2023 Wr-App Up: The Scroll Apps for Confluence

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Head of Product Marketing
10 min read /

2023 was a busy one at K15t with dozens of exciting updates rolled out across the year. It’s our mission to help every team share their knowledge freely, simply, and effectively, and the Scroll Apps made great strides in 2023 in helping teams achieve just that.

Whether you’re using just one of the Scroll Apps for Confluence or the entire suite, we know it’s hard to keep track of all the highlights across every release – so we did it for you!

Read on for 2023’s Scroll Apps Recap: a look back at all the features, improvements, and highlights over the year and how they impact and support your team. You’ll also get an early peek at what’s to come in 2024 and a variety of ways you can help shape the future of the Scroll Apps for Confluence.

Customer Success Spotlight

Our customers are what guide our mission and inspire future development, so we spent a ton of time in 2023 exploring the use cases and challenges that teams tackle with the Scroll Apps. Want inspiration on how others are making the most of Confluence? Learn how the Scroll Apps enabled:

  • Shinydocs to manage and publish their technical documentation, learning content, and sales and client enablement material.

  • NAGRA to migrate their help portal and authenticated sites from Confluence Server to Cloud.

  • GlobalVision, APTIS, and AppFox to launch beautiful help centers to better educate and enable their users.

Watch the Webinar: See more than a dozen examples of how teams manage and publish their documentation, multi-lingual content, learning content, and so much more →

Share Your Journey! We’re All Ears

Share how you’re using the Scroll Apps and we’ll be happy to offer advice on how to optimize and extend the use of both Confluence and the apps in your team. Book some time →

Building Better Help Centers with Scroll Viewport

Scroll Viewport continues to redefine the standards for creating beautiful and interactive help centers in Confluence Cloud. In 2023, we committed to providing better performance, deeper integrations, and a wider variety of ways to design, customize, and extend your help center. Here are the highlights:

  • Design Tokens: Design tokens enable customization, ensure visual consistency and allow you to enhance your sites appearance. Design tokens are also more stable, making them the recommended approach to styling your Scroll Viewport site.

  • Faster site generation: Users noticed massively improved site generation times with the introduction of partial publishing. Some teams were able to publish their sites up to 5 times faster!

  • Expanded support for macros and integrations: We introduced support for Lucidchart diagrams, Open API Documentation for Confluence, Viewtracker - Analytics for Confluence, and Handy Macros for Confluence, which enable you to insert call-to-action buttons anywhere in your articles.

Notable mentions and fan favorites:

  • Search enhancements: Exact matches now rank higher in search results, offering more relevant information to your users.

  • Enhanced In-App Help: The new in-app help widget allows your users to discover your articles directly where they need it without forcing them to navigate to your help center site. It can also be implemented in just two easy steps!

There are many more updates that didn’t get a shout here, but we’re sure you experienced them throughout the year! All in all, we’re proud to help you deliver faster, smarter, and more efficient help centers to your users.

Get Inspired

Level up your help center in 2024 with these best practices →

Elevating Your Confluence Exports with the Scroll Exporters

The suite of Scroll Exporters include popular apps like Scroll PDF, Word, and HTML Exporter, but also include export formats like CHM, DocBook, EclipseHelp, and EPUB. Here are a few of 2023s highlights:

Flexible template management: A new move option for custom export templates, allowing users to move a template from one space to another.

Flexible template design: A few new features make it easier to define styles for your templates and speed up template creation:

  • Drag & drop feature for images

  • New options for defining captions for Code Blocks and Equations

  • New option to add a Table of Code Blocks and/or Table of Equations to your export templates

More administrative insight for teams on Data Center: Specific logged events can now be tracked with the Scroll v5 Exporter apps. Our apps now integrate with Confluence’s Data Center Advanced Auditing where logged events include:

  • Exported Pages

  • Templates Edited/Copied

  • Templates Created/Deleted

  • Template Visibility changes

Paving the Way for Data Center and Cloud Migrations

We’re in the final stretch of the Atlassian Server EOL journey, and that February 15th date inches closer every day. It’s no secret that a huge amount of our team’s effort in 2023 went to making sure every Scroll App customer is able and ready to move to Data Center or Cloud when that time comes.

While that effort is still ongoing, we’re excited to share some significant milestones from 2023:

  • Relaunch of the Scroll Apps Migration Hub: As more teams started to move away from Server, there was a need for more detailed guides and best practices to help users transition from Scroll Versions and Translations to our new generation app, Scroll Documents and its extensions. This resource offers all the information teams need to make that journey a seamless one.

  • Scroll Viewport and Scroll Documents Integration on Data Center: It’s now possible to publish Scroll Documents to Scroll Viewport sites on Data Center, and control which version, translation and variant should be a part of the Viewport. This unblocks the path for our Scroll Versions and Scroll Translations users on DC to migrate to our new generation app, Scroll Documents.

  • Supporting Data Residency for the Scroll Exporter Apps: By supporting data residency, we’re able to hand users more control over how and where their data is stored. Teams can now confidently migrate to Cloud with our apps and still store their data in a region they trust. We’re proud to share that ours were some of the first Atlassian apps to implement data residency, and you can watch a summary of our experience and implementation on Atlassian’s Developer blog.

What’s in Store for 24?

We’re already buzzing with excitement for next year and busy with new initiatives already. Here’s what we can share:

  • Exploration in the age of AI: We’re exploring all the many ways we can bring AI's transformative power directly to our customers. With Atlassian Intelligence now generally available, we’re also keeping a close eye on how this functionality evolves alongside our apps and how we can build on its potential. Check out our latest Confluence best practice article for more and sign up for AI updates from there!

  • Scroll Content Quality: This app may not be the most recognizable of our Scroll Apps suite, but we’re working to give it a proper welcome in 2024. Development efforts are already underway to make the app more powerful in helping teams check and enforce quality standards in their Confluence content. Want to help shape its future? Get early access by creating a ticket and sharing your use case →

  • Accessible Help Centers for all: Scroll Viewport is committed to providing sites that are accessible to the widest audience possible, regardless of technology or ability. In 2023, we tested our theme against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 level A and level AA. We are now actively taking steps and devoting resources to further enhance the accessibility of our help center sites to meet applicable standards.

  • Scroll HTML Exporter v4: In the next major version of Scroll HTML Exporter we will be making changes that impact template creation and customization – and we need your help! Follow along with the beta version and share the type of styling, formatting and additional features that are being used within your custom export templates with Scroll HTML Exporter v3. Let us know →

Many Thanks for a Great Year

A heartfelt thank you to all of the teams out there using the Scroll Apps for Confluence. We’re very grateful for all the ways you help make great better with your support, feedback, and belief in our tools.

We can’t wait to bring even more value to Confluence users in 2024 and help your team continue to share what you do best! Wishing you and your team a wonderful start to the year.

The K15t Team