IntroductionEveryone knows that Confluence is a great enterprise wiki. At Atlassian, we also use Confluence as a reporting and business intelligence tool. We've developed some techniques to extract and share our company's information using Confluence, and in this guide we'll share them with you. When I started at Atlassian I was blown away by how they use Confluence for business intelligence. In previous jobs I had published business data using hacked-together collections of scripts or (under duress) cumbersome reporting packages that seemed designed more to impress in a demo than to serve a useful purpose for the organization. Atlassian seemed to have in Confluence a simple and fast yet fully capable way to publish the business' data to whoever needed it most. What makes Confluence so great for reporting? By combining Confluence's enterprise features with the ease-of-use and flexibility of a wiki, you can get real-time dynamic data in front of your users quickly, simply and without needing to invest in additional systems. As a bonus you get all of the collaborative features of Confluence for your reports (such as automatic versioning, granular enterprise security, and update notifications). If someone has a good idea for a report, they can make it happen (and if that good idea breaks the report, you can easily roll back to a working version). |
Here are some examples of what you can do (click to enlarge):
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In this guide we'll cover:
- Retrieving Data Into Tables
- Visualizing your data with Charts and Formatting
- Optimizing your reports for speed
- Creating Dynamic Content with macros
- Security and why it's important
- A library of Examples and Tips drawn from real-life experience
After you're done, you'll be able to use the same techniques that we use at Atlassian to build your own information dashboards and reports.
Audience
Creating reports and data dashboards in Confluence isn't as hard as, say, calculating the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. But we do assume that you:
- Have Confluence set up and running in your company.
- Know structured query language (SQL)1.
- Have the database you want to report on set up as a JDBC datasource available to Confluence.
- Know where your company's data is kept and how it's organized.
About the Authors
- Jim Severino is in Atlassian's Internal Systems group. When not mediating on business intelligence, Jim spends his time managing projects, building tools and playing Set. Contact Jim at jseverino@atlassian.com or just tap on the window of our Sydney office.
- John Rotenstein is Jim's boss. He taught Jim everything he knows, except for the wrong bits and anything that causes mistakes.
1: SQLzoo is a good place to learn SQL and a great reference for experienced practitioners.
6 Comments
Hide/Show CommentsDec 21, 2009
Roy Krishna [Atlassian]
Related blog post.
Aug 31, 2010
Adam Dry
Is that an African or European swallow?
Aug 31, 2010
Jim Severino [Atlassian]
Huh? I... I don't know that. Aaagh!
Sep 13, 2010
Jim Severino [Atlassian]
I presented on "Building Dynamic Reports Inside Confluence" at Summit 2010 - check out the video.
Mar 30, 2011
Mickey Calcara
Hi Jim. We are wanting to utilize Confluence for dashboards that are generated from our Business Intelligence tool ( we are currently using MSBI ). Do you know how common dashboards ( that are real-time) are in Confluence? Do you know any good examples of plugin development that supports this?
Thanks.
Mar 30, 2011
Jim Severino [Atlassian]
I can't say how common they are, but at Atlassian we use Confluence and the techniques I set out here to get data straight from the source onto a wiki page for things like sales reports and support case load. The data shows up in Confluence as soon as it's there, so that's pretty much "real time".
I've never used MBSI specifically, so I'm not sure how you'd go about displaying dashboards from it in Confluence. It depends on how MBSI presents its dashboards. I don't see any plugins that mention MBSI on our Plugin Exchange.