Project Report Pages - Versioning

Question

We are using Confluence pages for project managers to provide weekly status updates on their projects.    Various values from the reports are reflected automatically in a programme summary page.   However, we need to be able to easily go back week by week to review previous reports. i.e. see last weeks or 8 weeks ago entire version of the page.

Any ideas on best practice here?  Should we be creating a new page each week and creating a table of contents or something to easily find previous weeks reports?

Max Foerster - K15t · Answer

Hi @Mark Gabriel

Creating and maintaining this kind of "snapshots" is not a trivial thing to achieve in Confluence. Especially if you would like to collect this information from multiple pages to build an up-to-date report every week, I recommend trying our app Scroll Documents. There are two main benefits I see for your use case in combination with the app:

First, you can create a "document" that bundles the project documentation. You can combine a whole space, a page tree, or single pages into this document. Take the program summary page and related project pages, for example.

As Scroll Documents adds versioning and other authoring features, you can start saving a new version of this document every week to have a snapshot. Creating a new version will take all the pages of the working version, create copies, and organize them in the space. You can even automatically add restrictions in the process if necessary.

I made a quick example of what it could look like in Confluence when you're switching between versions of a page and a document. I did not try to recreate a report, though. 😄

Additionally, you can start comparing versions with each other and track changes. The comparison tool will then highlight changes made to the pages that are part of the document. This relieves you from navigating and comparing page versions in Confluence on individual pages.

Also, this document can easily be exported as a whole if you want to share this report outside of Confluence. I'd say, with this approach, the challenge is not how to implement core Confluence features for gathering status updates. You can use any feature that pulls in data from pages. Page properties, includes, excerpts, you name it. Subsequently, you continue to update the documentation that is constantly being worked on with new statuses and create a snapshot of the status quo by saving a new version every week. 🤔😄 I hope that my response was already helpful to you. Feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions! :)

Best, Max

Mark Gabriel_mife5g · Answer

Hi @Sayed Bares [ServiceRocket] So today we send MS Word documents weekly to various recipients that show project status.  Recipients can easily refer to a previous report if need be.   The use case is to replicate this in Confluence so that the Recipients can reference the report for example from 6 weeks ago

Sayed Bares [ServiceRocket] · Answer

Hi @Mark Gabriel , could you elaborate further on your use case? specifically the review part? if you only want to check the page versions then you could look into page's history. I personally wouldn't recommend adding a new page for each week, unless you really need to.