Best practices for using Spaces VS Pages in Confluence?

Magnus Bondesso

Hi,

We're in the process of setting up an information structure in Confluence and have read about spaces, pages etc. I can see that in Atlassian's own Confluence they have a space directory with all product spaces and inside each of those a space for each version of a product.

http://confluence.atlassian.com/spacedirectory/view.action

Things that we realized were:

Option A (like they have it) - one space per product
Advantages
x RSS-feed is per space it seems (meaning one could sign up for only those products one is interested in)
x Can name a Page the same as in another Space (since the Page name is unique within a space)

Option B - one space for all products
Advantages
x The tree structure on the left is better - you can see all the products in the same tree, whereas in option A you of course only get one product's info in the tree since the tree seem to be space based

Are there any recommendations on what else to consider? How do you sort your information? I know labels can do a good job there but it seems it would be a good idea to decide beforehand what spaces structure to use.

Benjamin Horst

We designed our space (similar to Option A) so that different groups of people can find their relevant topics all in one space. For example we have RCP projects and Portal projects which have (uncreative named) spaces "Rich Client Platfrom" and "Portal". Their only real intersection is managed in the infrastructure, which has a seperate space.

This way people can skim through their own topics without finding lots of other stuff they don't need for their work and without hiding all but "their" topics, getting a tree for stuff they really use.

But it really depends on the amount of projects you have, the amount of people using Confluence and so on. It's just what seems to work fine for us.