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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.


What are Confluence whiteboards?

Whiteboards are a new Confluence tool that makes your team's planning and prioritization process more intuitive, visual, and collaborative. Use whiteboards to create and capture unstructured work, like brainstorming and ideation sessions, and turn the plans you’ve dreamed up into actionable tasks that can easily be moved into your Confluence and Jira workflows.

Physical whiteboards have long been a go-to tool for ideation and planning processes. However, using them is often a messy process. Sticky notes fly away when someone opens a window. Another team wipes the board clean before you take a picture of it and you’re back to square one.

Confluence whiteboards digitize these tools, techniques, and processes, making planning and prioritization sessions easy to document, structure, and organize. If you’re new to Confluence whiteboards, check out this getting started guide to see them in action. 

Best of all, everything you create using whiteboards can be easily integrated and linked with your team’s Confluence and Jira workflows using smart connectors and sections.


What are smart connectors and smart sections in Confluence whiteboards?

Smart connectors and smart sections work perfectly within the context of whiteboards to help streamline workflows and make team collaboration easier and more dynamic. These features form a tight integration between Confluence and Jira to streamline access to ideas and discussions across products.

Smart connectors

When you need to organize your whiteboard or create a flow of thought, you can use simple lines to create visual paths between all types of content, like sticky notes, text objects, or shapes.

But if you need to take action on specific tasks or issues, smart connectors go beyond diagramming. Smart connectors are dynamic links that create connections between Jira issues within your whiteboard and automatically sync the relationship back to Jira in real time. These dynamic relationships can help your team illustrate hierarchies and dependencies between your tasks.

Convert sticky notes into Jira issues and then use smart connectors to link them in your whiteboard, creating a dependency directly in Jira. Smart connectors make it easy to visually understand how information relates, enabling you to seamlessly transition between brainstorming with stickies and making changes to your Jira issues without losing context.

Smart sections

In Confluence whiteboards, you can organize your work by grouping related ideas into sections. Smart sections are dynamic sections that go a step further by empowering your team to group and manage multiple Jira issues at once. Simply assign a rule to your smart section such as "everything in this section is assigned to me" and each time you drag and drop an issue into that section, it will automatically assign them to you.


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.”

Create whiteboard screenshot.

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.

Templates menu screenshot.

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.

Creating shapes gif.

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.

Creating a line from an element gif.

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.

Two sticky notes with line connecting gif.

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.

Three sticky notes with lines connecting them gif.

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.

Creating Jira issue from elements on whiteboard gif.

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.

Importing Jira issue onto a whiteboard gif.

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.

Linked Jira issue in whiteboard screenshot.

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.

Mouse over "Create action" button in whiteboard screenshot.

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.

Hand dragging Jira issue into weeky task created on whiteboard screenshot.

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.


We’re just getting started with whiteboards

While Confluence whiteboards already boast many features that can immediately improve the way your team collaborates, we’re just getting started. 

We’re continuing to work on new and better ways to integrate whiteboards into your Confluence and Jira workflows, creating a seamless set of project management tools. To see how whiteboards can bridge the gap between your project planning and execution phases, try it for free today

A reminder that smart connectors and smart sections are only available on Premium and Enterprise plans. If you’re interested in using these features, reach out to your product admin.