How to organize our software documentation within Confluence?

[Stephan Waldschmidt]

We would like to create, maintain and manage your software-documentation with Confluence (we already use Confluence 3.5 for our intranet).

At the moment, we don't know what would be the best way to manage different versions of our documents with Confluence.

Our background is as follows:

We got around 30 applications. For each application we have more or less 3 different document types (Admin-Guide, User-Guide, Architecture-Description).

It's necessary, that we provide at least 3 different versions of each document according to the different stages / versions of each application (development, test and production).

I already read the chapter „managing the technical documentation life cycle“ in the confluence documentation, but I'm not sure if this is a good way for us. If we create a separate space for each application, we would end up with a lot of spaces. I'm not sure if this is easy to manage.

Could somebody recommend a good way to organize our documentation within Confluence?

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions] · Accepted solution]

There's a new book by Sarah Maddox, Atlassian Technical Writer, coming out in Feb 2012:

http://xmlpress.net/2011/12/07/confluence-tech-comm-chocolate/

http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/tag/book/

Also if you do not already follow her blog, it has a lot of insights on the topic ongoing.

Anyways, thought you might want to look out for this soon...

[Kevin Buchs]

You will want to see this question: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/8969/how-to-handle-unique-page-names-in-confluence

The number of spaces (30) is easy to manage. However, you could put it all in one space. I would be inclined to come up with specified prefixes and use those to name pages organized in a hierarchy. For example:

Top level prefix: app1, app2, app3, app4

Next level prefix dev, test, prod

So you will create pages "app1", "app2", etc. at the top of your SW documentation space.

Under those, create: "app1dev", "app1test", "app2dev", etc.

Then under each of those, create pages with the suffix of AdminGuide, UserGuide ArchDesc, so they will be named app1devAdminGuide, app2testUserGuide, etc.