Confluence Content Lifecycle

[#1]

Content Lifecycle

The smallest organizational thing inside Confluence is content— a page, blog, database, or something else. Regardless of what it is, however, it follows a general lifecycle. Understanding where a particular piece of content is within a lifecycle is important as it will help guide decisions around what to do with that content and to understand how it fits into the bigger whole of Confluence.

So, however, we’ll explore that lifecycle: Need, Ideation, Creation, Maintenance, Archival/Deletion - or NICMAD, for short.

Need

I spent much of my career thinking that “creation” was the start of content... and much more of my career learning that isn’t true! Our lifecycle begins at identifying the need for content. This can be the result of research into why errors are happening, analysis of new hire questions, or some other signal that something needs to be added to Confluence to help support the team.

While this need can come from a centralized team that manages and monitors things, it can come from anywhere. The trick is to keep your eyes and ears open to identify the need for content as quickly as possible so you can respond.

Ideation

Once you’ve figured out there is the need for a piece of content, it shifts into the Ideation stage. This is where you think through what it needs to include. For example, if you’ve identified a need for new onboarding documentation, you’ll take time in this step to figure out WHAT that information is or how it can best be presented.

 This step is also an opportunity to work with other teams or individuals to further improve your idea. In some cases, you’ll be able to do this on your own, but many times your content will benefit from another set of eyes helping out.

Creation

This is the step most people think of as the beginning of content, and this makes a lot of sense to me. After all, content doesn’t really exist until you create it! That said, the steps before this are incredibly important in ensuring your “Creation” step moves as smoothly as possible.

Here you’ll be building out that page, database, or whiteboard and adding in everything you’ve learned in the prior steps. Ideally, this step is easy - you’ve already done the hard work of figuring out why you need the content and how you’ll do it… now you’re just punching keys.

This step does offer an opportunity to refine your idea though - frequently I find myself tweaking formatting or look-and-feel options as I realize changes are needed.

Maintenance

This is a step many people (myself included) can do better on! It can be exciting and satisfying to publish new content, and it can be incredibly boring to maintain it.

Maintenance involves a number of activities, including things like reviewing content, determining what action(s) are needed, and then actually performing the update. This step is here to help ensure that the great content you created in the prior step remains great content and doesn’t get “stale”.

Personally, I like to schedule regular time to review specific content. Getting it on a calendar and blocking the time helps ensure I actually perform maintenance and don’t just think about it.

Archive/Delete

The final stop in every piece of content’s lifecycle is to be archived or deleted. This might take longer or shorter, but at some point, someone will say that we don’t need that content anymore.

Most of the time, archiving is the better option. This is because archived content isn’t removed from Confluence, it’s just hidden. Links and search can still find it, but it is removed from the content hierarchy and placed in the archive. This clearly signals to folks that it is no longer in circulation, but keeps it handy just in case.

Deletion is less common since it is permanent. Deletion is a two-step process - first, a user deletes content, then an admin purges it. Once purged, the content is gone. No one, not even Atlassian, can get it back (one of the main reasons this is uncommon!).

Wrap up

Some content will move through this cycle more quickly than others - but they all go through it. Your job as a content creator, admin, or Confluence user is to understand where your content falls in it and to take the appropriate steps to keep things moving along.

[Stephen_Lugton]

For so many of us that Maintenance / Archiving step is a mere aspiration; I've spent occasional free time over the last 3 months reviewing our entire Confluence estate and updating / archiving things I'm responsible for, as well as flagging pages and spaces for team members to check.  Sometime I'll ask Rovo to create Jira work items for all the pages I've marked as review and spread the work of reviewing them back to the authors, since teamwork makes the dream work!

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Stephen_Lugton I hear your plain. Cleaning up is key, hard work and people prefer to just goes away. @Rob Hean says it well, maybe a bit too nice, it's not done as it's a pain. I would add often not a KPI which compounds the problem (management doesn't give it a lot of value):

This is a step many people (myself included) can do better on! It can be exciting and satisfying to publish new content, and it can be incredibly boring to maintain it.

With so many pages it's hard without bulk editing. The built in Content Manager (admins only, requires premium) has some limited features and is per space.

Take a look at our app Space Content Manager, it is a suite of built-in scripts to lasso content. Work on 1 or 1,000 spaces at the same time.