Proactive Communications in a Knowledge Base

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 a bit on creating proactive communications in Creating Your Knowledge Base Space, and discuss a bit further here.

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 produce proactive content for which customers can opt in. This page describes how to achieve that.

Using Confluence as a producer

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

Using Confluence as a consumer

Even if your Confluence instance isn't producing your proactive content, it can consume and display it in a prominent way:

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

• We use the Blog Posts Macrofor It 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 in more detail.