed Macro can consume content from any RSS feed on the Internet.

• We use the Blog Posts Macro to display blog posts written in Confluence. The macro output looks especially handsome in a panel, accentuated by an RSS image in a link. Here's the wiki markup:

  h4. Technical Alerts {panel:title=Important Technical Alerts for Confluence| borderStyle=solid| borderColor=#ccc| titleBGColor=#f93 | bgColor=#fc9} {blog-posts:content=title|max=5|sort=modified|spaces=CONFKB|time=30d} *[View more recent blog posts|http://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=CONFKB]* [!CONFKB:Confluence Knowledge Base Home^rss20.gif|align=right!|http://confluence.atlassian.com/createrssfeed.action?types=blogpost&blogpostSubTypes=comment&blogpostSubTypes=attachment&spaces=CONFKB&title=Confluence+KB+-+Technical+Alerts&labelString=techalert&excludedSpaceKeys%3D&sort=modified&maxResults=10&timeSpan=30&showContent=true&showDiff=true&confirm=Create+RSS+Feed|showTitleOnly=true] {panel}

次のステップ

You now have a good idea of how to do proactive communications. Next up, consider Additional Add-ons for a Knowledge Base.