Need Feedback on Space layout

[Eric Heinrichs]

Hi, I'm a first time user that has been trying to setup a easy to use knowledgebase for my employees for a few years now with now luck.

My question is this. I am starting to setup Confluence with 4 team groups and any shared resources like, Software, Contacts, Equipment Manuals, and the like get their own space. Then I plan to use labels so that, for example, software manuals and guides only specific to my design group have both labels "software" and "design" and use some macros like the content by label to add these within the team groups.

My thought is if an employee wants to find something specific to their job and it is a software question, they should be able to find it searching in the software space or their team space.

It is either I do that or have repeated parent pages in each team group. For instance, Equipment, Software, and Contacts would be a parent page in each team group. But then for stuff like common software used by all like anything Windows Microsoft Office, etc, is either duplicated multiple places or out by itself.

Any advice on what is easier for the user to navigate?

To summarize, I plan on setting up 4 team groups and then will either:

• Setup separate Subject spaces, for things like software, equipment, and contacts
  • Then use macros in the team spaces for the subjects that are specific to a team by using labels. So for example, any software that only my design group uses, is linked in a content by label that has both Software AND Design labels
• Setup parent pages for Software equipment and contacts in each department by duplicate parent pages in each team space. 
  • Not sure what to do with software that everyone uses then. Duplicate those guides in every team...

Thanks in advance,

-Overthinking Engineer

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

@Eric Heinrichs Welcome to the Atlassian Community

I have setup several different knowledge bases and all had different requirements.  Just some food for thought because I just got done setting up one for our company that was just a knowledge base.  Each of the teams have a their own teams spaces but we have a single knowledge base for the company.  We created a labeling standard that has to be followed by all units and a process for getting articles published.  The content can then be easily found but all documents reside in a single space making them easier to manage.  Team spaces also link to the knowledge base and we have tied it to our service desks.  This has been the most successful out of all of the knowledge bases I have created because we had set standards for the format of the articles, labels and a review process to get information published.

[Eric Heinrichs]

Brant,

Could you elaborate on your article publishing steps? Anyone can write something but a team leader has to review and publish or something? I haven't really considered workflow yet. I've just needed a place to share all the stuff we've been working on for 10 years now. there is a lot that we have forgotten.

Another issue I've had is IT being so stiff these days. If I want a document available outside the office it has to be on Confluence. Larger files have to live on a server our company manages and secures. One place for files would be awesome. Best I can do is references and published versions of documents are on Confluence while everything else is in a shared file server.

Been a tough time just finding a platform that checks all the boxes now the daunting part is making enough content that my employees see the value you of it from the get go. Thanks for the reply.

[Brant Schroeder]

We have some training that is stored in Confluence.  The content creator must take the training and follow the article guidelines.  We have templates that they use when creating content and specific labels that they have to use. Before they can publish the article for all to see it has to go through a peer review.  It has to be reviewed by another content creator to ensure it checks all the boxes (Clear title, detailed summary, clearly laid out, and properly labeled).   We also have a communication manager who is responsible for the whole knowledge base, sounds like you, who audits articles at random to ensure they meet standards.

We have some documents that are not stored in Confluence and reside in SharePoint.  This is something we are moving away from to get everything in a single location but are also not there yet.  These are linked out off of the knowledge base articles.

[Eric Heinrichs]

Nice. Thanks for taking a minute to expand on your processes. That's a whole piece I hadn't thought to consider. Sounds like long term that review process takes using this from good to great in your experience.

We are moving away from SharePoint 2016 and I have had just a terrible time with trying to implement anything like what Confluence Cloud can do. We're a few years off from having Microsoft 365 so all the nice features are out of arms length with that.

I would be curious to know if you all are Cloud hosted or the Server version of Confluence. My I.T. is looking for a solution for me that they don't have to manage as they are thin on resources and want-to, hence us starting in the cloud.

If this is successful enough, I'd argue that we'd move to the server platform so that we could have all the storage and speed a local hosted solution could offer. Maybe then we could tackle all of our storage being within a single platform in that case. But there's a lot to research either way and I'm talking from experiences with other software platforms.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Eric Heinrichs We are currently on server but looking to move to Cloud.  We have some regulatory issues that might require us to move to Data Center.  I hope in the end we can move to cloud but we will see.