External Documentation

Question

Hello,

I'm wondering if possible to use Confluence as a kind of simple documentation data base in which we may upload external documents (as PDFs, manuals, etc) with some fields like version, revision, label, description etc.  which generate an unique reference or ID for each one.

If not possible to upload the document, it is enough if it just stores the local path where the document is placed in our system but provide the URL link to it.

The idea is to solve two main things:

* Have a common place where we can easily find/search the documents related with the project, and a easy why to update/change/remove them.

* Have unique references to each document so it can be referenced from other places.

Thank you so much.

Best regards,

Abel.

Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Answer

I think you could use the built-in page attachments feature as a simple approach, because:

* Attachments have unique IDs.
* They are versioned by Confluence. (If you want to use your own revision identifiers, you can enter those to the "description" field of the attachment.)
* You can label those.
* You can add descriptions to those.
* You can use the Attachments macro to render a table about the attachments. It would give this a "database" feel, while the owner page allows to group the related documents.

Something like this:

Matt Reiner _K15t_ · Answer

Hi @Abel Barreira

I'm curious if you'd be able to keep the content of the documents in Confluence directly, rather than in separate documents. This would make it much easier to search and navigate. You could even use apps to create a full help center, like ours: https://help.k15t.com/

To give you an idea what could be done, my team made this guide with best practices for writing documentation in Confluence. Maybe it will be helpful to you.