How do you keep Confluence content up-to-date?

[Star LLC]

Hey everyone,

Our team struggles with outdated documentation - old version numbers, broken links, deprecated processes, old team member names, wrong orgs, worng product desc still in docs from 2022.

Manual reviews take forever.

 1. Is this a problem you face?

2. How do you currently handle it?

any apps you suggest? Thanks

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Star LLC no magic bullets, maintaining documentation is hard and unfortunately it often doesn't get enough respect internally.

We built a suite of tools in one app for bulk content management, it's called Space Content Manager. Maintaining docs is not one thing, even if it's a challenge to convince management at times that it is a lot of little things that in total eat up time and can be tricky. The app can help with some, not all, time consuming problems.

This screenshot is from a test instance I have, gives you a sense of what it can do.

A simple and common use case is that the name of something changes and you need to update it without knowing exactly where it appears.

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

Hi @Star LLC and welcome to the Community.

Can you be more specific about what documentation we're talking about? Public and customer facing product docs? Internal for developers?

You're on Confluence, which is a good start. There are apps that can help (Scroll Documents with versioning and version management), various content management apps that nag you when a page is not updated for XY months.

But tooling alone is not a universal savior.

You need to set up process and ensure that information flows from product managers to devs to writers and back. DocOps methodology is great for this - documentation is a part of the product, doc tickets are treated as any dev/QA ticket, writers are assigned to specific teams and attend all agile rituals.

In other words, you need to set up a viable documentation life cycle management routine.

Disclaimer: I'm the guy behind one of the Atlassian's customer success stories. that revolves about documentation. I'm also a documentation writer and content strategist. I recently joined K15t and we make a bunch of apps for content management (versioning, conditional content) and publishing. You can check our YouTube webinar on the subject of docs life cycle management.

[Star LLC]

Thanks. , does atlassian intelligence help with suggest specific updates for docs?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Star LLC I think AI could be definitely useful here, but only for the formal / deterministic / trivial updates, and even for those there would be human supervision needed.

I think that a well-defined review process supported by the right tools (incl. apps and AI) would be the right approach.

We have seen teams in similar situations, and the good news is that after fixing the chaos once (can be a large one-time effort), maintaining the quality can be automated (low , but continuous effort).

[Brant Schroeder]

@Star LLC Welcome to the Atlassian community

This is always a challenge but having solid processes in place can really help make it a lot more manageable.  We use Confluence analytics https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/view-analytics-to-see-how-content-is-performing/ to monitor content usage.  Analytics can provide insights into content that is becoming outdated and old, how many views it has and linked content.

We also have content owners who are responsible for preforming content audits and ensuring that content is up to date.  Out product documentation is regularly updated by a team that is associated with every project.  The project provides the changes that are incorporated into the product documentation and then reviewed before publishing.  We use comala document management to help with the review process.  We used to use better content and archiving for confluence and it had some really nice features but we do not have it due to cost saving measures.  I would recommend it though.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Brant Schroeder Thanks so much for mentioning the Better Content Archiving app (developed by our team).

Let me add the link: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/123/better-content-archiving-and-analytics-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview