Confluence Admin and Power User Guide to Meetical Meetings

Owned by Lukas Gotter _ Meetical
Last updated: Sept 27, 2023
13 min read

Meetical Meetings is a Meeting Management Software, based on Atlassian Confluence.

This Admin Guide is intended for Atlassian Confluence Admins, Power Users, and Solution Partners who want to know everything about Meetical. It will cover the preparation, setup, and rollout of the App.

If you are looking for a more end-user-friendly guide, check our Learn Meetical section and the Introduction to Meetical guide on our website.

Also, read our Ultimate Guide if you are new to Confluence Meeting Notes.

You can install the Confluence App from the Atlassian Marketplace.

Topics

Table of Contents

Basics

What the Meetical App does

Meetical allows users to connect their calendars and create meeting pages from their calendar events.

The first module is the New Internal Confluence Calendar, reachable from the top menu “Apps”, and from any Space in the left sidebar. This calendar shows the users' primary calendar, which every user can connect to Confluence with the App.

Another way to create, link, and find meeting pages is using the calendar extensions:

The Meetical Calendar for Confluence connected to Google / Microsoft 365

Screenshot of the Browser Extension in Action

Chrome Extension for Confluence to create meeting pages

 

Screenshot of the Outlook Add-in

Users can connect their Google or Microsoft 365-based calendar. Only the primary calendar is currently supported. Shared calendars only work, if the user is actually invited to the meeting (and thus, technically speaking, the event is showing up on his primary calendar too).

Macros will display meeting meta-data on Confluence Pages. There is a “Meeting Overview Macro” which is basically a composition of macros including meeting date/time, location, summary, list of attendees and their RSVP status, etc. Furthermore, there are report macros that can show a list of all meetings in a meeting series, or show open action items from past meetings.

Automatic updates: The system will automatically keep pages up to date. For example, if a date changes both the page title is updated and all related metadata, resulting in the macro

Automatic page creation: The user can activate auto-create for the meeting series. Each occurrence will get a page created automatically, a configurable number of days before the meeting takes place.

What the App does not

The App does allow you to create internal calendars without a connection to Google / Microsoft 365. Thus, it’s not a replacement for Apps like Team Calendars.

Who is the Meetical App for

Meetical is a general-purpose Meeting Management Software, best suited for operational and tactical meetings. It’s intended for Project Managers, Product Owners, Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Solution Consultants, etc., and anyone who needs to coordinate and has a lot of meetings. It is very strong for weekly update meetings, regular check-ins, team meetings, etc.

It’s also great for Scrum events such as reviews, retros, and even daily meetings. Furthermore, it’s very well suited to conduct regular 1-on-1 meetings.

We also see Customer Success and Support teams using the app a lot to log calls with customers and provide a feedback loop for product teams.

One feature, enabled with the generated participant tables, is that users can run mostly asynchronous meetings. In other words, people get a notification because they get mentioned in a table and can provide their input. Meeting times can be drastically reduced.

The App is also used by Management Teams on a more strategic level to conduct monthly reviews for example. For this use case, you can create a separate Confluence space with appropriate permissions.

Benefits

Look out what users say about the app on the Marketplace reviews!

  • Save time by reducing meeting admin tasks and pre-populating meeting pages

  • Allows users to find things much faster via direct links on their calendars

  • A much better-structured Confluence and meetings notes collection, with consistent naming and up-to-date information

  • Better alignment between meeting names and events on work calendars

  • Automation for recurring meetings frees up even more time and allows teams to stay on track much more easily

  • Meeting times can be drastically reduced by using generated participant tables and running status updates mostly asynchronous meetings.

Installing the App

Starting a trial

The App can be installed from the Atlassian Marketplace.

Extending a trial

Each trial is a minimum of 30 days and expands to your billing cycle. Companies under external license management need to request an offer from their solution partner. If required and promising we can extend a trial up to 90 days, please reach out to support.

Requesting a trial from your admin

As a regular user, you can request this app by clicking on “Try if free” on the linked Marketplace page. This will send a notification to your admin. Invite your colleagues to do so as well since the admin also sees how many people requested the app and can prioritize accordingly.

Privacy and security

All meeting data and metadata are exclusively stored on Confluence, making the App secure and reliable. Backups include all this data as well. We are using Atlassian standard APIs and Confluence Content Properties. Also, check out security guidelines.

Uninstalling the app

To uninstall the app simply follow the same process as with other apps. You can request user-related preferences and data to be deleted (or it will be wiped from our database after 6-12 months automatically). Meeting data is kept on the customer side as mentioned. After the uninstallation, macros won’t be available anymore and existing pages might show warnings, but generally continue to work. Customers who have been using Meetical for more than 6 months can request a whitelisting so that they can continue to use the macros view-only without a license (but cannot create any new pages).

Configuring the app

Admins can reach the Meetical Configuration Section in the Admin Settings side menu. See later chapters on how to customize meeting templates and use other admin options as indicated on that page.

Trying the App

First Time Setup

Each user who wants to create and find meeting pages from their calendar needs to authenticate to the app using their Atlassian Account. This is today also standard practice for the new Atlassian Forge Framework-based apps. Furthermore, users need to connect their Google / Microsoft 365 account in order to use the create and find page features.

Users who only attend meetings do not run through any additional setup. All macros will work just fine for them and they can contribute and read meeting notes without problems. Also, they don’t need to connect in order for their RSVP status to be shown, since this data is collected from the meeting creators' primary calendar.

For enterprise customers, we are happy to collaborate on setting up service accounts and support the rollout where we can.

Creating a first meeting page

You can reach the internal calendar from Confluence Apps → Meetical Calendar or from any Space sidebar. Run through the setup and create a meeting event on your calendar using Google Calendar and Outlook. Then go back to the Meetical Calendar, refresh, and find that meeting. Then create a page.

Repeat the process for a recurring meeting and notice, that a parent page is created. For the second and successive pages created, the app remembers the correct location and template to be used.

Depending on your provider, also try the Outlook Add-in and Google Calendar Browser Extension.

Recurring meetings

As mentioned, recurring meetings are grouped under a parent page. Each series has its own parent page. Since meeting series are sometimes copied or re-created, technically being a new series, you might experience from time to time that the system creates a new parent page. It’s important to check automation settings to make sure auto-create continues to work as expected.

Automation for recurring meetings

You can turn on automation from any meeting series parent page, from the internal calendar, but also using the Chrome extension (new since January 23). Soon the option will be available directly in the Outlook Add-in as well.

To turn on this Confluence Automation, simply create a first page and check “enable auto-create for this meeting series”. Or click on any existing occurrence in a meeting series and “Enable automation” / “Enable auto-create” from there.

 

 

Coming soon for Outlook Add-in

 

The App will schedule the pages to be created and try to create them around 7 am in the morning in the meeting organizer’s timezone. If that fails for any reason we’ll retry during the workday. This makes sure nobody gets an unwanted notification, in case there is a macro that generates @mentions for each user. (See Generated Participant List Macro)

Adding attendees as watchers

Also note, that the App will try to add Attendees as Watchers to the page. Watchers will not get a notification when the page is created, but when the page/agenda is edited and published. Unless the person editing the page chooses to “Publish without notifying watchers…”.

Adding attendees as watchers only works, if the user creating the page is a Space Admin. Currently, there is no fine control over yet but you can deactivate this feature via our support desk for your instance.

Macros

Live macros

Live macros render metadata of Confluence pages on the fly and often allow interaction without editing the page. For example, you can edit the Participant's Attendance status, directly from the Attendee List macro. To configure the macros, edit the page and click on the macro. Then click on the edit icon.

Meeting Overview

Shows a meeting overview table including date, time, location, participants, conferencing links and description. Use this macro on top of your meeting pages for a concise meeting event summary

Recurring Automation Macro

Admin macro. Allows user to enable/disable automatic creation of pages for recurring meetings.

Event Status

Shows meeting event status. Cancelled, Scheduled, In-Progress or Finished. In relation to the start date and time

Event Link

Shows a link to the original calendar entry

Event Title

Shows meeting title, copied from the calendar event

Attendee List

Shows all meeting attendees from the calendar event and their RSVP status. Status can be changed and single attendees can be hidden. This is a live macro, best for attendance lists. For a generated list of participants check the generated Participant List macro.

Meeting Report (for meeting series and parent pages)

Shows all meeting occurrences in a meeting series or under the current parent

Event Description

Shows meeting description, taken from the calendar event description

Event Date and Time

Shows meeting event date or time, taken from the calendar / meta-data

Event Location

Shows meeting location, taken from the calendar event

Event Rating

Experimental macro, please give us feedback. Allows users to leave ratings for meetings.

Admin macros

Change Sub Page Template

Admin macro. Shows current sub-page template recurring meeting series. Allows to change the template.

Button to Create Meeting Notes with Meetical Calendar

Admin macro. A button to create a meeting notes page with Meetical (Link to internal meeting calendar)

Macros for templates to generate markup

Generated Participant List

This macro should be used on templates only. The macro will populate a real table with a row for each participant and an @mention. By default, the table contains two columns, Participant and Input. To customize the columns to use, add a table inside this macro and specify the columns. For a simple attendee list see Attendee List macro. Use the Participant List to engage attendees for meeting preparation, feedback and async status reports.

Sind Aug 1, 2023, you can also pre-fill the rows with default values or checkboxes. For example adding a checkbox, to request read-confirmation of any material participants should read before the meeting.

Templates

Global and Space Templates

Meetical supports global and space templates for meeting notes. You can also define default templates to be used for each space, or globally. If a default space template is available, it has higher priority than the global template, allowing teams to define their own defaults.

Installing and customizing the default templates

The App comes with a couple of default templates including:

  • Default Meeting Template

  • 1-on-1 Meeting Template

  • Executive Meeting Template

  • Strategy Meeting Template

  • Team Update Meeting Template

  • Weekly Tactical Meeting

  • Aug 1, 2023 Daily Standup

  • Aug 1, 2023Async Status Update

  • Aug 1, 2023Retrospective

  • Aug 1, 2023Project Kick-Off Meeting

Creating new templates

We’ve written a whole guide on how to customize templates and create your own templates for Meetical. Furthermore, we’ve also written an ultimate guide on how to create templates in Confluence.

Structure spaces with multiple parent pages

By default, meeting notes are created under the “Meeting Notes” parent page in any space. This so-called meeting notes index page is created automatically when you create your first page. Read the full guide for more info.

Additionally, you can choose any parent page you want from the space (new since January 23, for Chrome Extension and Internal Calendar). Furthermore, users can label their preferred parent pages with the label “meetical-parent” in order to make them appear and show up as preferred locations.

Browser Extension for Confluence (Chrome, Edge, …)

The browser extension for Chrome / Edge / Firefox comes with Features for Google Calendar and a Quick access section working for all users including Microsoft 365 users.

Users can create and find meeting pages, and manage their recurring automations directly from Google Calendar.

Furthermore, all users can access the extension pop-up to view recently accessed pages, recently created meeting notes, and new since January 23, users have a whole task management section to see their open tasks and check them off without having to navigate to each individual meeting page.

Pinning the extension is important because more recent Chrome versions hide the extension icon by default. Google Workspace Admins can also pre-install the Extension for all users (see Rollout section below)

 

The browser extension can be installed from the Chrome Web Store. It can also be installed for Microsoft Edge. A Firefox version is available as well, however, it’s currently not providing all features. Reach out for updates.

Admins can automatically pre-install the browser extension for Google Workspace users (see section “Rolling out the Extensions”).

Outlook Add-in for Confluence

Users can create and find meeting pages with the Outlook Add-in without leaving Outlook. In the future also Microsoft users get the automation setting features right in Outlook (currently the automation can be set from the meeting series parent page and from the internal calendar).

In order to have easy access to the Add-in you should pin it to your menu bar. Otherwise, it will be hidden under the three dots “…” menu.

The Outlook Add-in can be installed from the Microsoft AppSource Store. Please Note that the Data Center version for Exchange is not distributed from AppSource but must be deployed behind the Firewall.

Rolling out the Extensions for all Users

While many customers choose an organic approach where each user can install the Chrome Extension or Outlook Add-in individually, the best results achieved by our top customers come, when you pre-install the extensions for the users.

Rolling out the Chrome Extension

For the Chrome Extension, the Google Workspace admins can set this up and pre-install the Meetical Extension for all users or for certain groups and departments. We highly recommend you choose the option to “Force install + pin”. When the extension is pinned you give everyone easy access to the quick pop-up and

Here is a detailed how-to from Google on how to pre-install the Chrome Extension: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6306504?hl=en (german version available)

Rolling out the Outlook Add-in

The Outlook Add-in can also be pre-installed for all employees or certain groups of users.

As a Microsoft 365 Admin, follow this guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/install-or-remove-outlook-add-ins-exchange-2013-help

Advanced topics

Migrating from Server to Cloud

Meetical pages use very similar macros on Server / DC and Cloud and use the exact same meta-data structure. Migration of existing pages should be very easy. However, we don’t have much experience frankly speaking but are very happy to support you in this transition. From a product and feature point of view, we highly recommend migrating to the Cloud.

Known issues

Meetings series sometimes get a new parent page or automation does not run as expected. Reasons can be that the series was copied, manually recreated, or for technical reasons got a new ID. That can cause mappings to get messed up. We’re looking into ways to solve and improve this constantly. In such case, you must continue with the new parent page, move any relevant pages

Updates to pages sometimes don't get processed anymore because there has been a problem. Most errors pop up in our monitoring systems and get fixed under the hood. But it can be worth checking app.meetical.io in case users think there might be something wrong.

FAQ

See https://meetical.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MMD/pages/1905721345

Useful links

 

Thanks for reading, please reach out to us at info@meetical.io for general questions or support at any time.