How do you keep Confluence Whiteboards organized?

[Mirek]

Confluence Whiteboards seems fantastic for workshops, planning, and brainstorming but when teams use them heavily, they can probably quickly turn into clutter. Do you agree? 

I’m curious how others manage them in practice:

• Do you have naming conventions, tags, or folder-like structures?
• Are Whiteboards mostly temporary, or do some become long-term references?
• How do you make it easy for your team to find boards that are actually useful later?

Would love to hear some tips, lessons learned or even examples/screenshots from your expirience!

[Vitali Charin]

Hi @Mirek

If you are working with many Whiteboards, you should follow the same best-practices as with Confluence pages:

1. Organize them in the right space, underneath a page or folder it belongs to.

2. Have your folders or parent pages by date or topic. For example yearly folders and monthly sub-folders with pages and whiteboards underneath.

3. Use a standard naming convention in order to standardize page/whiteboard names and to make it easier to find them.

4. Link your pages/whiteboards to Jira work items and/or other pages.

5. Have dedicated places where your whiteboards are located in order to limit the possible places to a minimum.

-> If you can not find the whiteboard manually, you could use Rovo to find the right whiteboard/page.

Regarding your questions:

• Do you have naming conventions, tags, or folder-like structures?
  -> Folders are working the best, you can find more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/use-folders-to-organize-your-work/
• Are Whiteboards mostly temporary, or do some become long-term references?
  -> It depends on the content. Some are important for your team/management to keep and others can be removed automatically after some time, for example with a Confluence space automation rule that regularly checks obsolete pages/whiteboards: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/edit-copy-and-delete-automation-rules-in-confluence-cloud/
• How do you make it easy for your team to find boards that are actually useful later?
  -> Each team has a dedicated Confluence space or at least a dedicated section within a space (if it is shared with other teams). You should keep it simple and limit the places where your team should save pages and whiteboards in Confluence. The more possible places you have, the harder it will get to keep it organized. 

This is just my experience and I hope there will be inputs from others as well. 

But for the moment, I hope I could help you a little bit. 

Best regards,

Vitali

[Mirek]

Thank you @Vitali Charin for your input. It is very useful for discussion. 

Whenever there is a new thing started to be widely used I start think about scaling, so in case of whiteboards it is hard to filter them quickly for admins to manage (on site and space level), correct? 

So the think that I am afraid is how this would look like after few years of usage when you cannot simply say what is the most useful (used) whiteboard.. what is not used at all.. linked or not linked.. history is removed after 30 days.. 

Something similar like for Boards in Jira.. after time you end up with so many stale Boards that nobody know who is the owner and is this still used.. 

So I would like to avoid making bad choices and organize this is a good way before it gets bad :) ..  

My first though was a little bit like your #5 - Have dedicated places where your whiteboards are located in order to limit the possible places to a minimum.

I was thinking about one dedicated space with only whiteboards enabled and everyone that would like to use it need to do it there.. And inside somehow manage it permissions based on folders or page structure and restrictions.. 

Thanks to that maybe I would already know which team or unit is responsible for managing those and maybe somehow be able to maintain it when scaling..  at least that is the goal to easily maintain and find it in whole Confluence. 

What do you think? 

[Dave Liao]

@Mirek - funny you mention "tags". It's not possible to add a label to a whiteboard, is it? 🥲

I'm trying to see if there's a JAC ticket for Confluence Whiteboards requesting that, but doesn't seem to be? 😂

Also - love Vitali's reply!

[Mirek]

@Dave Liao - Nothing would surprise me on Cloud when things change all the time but on my side I had an option to label it :) 

I have double check and looks like it is still there :)