What are some of your best tips to managing Knowledge Bases in Confluence without paid apps?

[Adrian Woods]

Hi folks! Looking for some best practices, tips, and thoughts around how to most reasonably utilize Confluence for our knowledge base. We're moving from many years as a startup into a full fledged company with a lot of momentum and potential, so it's time to scrape all of those Google Drives clean and move to a more unified, centralized platform. Exciting times!

The challenge here is that some of the things I envisioned for version control and even AI ingestion aren't proving to be difficult in all cases (ex. Databricks possibilities, etc), but I am finding myself in a spot of browsing through the app marketplace and going "Wait a second - this is a paid app and not something already built in?" It's not a bad thing and gives Atlassian a great idea of what is needed next, but in bootstrap mode, there's no budget for adding in assistive apps for now.

That said, I feel like there are likely more more things I'm missing here and I want to build up this architecture to be as robust and scalable as possible. What are some of your favorite features that you use? What are some wishlist items?

[Nikola Perisic · Accepted solution]

Hello @Adrian Woods 

• Have a good homepage with some quick links added such as content table search macro, so the users can navigate faster when they land in your knowledge base 
• Have a clean structure in your sidebar - use folders when needed
• Utilize Confluence whiteboards when you need to specify a logic, decisions, basically anything 
• Use Rovo whenever you can to rewrite articles in the tones that you need - there is an option Improve writing that really helps you out
• If you need to have Google Docs within your Confluence, that is possible to do as well
• You can use Refined to make your knowledge base look much better and you won't feel like you are on Wikipedia

[Adrian Woods]

Great tips, @Nikola Perisic

• I do have the content table set up as well as the default option that utilizes labels, but the content report has been a bit challenging for me to integrate in a meaningful way on the other hand. I thought I could use the reports to pull KB articles (live docs or pages - the latter more specifically) to audit from that, but it seems there's more REST API and similar things that would need to be integrated for that.
• We do have a clean structure right now, but I worry about overengineering and approachability - our folders have folders! I wish there was a bit of a way to create more landing pages of sorts for our parent folders so it was more of a "hub" at each junction for those viewing.
• Whiteboards are a big dive in that we need to take - we use Lucid now, but I want to keep it all central!
• Agreed that Rovo is really exceptional for writing tone - this makes sense to try it with more use cases though!
• I have seen the Google Docs embed/Smart Link option - I do dig that! We worry about duplicating work though, so doing Confluence updates and then having to remember to go update drive as well. I still think this will be a great option as we convert legacy info.
• Refined - this is new to me - I am about to go dig on it now! Initial peek appears to be a paid app, which I have to avoid at this point in time - is there some custom engineering that could be tackled or another free option to yield similar results that you know of?
  
  Thank you for your time and offering an answer here!

[Nikola Perisic]

Hi @Adrian Woods !

You also have the option to create your own company hub which will wrap up all of the spaces in one place. With Google Docs, there is an app that allows the two way synchronization with Confluence. As for the Refined, either you need to create your own Forge application if you are knowledgable with coding. It's not a small app though. You can check their Confluence app here https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221322/refined-sites-for-confluence-intranets-documentation-kbs?hosting=cloud&tab=overview (I am not being promoted by them in any kind of a way).

Also, if you liked the answer, kindly accept it, so the other users with similar questions can refer to it.