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What is the best way to organize a company Confluence?

Martim Schnack

Really having a hard time and wondering what is the best way to organize our company Wiki (we are using Atlassian Confluence). Here’s what we are doing now (SCREENSHOT): a space for each company (company A, company B, company C), a space for each product (Product 1, Product 2, Product 3), a space for each department (sales, marketing, engineering, etc.), and “Learning and Development” with content related to learning material.

We think it is clustered, messy… making hard to find the things we are looking for. We think we are reinventing the wheel, making things harder than they need to be.

How it should be organized? Do you structure the content into buckets, or leave the content “free”? What is your suggestion for content structure?

Accepted answers

Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]

I'll give you the classic consultant answer: "It depends." I generally see clients use Confluence for their internal documentation. The way that most people want to structure their permissions and content seems to be team based. If you have content consumers (like customer support, for example,) that need to see things neatly grouped by product, you might want to go that route, but most people's "product" is really the product (pun intended) of multiple teams work, so this model tends to not work so well for the teams. The teams want to see the stuff that they care about and aren't so interested in other people's stuff usually.

All comments

Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]

Rodrigo Girardi Adami

Hi Martim,

In addition to Dave answer, there is a page with some tips on organizing the contents.

And I can also give you some examples in our documentation website http://confluence.atlassian.comon which you can see the page tree structure and organization of major categories.

cheers,

Rodrigo

Mick Davidson_o2ws6w

Martim,

Adding to what's already written above, I also think there is an element of compromise. Confluence can't be all things to all people, so you will have to juggle your content until you've got it optimised for your user's needs, and accept that this isn't going to be perfect.

This won't suit all of the needs of everyone and perhaps won't achieve everything you'd like in terms of structure and grouping.

My tip is to draw a plan of how you want your content organised and linked, perhaps this will a bit like an ERD, then set that structure up and see how it works. You will probably need to tweek it a few times until it's as good as it can be though. This will take time and depends on how the content grows too.

In our case, the structure we had in several spaces a year ago is not what it is now. We've had to change our structure as the content changed and as our needs changed. This is one of the great things about using Confluence: it's not set in stone - as you grow, it grows with you.

Don't forget you can link from one area to another, so while content might be split into different spaces etc, there's no reason why each home page can't contain links to related info. We do this ourselves by creating panels with a clear and obvious headings, then add links (with explanations) to content that is kept elsewhere.

Cheers and good luck.

Maggie Modersohn

Hi Martim, This may come a little late, but we're hosting a webinar around your question on December 9th. You can learn more about it here: http://bit.ly/1yiL7Zk

Nancy Jaiswal

Hi Martim,

I think our solution perfectly match your requirement. (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.hivestone.confluence.plugins.spacehierarchy/server/overview ) For your case we will create a space for each company (Company A, Company B ...). Now we will create more space like 'Product of Company A', 'Departments of Company A' etc. We will mark parent space of 'Product of Company A' and 'Departents of Company A' as 'Company A'. Similarly we will mark parent of Product spaces or departments respectively. This way hierarchy of spaces will be created and this hierarchy will make spaces organized and navigation between spaces very easy. Above Hierarchy will be displayed like

Company A
Products of Company A
Product 1
Product 2
Departments of Company A
Department 1
Department 2
Company B ........

This hierarchy will be links to spaces which will server as central location of spaces and can be used for easy navigation. Best part is that it will also show breadcrumbs in form of hierarchy of spaces which makes navigation between spaces very convenient. We have also kept in view the performance of overall system and our solution does not impact the performance. You can check details of plugin at http://www.hivestone.com/space-hierarchy--breadcrumbs-for-confluence

Hope this helps.

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