Developing a Phone Directory in Confluence

[David Stokes (david.stokes.nz@gmail.com)]

Hi Guys!

Just looking for some advice ....

I have a requirement to develop a phone directory and I'd like to do it in Confluence which we are already using (rather than custom building something).

I know that you can capture some information about users in the Confluence user profile, but our phone directory will not be just of our own users, but will include other people outside of the organisation - I don't want to have to create users for all of the people who will be in the phone directory. Also, I'm going to have a number of additional fields.

I've done some research on this and it sounds like it could be achieved through the use of metadata (there will be a confluence page for each person with a bunch of fields on it) and searching that metadata for looking people up.

For each person, there are a number of fields, eg: firstname, lastname, company, department, job title, manager, organisation, etc. And I need to be able to search on any of these fields.

How do you think this would be best achieved?

Thanks in advance
David

[David Stokes (david.stokes.nz@gmail.com) · Accepted solution]

OK - here's the nearest I have got to a solution:

• Using the Metadata Plugin - each of the fields are added as metadata on a page and this plugin will include the metadata in the search indexes
• Using the Advanced Search Plugin - this allows you to search on those metadata fields. The limitation I've found however is when you do a search, you can't display any of the metadata fields I added, so if you've got a number of pages returned, it's difficult to work out which page is which without going into each one of them.

I'd be interested if someone has a suggestion on a better way to achieve the requirements.

Cheers
David

[David at David Simpson Apps]

If your phone directory is stored in an LDAP, AppFusions' Enterprise Directory and Org Chart should do the job.

If you have an externally hosted REST API, perhaps you could roll your own client side code with a bit of JSONP.