HuddleBot

HuddleBot is a Confluence add-on available from the Confluence Marketplace.

If you are unfamiliar with Confluence, it's part of the Atlassian Suite of products which include Jira, Trello, BitBucket, and more. Confluence is the document collaboration tool; you can create your company's knowledge base there. This is where you can store and collaborate on documents as well.

Atlassian has a thriving marketplace for third-party add-ons. Atlassian products are something that I've used for the last few years on my own projects as well as managing client projects. It felt like an approachable marketplace, as it's not so large and over crowded, and I have experience with the products.

I had a few ideas and HuddleBot was by far the more difficult idea, so naturally I chose it. Who can resist a challenge?

A challenge it was. That's going to have to be a story for another time.

What is HuddleBot?

HuddleBot is an automatic check-ins app. You create "huddles" — questions that are sent out to your team on a regular basis. You can have it send out daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Your team can then respond to it and comment on each others responses.

It removes the need for in person status meetings and can help foster a sense of community remotely. Instead of having a regular scheduled status meeting, you can let your team respond on their time. This also creates a paper record that you can always look back on at a later date.

HuddleBot integrates seamlessly into Confluence. It looks and feels like it belongs.

One of the things that was different and exciting about this project is that I don't store any actual data. I use a database that has one table and it keeps track of where it was installed and it let's me check if their license is still active. HuddleBot uses the Confluence REST API to load and store data onto the user's own Confluence instance.

Reduce Meetings & Build Community Remotely Through Automatic Check-Ins

And that's HuddleBot. You can find it in the Atlassian marketplace.