Rolling out Confluence and draw.io at Hilfswerk Salzburg

Hilfswerk Salzburg is a division of Hilfswerk Österreich, one of the largest providers of social services in Austria. To guarantee standardized and always up-to-date documentation of IT services and visual communication with external partners, they use Atlassian Confluence and draw.io.

Revolutionizing project management with Confluence

Hilfswerk Österreich, a non-profit organization, employs over 11,000 people worldwide. Their largest areas of operation are nursing and care for the elderly, childcare and youth work, social work, and counseling and education. Hilfswerk is the market leader in the field of mobile care at home, while Hilfswerk International is active as an aid organization in crisis areas around the world.

With such important work on their shoulders, we were grateful to sit down with Adnan Reh, the head of Hilfswerk Salzburg’s IT department, to talk about Confluence and draw.io.

“We are very happy to be able to use your plug-in in such a cost-efficient way,” Adnan said of draw.io. The IT department is currently running a Confluence Data Center instance, and uses draw.io mainly for IT service management, creating workflow and network diagrams.

Adnan’s plan is to extend Confluence to the entire organization, and revolutionize project management throughout the company using Jira and Confluence. This is a daunting task given the size of the organization – every province in Austria has its own Hilfswerk, and Hilfswerk Salzburg alone has more than 1,400 employees in almost 160 teams. Many of our readers will know what a challenge it can be to roll out Confluence in such a large organization: adopting Confluence for internal documentation, relying less on email, working with skeptical people who haven’t used an internal wiki or intranet before, and so on!

But Adnan and Hilfswerk are up for the challenge. Hilfswerk’s strategy is to provide its employees with the best possible tools for easy digital collaboration across teams. Adnan’s department aims to make the digital workplace as efficient and intuitive as possible in order to ease the burden on employees.

Adopting draw.io across teams

At the same time that Adnan will be rolling out Confluence to the rest of the organization, he also plans to extend draw.io to other departments. So far, because other teams do not yet have Confluence, and thus draw.io, diagrams are only created within the IT department and exported for viewing by other teams, for example in management presentations that show IT roadmaps.

Once Confluence is fully rolled out, Adnan can well imagine collaborating with other teams on draw.io diagrams – from diagrams for the customer portal to org charts for the HR department. The application is so diverse that it won’t be hard to find a helpful place for draw.io in every team.

From Visio to draw.io

Today most departments of Hilfswerk Salzburg use Visio for their diagrams, since the teams are currently using Microsoft office suite. The plan is to migrate the Visio diagrams into draw.io as the organization switches over to Confluence.

Migrating Visio diagrams to draw.io is an intuitive and technically simple process, so the IT department shouldn’t have any problems. But just in case they do need help, our team at draw.io is always ready to offer support!

Exploring draw.io features

As part of our conversation, we asked Adnan if there were any features his team had found missing from draw.io.

“No, nothing is missing,” Adnan said, “maybe some IT icons and the app for Android and iOS.” Luckily, the integration of custom libraries into draw.io is so easy that we were able to quickly show Adnan how to import them himself with just a few clicks. We also explored draw.io’s whiteboard feature, which further enhances the kind of collaborative work done at Hilfswerk.

Finally, we talked about some other apps from Seibert Media that Hilfswerk Salzburg might also be interested in, including social intranet app Linchpin, Aura and Blueprint Creator. And as a true IT guy and Jira user, Adnan was also interested in the documentation for Agile Hive.

“I am grateful for this brilliant software,” Adnan said of draw.io. “Thank you so much for letting us use it!’

Of course, we would like to thank Adnan even more for the interview, and the whole Hilfswerk Salzburg team for the trust they have put in our tool. It’s a pleasure to help an organization that puts helping others as its number one goal.

We wish you good luck in rolling out Confluence and have fun diagramming with draw.io, Adnan!

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