Clearvision is an innovative software services company with offices in the UK, Philadelphia, Dublin, and Bangalore. An Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, Clearvision has been servicing enterprises globally since 2005, supporting agile transformations and providing consultancy, training, support, and hosting for Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, and the entire range of Atlassian products.
When a business has teams across different locations and timezones, collaboration can get complicated. So, what happens when you’re not only trying to facilitate collaboration between teams from your own business, but for hundreds of different organisations?
This is the challenge TM Forum needed to overcome as a member organisation with the goal of bringing together digital businesses so they can work together to create best practices and standards.
TM Forum’s collaborative solution? Confluence. In this post, we’re sharing how TM Forum is using Confluence to achieve collaboration on a global scale, and how Confluence’s extensive features and flexibility can be harnessed to empower teams no matter where they are, or how many people are involved.
Meet TM Forum
TM Forum provides a platform for hundreds of organisations across a wide range of industries to collaborate and innovate so companies from around the globe can work together to promote digital transformation in all industries.
TM Forum’s collaboration focuses on delivering rapid pragmatic solutions to the top technology challenges that our members face. Confluence is being used by our global membership as the platform for collaboration for the co-creation, editing and publishing of our industry best practices and standards. – Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
By working together in this way, TM Forum’s members are able to team up and create industry best practices and standards. This is how TM Forum is helping shape the future: providing guides for businesses in the adoption of new technologies.
The challenges of collaboration at scale
As an organization with collaboration at the centre of its ethos, TM Forum was looking to adopt a tool that would foster this collaboration.
TM Forum’s aim is to create a level playing field among its members, many of whom are from competing organizations. To do this, it aims to provide them a “table” to work around; that is, a platform that is accessible to all members, regardless of industry, size, or location. All members can have a seat at the table, where they then drive collaboration, working to solve the challenges of digitalization.
It’s an ambitious goal, and in its journey to accomplish this, TM Forum encountered a number of challenges around how to enable collaboration. TM Forum was dealing with:
- Predominantly document-based assets
- Work in multiple locations
- Complex publishing processes
- Barriers to collaboration
- Lack of customisation
To fully empower its members, TM Forum needed to implement a tool that would offset these challenges.
Achieving collaboration and innovation at scale with Confluence
How did TM Forum settle on Confluence as its solution? The decision was, in itself, collaborative: it consulted with its members, the very users who would be using TM Forum’s platform for collaboration.
Confluence stood out as the winner for a number of reasons:
- As a web platform, it’s accessible without requiring anything other than standard web browsers
- It can scale to meet changing needs
- It removes barriers that prevent collaboration
- It vastly improves visibility of work in progress
- It has greatly simplified the publishing process. Published “documents” are now web pages that members can interact with online
- Confluence has the flexibility of access security needed to support IPR policy
- The Atlassian Marketplace provides hundreds of add-ons and extensions that allow improvements and features to be added without the need for customization
- Confluence also provides the option to build customizations when there is a specific need
In the majority of cases, a Confluence instance operates within a single company. It acts as a collaborative wiki and knowledge base. When integrated with tools like Jira Service Desk, it often includes public-facing pages that external users are able to search – but this knowledge base is still built up by one organization.
As a members organization, though, TM Forum is pushing Confluence beyond its traditional use. It acts as a platform for hundreds of companies to work together, and they all require access – this was one of the reasons having a web-based platform was so key. TM Forum wanted its collaboration platform to be customer-driven, as the work it produces are created by members, for members.
TM Forum worked with Clearvision, an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, to achieve these goals. Learn just how TM Forum is now using Confluence, including its innovative custom workflows and integrations with Jira and WordPress, by downloading the white paper.