Seeking advice/examples for starting a Knowledge Base from scratch in Confluence

Question

Hello!

Our team is starting to explore creating a brand new internal Knowledge Base in Confluence to become the single source of truth for all of our internal job aids and process related documentation.  Right now, documentation is scattered across many different platforms and not intuitive to find.

We've viewed the Atlassian documentation around Knowledge Bases in Confluences, but are still having a hard time on where to start.

Does anyone have any sample screenshots of internal KBs you've set up in Confluence you'd be willing to share for inspiration? Or any advice in general?

Thanks in advance!

Nikki

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

We are using Scroll Viewport from K15t: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211636/scroll-viewport-for-confluence?tab=overview&hosting=cloud

Nikki Hylton · Answer

This is super helpful - thank you @Barbara Szczesniak ! Would love to know which app you went with if you don't mind sharing.

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Nikki Hylton One thing I would advise you to think about up-front is how you are going to make the content available to your audience.

I have been using Confluence to write a user guide for one of my company's applications. When I started (about 16 months ago), we were using the Free Cloud plan, since I was basically the only one using Confluence and we could add a few reviewers while still on free.

The plan was that, once the documentation was ready to roll out to the rest of the company, we would move to the Standard plan, with licenses for all who needed to access the guide.

This brought up the question of how to update pages when needed in the future without all those end readers seeing the changes before we were ready to publish them.

Over the course of a year of participating in this community (thank you community for all your wisdom! 😀), I learned that there are 3rd-party apps that we could use to provide a website output that we could make available to our internal folks (you can also set it up for external readers).

It turns out that licenses for the 3rd-party app we chose for our people who will actually use Confluence for other purposes are much cheaper than getting Standard licenses for all the people who just need to read the documentation, so we decided to go that route.

Had I known up-front that we were going to do this, I could have avoided the hours and hours I spent figuring out how to work around some of the features in Confluence to format my docs how I wanted, as well as putting in features like TOC macros on each page that I now do not need (because my app provides alternatives or doesn't support some of the macros and features I used, and I am now spending time removing them.)