App Center - Access your external tools
Create your own set of apps to access external systems from within your intranet
See the documentation for your Release
Table of Contents
Adding apps to the App Center
Within the General Configuration of Confluence please locate the section App Center and click on Manage apps.
Admin Configuration
The administration view offers four tabs. The first one lists all the apps that have previously been defined. This overview shows the following information.
Above and below the table
Select all | Selects all apps for bulk edit view. |
|---|---|
Edit | Opens the bulk edit view for the selected apps. The button is disabled if no app is selected. |
Create new App | Opens the create new app view. |
Table
| Bulk edit | If checked, the app will be taken for bulk edit action. |
|---|---|
| Name | A short name to identify the app, shown to the user. |
| URL | The URL where the external app is located. This can be any external or internal link. At this point, local applications cannot be linked, though. |
| Key | An optional identifier for an app. This is used to display hand-picked apps on a Confluence page, which is described below. |
| Contact | An optional information to tell users who to contact, if they have questions or problems with the app. |
| Categories | Each app can be assigned to one or more categories. Especially useful if you offer a large number of apps. |
| Rec'd | A tick icon shows if the app is marked as a recommended app for some or all users. |
| Mand | A tick icon shows if the app is marked as a mandatory app for some or all users. |
| Vis (NEW) | A tick icon shows if the app is marked to be only visible if the user profile matches a custom criteria (the column is only visible if at least one app has a restricted visibility) |
| Actions | Click these icons to edit or delete an app. Once deleted, the app cannot be restored. You'll have to add it again. |
To add or edit an app simply fill out the form fields. The only mandatory fields are the URL and a title. This title will be displayed as the name of the app to the user. All other fields are optional.
To assign categories you first have to define these as described below.
If you mark at least one app as recommended, an additional "category" will show up on top of the other categories within the app center for the users. Use this to highlight the most interesting apps for your users.
If you mark the app as mandatory, the app will be automatically added to the "myApps" section for every user. Use this to highlight the most important apps for your users.
Use this feature with caution, as the user can't remove these apps from their favorites.
New in 1.2
You can add a visibility restriction for apps.
Bulk edit apps
You are able to select several apps in the overview and change them all at once.
- Select the to be edited apps
- Click the edit button on top or bottom of the table
After clicking the edit button, the bulk edit view appears.
On top there's a list of the selected apps. By clicking "Change selection" you can change them. When clicking the "Change selection" button, your values filled in bulk edit view will be lost
You can set the values like you do for a single app. Some fields (like "Title" and "Link") are hidden.
Every input has a further checkbox on the left. The values are only set for the selected apps, if the checkbox is checked.
If all apps share the same value for a field, it will be prefilled with this value.
Defining categories for apps
Switch to the tab "Categories" to define as many categories as you need for sorting your apps. The more apps you offer, the more categories you should define to make it easier for users to find what's important for them. To delete an app, simply click the trashcan icon. A deleted category cannot be restored and has to be added again, if you deleted it by mistake.
Personalizing recommended and mandatory apps
Especially if you have a large number of users and apps, it's common that not all apps are equally important for every user. That's why we added the possibility to define recommend and mandatory apps only to certain users, based on their profile information. The first step to do this is to define, which profile fields are relevant. You can define up to three fields.
In a second step you define for each app, in which cases it should be shown as a recommended, mandatory app or if this app should only be visible for specific users. If you haven't configured any profile fields or leave them empty, the app will be recommended, mandatory or visible for every user.
In our example, all users who are member of the department "marketing" will automatically have this app added to their "myApps" section (Mandatory app). Besides this, the app itself will be only visible if you are working in this or the financial department. Other users cannot see this app at the App Center.
You can use wildcards and logical operators for more complex filtering arguments. Please refer to the page Useful admin information for more information.
Displaying a users favorite apps on a page
To display a users favorite apps on a Confluence page, select "MyApps" from the macro browser. No additional configuration is needed. The macro displays all those apps you marked as favorite on the page. Usually the dashboard is a great place to insert this macro. Depending on your theme there might be other suitable places.
Displaying a hand-picked list of apps on a page
You can also display a hand-picked list of apps on a page. For this you have to define individual, unique keys for every app you want to display that way.
Navigate to the editing view of the page where you want to embed this list. Then pick the "Apps" macro from the macro browser and embed it. The macro configuration offers an input field. Type in a comma separated list of keys of the apps you want to display. At this point it's necessary to do this by hand. In later versions we plan to offer a comprehensive list to let you choose from instead of typing in the keys.
Additional Settings
If your theme shows the standard Confluence application header, you'll find a new item "App Center" there. But maybe you already placed a list of apps or the users' favorite apps as macro on your dashboard or have other reasons for not wanting this link to show up there. In this case you'll find a checkbox on the "Settings" tab. Simply uncheck it, and the item inside the application header is gone.
