Ideas / Best practises for dynamic linking of content

Question

Hi there

We're currently doubling down on our IT documentation in Confluence. A main topic of discussion is: Where should things be documented and how do we make it dynamic enough to avoid duplicated content. Let's take the following example:

I have a firewall on which I run services such as Network filtering, ssl-vpn and so on. Now, ssl-vpn itself relies again on other services outside the firewall. Let's say some on-prem gateway and a domain. In my understanding it now makes sense to create a page for the firewall and one page for ssl-vpn. But what I also want is some kind of relation between the two pages so when I open the firewall document I always know what services are related to it. How do you guys do this? The whole thing should be as dynamic as possible so I don't need to update multiple pages whenever I perform a change.

Here's what I've tested:

* tag pages and use the tag filter macro on the firewall page. So far my favorite
* Embed page: Can make a document huge and still need to manually add another header
* excerpt macro

Do you have any smarter ideas on how to achieve that?

Cheers!

Kristian Klima_gtcuat · Answer

Hi @Sal

I'd explore 2-3 options depending on how 'wholesale' you need to share the content and how granular your shareable bits and piece are.

* excerpt / page inclusions - standard Confluence feature but can get out of hand if you scale up big time
* synchronizing selected pages among the spaces - Space Sync for Confluence app by Ricksoft. You can have one space Network, SSL, Whatever. You sync (push) selected pages from Network to SSL and Whatever, selected pages from SSL to Network and Whatever, etc. 
This way, those 'shared' pages will have their home spaces, when you update them, just sync them with their pendants in the target spaces. 
* Scroll Documents with Variants + Scroll Viewport - all by K15t.
This is the most sophisticated solution but the most versatile.* Documents allows you to create 'documents' - virtual groups of pages within a space.
* You can also create 'page groups' - pages that make sense together.
* Combine the above.
* Variants is a conditional content tool - you set the condition for a page/part of the page that determines in which document the said page/paragraph appears.
* Viewport puts it all together into a documentation site.* So you would have a proper doc site, with microsites for individual products - each represented by one Scroll document that contains specified page groups and conditional content.

Now, a specific example. Two years ago, I created a proof concept for https://www.turris.cz/en/ using the Scroll apps.

They had three devices which shared about 60% of the OS. Then there were overlaps between random pairs. And there was unrelated content that they wanted to share in individual docs. I was able to have it all in one Confluence space and just use the scroll apps to determine which content appears in which devices' docs.

Stiltsoft support · Answer

Hi @Sal ,

If you are planning to work with tables, we can suggest trying our Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence app.

With the help of our Table Excerpt/Table Excerpt Include macros you'll be able to

* collect multiple-row tables from other pages and generate a combined report on your master page (use it as an advanced version of the Page Properties/Page Properties Report macros)
* reuse your tables on other pages and/or perform filtration/aggregation/visualization of your tables (using other handy macros provided by the app) and reuse the result table views and charts

If you are not familiar with the app, please book a call with the team - we'll show you the use cases live.

Marc -Devoteam- · Answer

HI @Sal

You could to look into Confluence databases, or look at discover-relevant-content-with-related-pages or insert-links-and-anchors