A quick recap

In the last blog article, our fictional Sketch Team kicked off their AI-driven emote project for their streaming platform. They held a brainstorming session using draw.io within Jira to illustrate and centralize their creative thoughts.

The next step for the team is to outline their project structure in Jira in order to have an overview of dependencies, and ensure everyone is on board with the plan.

The team is on the hunt for inspiration. As their project will feature AI-driven emotes, what better way to structure their upcoming tasks than by using AI?

AI-generated custom templates at your fingertips

draw.io’s Smart Templates allow you to generate custom diagrams at the click of a button, powered by AI. This can provide a little boost to the Sketch Team’s planning process, with concepts or roadmaps they may not have thought of just yet.

To generate a purposeful Smart Template, you first need a good idea of what your criteria are. For a project roadmap for example, consider:

• What type of diagram do you want? (If you know this already): e.g. “A 3-tier sequence diagram”
  • You can equally use the “Diagram type” dropdown to select the diagram you want. Leaving this blank will leave AI to generate a template type for you
• What purpose do you want it for? e.g. “An emote feature”
• Who are your key stakeholders? e.g. “The designer, the developer, and the project manager”

Found out more about Smart Templates

For more information, check out the following articles:

• Smart Templates, an exclusive new feature from draw.io
• What can you do with a Smart Template?

We will continue to follow the Sketch Team’s emote project journey in the next blog post. For all the blogposts in this series, see:

• “Epically” kickstart your project: using draw.io in Jira
• Going retro: facilitating Sprint retrospectives in Confluence and Jira
• Speeding tickets: optimize support in Jira Service Management using flowcharts

Last month we introduced draw.io’s latest feature, Smart Templates, which uses AI and machine learning to generate diagramming templates quickly and easily. Feedback from users has been very positive, and the response to our demos at Atlassian Team ’23 let us know that people are really excited about a tool that helps them diagram faster. With that in mind, we wanted to use this blog to offer a little diagramming inspiration, to show off just how powerful this new feature really is.

Don’t need to hear any more, you just want to get started diagramming smarter? You can try draw.io and Smart Templates for free for 30 days, just visit the Atlassian Marketplace and start an evaluation today.

Create Entity Relationship Diagrams quickly

We know many of our customers create Entity Relation Diagrams (ERD). These diagrams are commonly used when designing databases (or troubleshooting databases), but they can be time consuming to create; mapping all the entities and relations takes time. However, Smart Templates can get you started quickly, as long as you provide the entities and relationships you’re trying to map.

In the example below, we entered the text string “an e-commerce database design featuring customer information and previous purchase history and demographic information” and the Smart Template’s AI produced the diagram below in seconds:

Your fields may need to be tweaked, and you might have more relationships than this, but at this point you could easy edit text and copy/paste the entities and relationships. By using Smart Templates we saved ourselves a lot of time and hassle, and got moving on perfecting our diagram quicker.

Let Smart Template inspire your flowcharts

Many job roles require the use of flowcharts on a regular basis. Maybe you’re an HR professional who needs flowcharts to resolve a tricky personnel issue. What about the flowcharts used by risk managers to asses potential problems before they start? Or think about support engineers who are faced with challenging service requests on a regular basis; a flowchart definitely helps standardize responses. We wanted to see how complex we could make a flowchart using Smart Templates to really show how much time it saves. So, we gave it this text input, “A flowchart for rolling out a new salary structure at an enterprise company, including salaries, bonuses, and commissions”, and here’s what it produced for us:

What is interesting about this example is that the Smart Template did some of the thinking for us; we hadn’t even considered Performance Objectives in our initial query. Is there more we can do to make use of Smart Template’s ability to find information?

Data-Driven Diagramming

We have mainly talked about using Smart Templates to quickly create the “skeleton” of a diagram, with the assumption that our users are then going to tweak the contents/text to fit their exact needs. But, a side benefit of Smart Templates is that it can source actual data for your diagrams, making it faster to create them. In the example below, we prompted for “the royal family tree starting at Queen Victoria to present day”, and the template provided exactly the data we were looking for:

This should set your imagination running thinking about the various pieces of data you could pull in. You could ask “create a map of every brand under the Proctor and Gamble umbrella”, or “create a flowchart of every type of ISO certification”, or “list every element in the periodic table”. Why stop there? There’s no end to the queries you can give Smart Template:

• Who is the greatest NBA player of all time?
• Is Star Wars better than Star Trek?
• What is the meaning of life?

Instead of manually typing in data, let Smart Templates save you time so you can start customizing it quicker.

Just scratching the surface

With the feature still fairly new to the world, our users have only just begun to discover the power of Smart Templates. Have you been able to design a unique or interesting diagram using Smart Template? If so, we would love to hear from you; we’re excited to learn how the feature is being used, and how we can improve it in the future. Please reach out to us at sales@drawio-app.com.

Want to explore all the features of draw.io? Visit the Atlassian Marketplace to get started, and soon you’ll be able to create any diagram you can dream of in Confluence or Jira. You can use draw.io to visualize everything, including process modeling and relationships (BPMN 2.0, ERD, Flowcharts, Swimlane diagrams…), software development and networks (UML, UML 2.5, AWS, Azure, Cisco, GCP, IBM…) and administration (Org charts, Mind maps, Floor plans, Infographics). Give us a try and you’ll quickly see why draw.io is the top-rated app in the entire Marketplace.

It takes something special to stand out amongst the opulence of Las Vegas, but if there’s anything Team draw.io loves, it’s a challenge. We set out to make Atlassian Team ’23 our best event ever, and after a fun week of getting face to face with our customers, partners, and Atlassians, we’re feeling like we were the big winners in the Expo Hall.

Our newest feature: Smart Templates

We were really excited to show Team ’23 attendees a brand new feature, Smart Templates. We know that when it comes to building complex diagrams, our customers don’t want thousands of templates, they want the right template. The Smart Templates feature uses machine learning and AI to create editable diagrams in just seconds, all from a simple text prompt. Every user we showed this feature to was impressed, and many commented that it would save them a lot of time in their diagram creation.

Our Community Engagement Coordinator, Emily Fedor, recently produced a video demonstrating Smart Templates, check it out here:

From Smart Templates to Smart Partners

The first appearance of our new feature actually took place the day before Team kicked off, at Seibert Media’s Info Session. This event brings together Partners from across the ecosystem to learn the latest news, best practices, and tips/tricks to help their customers get the most from their Atlassian tools. At this year’s event we hosted two sessions. In the first, Mike Rink shared with Partners draw.io’s vision for building successful apps in the cloud. Then, Ashley Flanagan and Carlotta Kuhn showed Partners how to run better meetings with Confluence (and a little help from draw.io). These sessions will be posted on our YouTube channel soon!

What the F#ck is the Eierlegende Wollmilchsau?

That was the question we posted to everyone who visited our booth. And the answer is that the Eierlegende Wollmilchsau is draw.io’s mascot! This creature comes from a German phrase, which can be translated into something like “an egg laying, wool having, milk giving, bacon growing animal doesn’t really exist; you can’t get everything you want”.

We disagree! We think that our customers deserve to have it all, and that’s why we consider draw.io to be the one tool for every team. Our mascot was featured prominently in our booth artwork and our merch, and they definitely found a place in all of our hearts. We even used them as a supporting character in a Dungeon & Dragons adventure we played with attendees in our booth. 

We recognize that the word might not be familiar to English speakers, but the best way to learn is by trying! So, we challenged Team ’23 attendees to pronounce the animal’s name, and you can see the hilarious results for yourself on our YouTube channel:

What’s in Store for Team ’24?

Team ’23 was special, but the draw.io team isn’t one to take things easy for too long. We’ll pause to recover, but soon we’ll start planning for our big Vegas comeback show. We are looking with excitement toward Atlassian Team ’24, once again taking place in Las Vegas next May, and we hope to see you there!

Want to stay on top of Team draw.io’s exciting adventures? Be sure to follow our social media channels so you don’t miss out.