Using smart connectors and smart sections in your Confluence whiteboard flow chart
Note: smart connectors and smart sections are only available on Premium and Enterprise plans. Reach out to your Product admin to enable these features.
Even two decades ago, research confirmed that the majority (65%) of people are visual learners. Current data reinforces that sentiment.
In a 2023 study on the effectiveness and utility of flow charts on learning, 86% of participants said that flow charts improved their understanding and 87% said that they improved their overall knowledge of a topic they were learning about.
Flow charts offer an effective visual approach for explaining complex content and processes. They make it easy for you to organize and summarize data in a way that’s logical and easy to follow across a variety of disciplines.
That’s why we made flow charts an integral part of Confluence whiteboards—our latest tool for improved team brainstorming, planning, and prioritization activities. To make it easy to get started, we’ve provided a flow chart template.
How to create whiteboard flow charts with smart connectors and sections
To create a whiteboard in Confluence, go to the top menu and click the “Create” button, then select “Whiteboard.”
You’ll then be prompted to choose a template. Scroll through the template picker and find “Flow chart.” Hover over the template and select “Use Template to get started.
If you want to build your flow chart from scratch, the best way to do it is to start with shapes.
There are eight shapes available in whiteboards. To add a shape, select the Shape tool, choose the shape you want, hover over where you want to place it and select the shape again to drop it into your whiteboard.
For more detailed instructions on how to use shapes to visualize your ideas in whiteboards, check out this resource.
Adding connectors to shapes
To create diagram flows and flow charts in whiteboards, you can add connectors between elements like sticky notes and shapes.
The easiest way to create a line or connector is to drag it up into your whiteboard from the toolbar.
You can also create a line from an element, select it, hover over one of the anchor points that appear, select the anchor point, and finally hold and drag the cursor to draw the line and release it when you’re done.
If you already have an element that you want to connect to, simply hover over that element’s anchor point and connect to it.
Lines help you to create paths between your sticky notes, shapes, and text objects, making it easy to organize your whiteboard and create diagrams and flow charts.
In whiteboards, you have straight lines—a direct path between two whiteboard elements. You also have dynamic lines—paths between elements that shift as you resize elements and move them around.
To change the line type, select the line, then select the line type icon found on the floating toolbar. When selected, the line will be dynamic. If you haven’t specified the line type, your lines will be straight by default.
To learn how to move, edit, and label your whiteboard lines, check out this support resource.
Creating a Jira issue from an element in whiteboards
The great thing about whiteboards is that all of your great ideas garnered from brainstorming sessions can be turned into actionable tasks. The easiest way to turn your great ideas into “to-dos” and make sure that they don’t get left behind is by turning the whiteboard elements used for brainstorming into Jira issues.
To turn a whiteboard shape or sticky note into a Jira issue, select the element, click “Create a Jira issue” on the floating toolbar, and add all relevant information to the dialog box that appears on the right side of your whiteboard.
When you’re done, click “Create” to automatically create the Jira issue without having to leave your whiteboard.
To learn more about creating Jira issues from elements on your whiteboard, check out this support resource.
Adding Jira issues to your whiteboard
There are a few different ways to add Jira issues to your whiteboard. One is importing issues directly.
You can do this in two ways. One is by copying and pasting the link to a Jira issue onto your whiteboard.
The other is using the Jira issue import dialog. Click on the Jira import icon on the main toolbar, search to find the Jira issues you need, select the ones you want to import, and then click the “Import X selected” button.
To learn more about importing Jira issues onto a whiteboard, visit this support resource.
Linking Jira issues from your whiteboard
Once you’ve created Jira issues in your whiteboard, you can add smart connectors to them to help visualize relationships like hierarchies and dependencies.
You’re essentially turning the lines you’ve created into issue links in Jira. Every time you create a link between two Jira issues in your whiteboard, the “linked issues” field in Jira is automatically updated.
To get started, connect the Jira issues with a line. Select the line, then select the “Link issues” button from the floating toolbar.
Choose the type of link you want from the menu that appears. For example, you can set it to “blocked by” to show which one of the Jira issues is the blocker.
You can also change the direction of the link by selecting the Reverse icon located to the right of the menu. Once you’re all set, click the “Link” button and the line will automatically receive a label that shows the link you’ve created in Jira.
You can also edit the links you’ve created without leaving your whiteboard. To edit a link, select the line between the two Jira issues, click the “Edit link” button on the floating toolbar, and use the menu to change the type of link you want to create.
Once you’re done, click “Update.”
Check out this support resource for more information on how to link Jira issues from your whiteboard.
Creating smart sections in whiteboards
If you want to speed up your whiteboard workflows, start using smart sections. Once you’re done with your planning and brainstorming sessions on your whiteboard, you can quickly take all your ideas and put them into action in Jira with the help of smart sections.
To create a smart section, select the section element from the global toolbar and add a section to your whiteboard.
Now select the section to activate the floating toolbar and click on the “Create action” button to open the configuration panel.
From the options presented in the picker, choose a site, project, and issue type to configure the action, then fill in all of the corresponding fields.
Once you’re done, click “Save.” Now you can start dragging various Jira issues into your smart section. Every update made within the smart section will be reflected in Jira in real time.
Once you’ve added all your Jira issues into your whiteboard smart sections, you can add smart connectors to them, linking issues and demonstrating dependencies and other relationships, just like you were able to do outside of smart sections.
This support resource provides more detail on taking bulk Jira actions with smart sections.
