A New Year will bring a new Confluence Cloud editor

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Confluence Cloud is pivoting and opening up to a broader audience of business teams and knowledge workers. Part of how we'll accomplish this is by simplifying Confluence so it's accessible and easy-to-use by every team, not only product teams. Our first milestone, a reimagined content creation and editing experience is here and ready to be rollout out to our customers. As we roll this out, we'd make sure that our ecosystem vendors and partners are well prepared for the changes.

What is great about the new experience?

Benefits of the new editor:

  • Fluid content creation – Use the slash command (/) to add anything from tables to images, and keep focused with in-context menus.
  • What you see is what you get – New live macros provide previews in edit mode so you see exactly how content looks upon publishing.
  • Viewers benefit too – Fixed width layouts and responsive design help creators build legible, consumable content that helps readers on desktop and mobile.
  • A consistent experience across the Atlassian suite – Soon, the way you create pages in Confluence and edit tickets in Jira will work exactly the same.

Why are we making these changes?

Creating content is at the heart of how customers use Confluence, whether it’s taking notes in a meeting, creating a dashboard to help track a project, reviewing and providing feedback on a script, or brainstorming on a new design. We've received feedback that our existing editor is complex and difficult to use.

We want to make this experience better, so we’re focusing on some of the biggest user feedback issues we’ve received. The goal of all of these changes is to give customers:

  • A cleaner interface with fewer distractions
  • Features that are easier to find and use
  • Better, more legible content
  • Improved stability, reliability, and speed

When will the new experience be rolled out?

Blogs and meeting notes in Confluence are already using the new editor. Come January, we will begin rolling these changes out across all page types on eligible customer instances, starting with the most simple customers first (based on activity and content that new editor support), with the aim to reach 90% of customers by April 2019. Our largest, most complex customer instances will be migrated last.

Please keep in mind, timing of the rollout is subject to change and we will do our best to keep our ecosystem vendors and partners informed of the changes.

What will happen when customers get the new experience?

In order to be transparent, we'd like to share the major milestones of our migration plan with our ecosystem vendors and partners. We will be sending customer admins communications, including emails and in-product notifications, about the new experience and migration process six weeks prior to their migration date.

Main milestones to be aware of:

  • Six weeks prior to customer migration, users can try out the new experience using a new template which will contain the new editing experience.
  • Four weeks prior to the customer migration, we will set the new editor as the default editor when users create a new page. Users will be able to opt to use the old editor if they select it from the template library.
  • After their migration date starts, if a user edits an existing page, their content will be migrated to the new experience. We will have in-product change-boarding to help users learn about the new features in the editor.
  • Customers can opt for an early migration – If a customer wants to migrate all of their content before their migration date, they can do so by contacting support. Note that admins can opt in at the instance level only and there is no opt out once they have opted the instance in.

What does it mean for ecosystem vendors?

In August 2018, we published a blog for live macros experience with new editor. We understand that you would still have lots of questions about the rollout plans and how would we enable migration of existing apps onto the new editor. In order to address these questions, we will post a blog for you in January 2019 with more details. In the meantime, if you have any questions, head over to the Developer Community with your questions/concerns.

In the meantime, enjoy the end of year time with your friends and family. Happy holidays!!!