Confluence best practices

Question

Hello Atlassian Community

Has anyone put together a list of best practices for Confluence?  I'm thinking topics like naming conventions, page ownership, recomended formating (table of contents), archival, etc.

We don't have a wiki libarian/housekeeper so I'm hoping to put together some "rules of engagement" for folks to follow.  Our house is getting cluttered.....

Thanks in advance.

Kate Jobe · Answer

Good question Matt. I am on the same page. We are using Confluence and JIRA. Although not everything we do feeds back into JIRA. In addition to projects, we are using Confluence as an internal knowledge base. The spaces are organized by department. I want to create a home page directory that is a little easier for people to use with categories and quick links to hot projects and key topics.  The more information we add the harder it is to find something. Any suggestions on best practices? Has any published a best practices example for this kind of use? Thanks!

Tom McKenzie2 · Answer

Good point Matthew, we use it as an internal knowledge base (not externally facing). There's combination of things we know (specifications) and things are trying to figure out (ideas).  I think that's one of our problems is folks aren't sure what the state of a page is.  I'm things like the product requirements template header widget which provide an status, owner, etc are probably part of what I'm looking for.

Also this guide covers alot of the topics I'm interested in.

Matthew J. Horn · Answer

That's a huge topic, and the answers depend greatly on the way you use Confluence: do you use it as an internal knowledge base? External documentation? A free form wiki for sharing ideas? As you can see, everything you mentioned (naming conventions, page ownership, formatting, and archiving) have entirely different approaches based on how you use Confluence in the first place.

Maybe you can explain a little more about how you use it, and then some community members can provide some of their own input.