How do you use statuses and labels in Confluence for your workflow or organisational needs?

[Sean Manwarring _Izymes_]

Hi everyone!

I’ve been exploring ways to streamline workflows (or just optimise in general) in Confluence and was curious about how others are using the Status Macro or other methods for tracking the progress of work on their pages.

For example, do you use the Status Macro to represent things like project stages, task priorities, or other types of categorisation? Are there other creative ways you’ve implemented this to improve visibility or collaboration within your team?
Some questions:

• Do you use the Status Macro frequently? If so, for what?
• Are there scenarios where you’ve found it doesn’t quite meet your needs?
• Have you created any workarounds for making statuses or labels more dynamic or visually engaging?

For instance - I lead the marketing team for Bitbucket App Vendor here in the Atlassian ecosystem. So I am constantly using the status macro for tracking meetings notes/takeaways/action points, blog posts (labels/status in for each individual paragraphs), and especially each specific part of campaigns in general that are created and documented in Confluence.

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly use Jira to track a lot of the projects, but there are often times I need to track the status of something, or even categorise something in Confluence that wouldn’t make sense to affiliate it to a Jira project/ticket.

Looking forward to hearing how everyone is tackling this! It’s always great to see the innovative ways people use Confluence for their teams.  

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Sean Manwarring _Izymes_ 

Funny, I just wrote this last week :) 

Workflow options in Confluence

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

You mentioned "dynamic statuses" although if I understand correctly you manage the status manually most of the time?!

I think that there are 2 basic approaches exist, each with own virtues and shortcomings:

1. Manual statuses (where you transition a page from status X to Y): use a traditional state machine based workflow app like Workflows for Confluence or Comala.
2. Automatic statuses (where you define the condition for a page to enter status X and let the app transition the page automatically when the condition is satisfied): use the Better Content Archiving app.

[Yulia Lenina _AppFox_]

Hi Aron, thank you for mentioning our app, Workflows for Confluence, much appreciated! 

I just wanted to clarify one thing here, regarding automatic statuses. In Workflows for Confluence, you can transition pages through the pre-defined workflow manually, because it needs to pass the approval process, and people involved transition the page while reviewing and approving it.

At the same time, there can be cases where a page automatically transitions to a status on a condition as well - the page is edited or the expiration date is set up. So I wouldn't put Workflows for Confluence to the "Manual statuses" only group:)