Does anyone have any jump starts for SaaS B2B product documentation and training in Confluence?

Annette Kramer_easdlq

I took the short training on setting up documentation and knowledge spaces, but are there jump start resources or community members who have started from scratch before and could help me avoid pitfalls. We are new to using confluence for this, I am learning how to use Confluence to begin with.  But I have a tech background, so I am willing to dig in.  I tried looking for this in the community but searching on "documentation" or "product documentation" brings up a ton of irrelevant links. This is a training and documentation team, very new and green - not all hired. Small-ish company with a great demand planning software tool - just never invested in creating documentation and training. I want to help catch us up. Thank you in advance!

Barbara Szczesniak

@Annette Kramer Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I have 30+ years as a Technical Writer and have been documenting a product for my company in Confluence for the last 11 months or so (my first time writing in Confluence). 

You don't say if you're using Cloud or Data Center. I am using Cloud, so my comments below may be influenced by that.

Some things I've done/learned:

• When I created my space, I selected the Documentation Space blueprint. The main thing this gave me was a page that I use as my Overview page for the Space. It has a Live Search macro for readers to search within the space.
• I then made templates for a couple of pages. I called them Chapter_page and Non-chapter_page. My "chapter" pages are the Parent pages for a section and have a summary with links to the main topics in that section. For normal pages, I have a 3-panel layout at the top with Table of Contents macros in the first 2 panels—1 for Headings in the page and 1 for the heading level I use for my procedure titles. 
• Then I just created pages in my outline: Chapter page, then all the child pages under that page. In a few places, I have gone down an additional level where the content lends itself to warranting separate pages. Note: I started out just making all the draft pages, but I found that, if you want to link to a page from another page, you have to publish the page.
• There are 3rd-party apps that you can use to help with styling and layout, but for most you are charged per Confluence user (not just the users that are actually using the app).
• I am making this documentation for our internal users, but we will be using a 3rd-party app to generate a web site of the documentation when it is published, since 1) these people only need to read the documentation; 2) I can have a drafting location in Confluence and publish the updates to the web site; and 3) paying for the app for the number of Confluence users we do have is less than paying for Confluence licenses for all of the people who just need to view the documentation.
• If you are going to be making your documentation available to guests or the public, you should review the Confluence documentation related to these types of users.

Hope this helps. Others may have additional tips. Please feel free to ask additional questions here.