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How do you keep Confluence Whiteboards organized?

Mirek

Confluence Whiteboards seems fantastic for workshops, planning, and brainstorming but when teams use them heavily, they can probably quickly turn into clutter. Do you agree?

I’m curious how others manage them in practice:

Do you have naming conventions, tags, or folder-like structures?
Are Whiteboards mostly temporary, or do some become long-term references?
How do you make it easy for your team to find boards that are actually useful later?

Would love to hear some tips, lessons learned or even examples/screenshots from your expirience!

Comments

Vitali Charin

Hi @Mirek

If you are working with many Whiteboards, you should follow the same best-practices as with Confluence pages:

1. Organize them in the right space, underneath a page or folder it belongs to.

2. Have your folders or parent pages by date or topic. For example yearly folders and monthly sub-folders with pages and whiteboards underneath.

3. Use a standard naming convention in order to standardize page/whiteboard names and to make it easier to find them.

4. Link your pages/whiteboards to Jira work items and/or other pages.

5. Have dedicated places where your whiteboards are located in order to limit the possible places to a minimum.

-> If you can not find the whiteboard manually, you could use Rovo to find the right whiteboard/page.

Regarding your questions:

Do you have naming conventions, tags, or folder-like structures?
-> Folders are working the best, you can find more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/use-folders-to-organize-your-work/
Are Whiteboards mostly temporary, or do some become long-term references?
-> It depends on the content. Some are important for your team/management to keep and others can be removed automatically after some time, for example with a Confluence space automation rule that regularly checks obsolete pages/whiteboards: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/edit-copy-and-delete-automation-rules-in-confluence-cloud/
How do you make it easy for your team to find boards that are actually useful later?
-> Each team has a dedicated Confluence space or at least a dedicated section within a space (if it is shared with other teams). You should keep it simple and limit the places where your team should save pages and whiteboards in Confluence. The more possible places you have, the harder it will get to keep it organized.

This is just my experience and I hope there will be inputs from others as well.

But for the moment, I hope I could help you a little bit.

Best regards,

Vitali

Dave LIAO

@Mirek - funny you mention "tags". It's not possible to add a label to a whiteboard, is it? 🥲

I'm trying to see if there's a JAC ticket for Confluence Whiteboards requesting that, but doesn't seem to be? 😂

Also - love Vitali's reply!

Mirek

Thank you @Vitali Charin for your input. It is very useful for discussion.

Whenever there is a new thing started to be widely used I start think about scaling, so in case of whiteboards it is hard to filter them quickly for admins to manage (on site and space level), correct?

So the think that I am afraid is how this would look like after few years of usage when you cannot simply say what is the most useful (used) whiteboard.. what is not used at all.. linked or not linked.. history is removed after 30 days..

Something similar like for Boards in Jira.. after time you end up with so many stale Boards that nobody know who is the owner and is this still used..

So I would like to avoid making bad choices and organize this is a good way before it gets bad ..

My first though was a little bit like your #5 - Have dedicated places where your whiteboards are located in order to limit the possible places to a minimum.

I was thinking about one dedicated space with only whiteboards enabled and everyone that would like to use it need to do it there.. And inside somehow manage it permissions based on folders or page structure and restrictions..

Thanks to that maybe I would already know which team or unit is responsible for managing those and maybe somehow be able to maintain it when scaling.. at least that is the goal to easily maintain and find it in whole Confluence.

What do you think?

Mirek

@Dave LIAO - Nothing would surprise me on Cloud when things change all the time but on my side I had an option to label it

I have double check and looks like it is still there

Vitali Charin

Hi @Mirek

Yes, I understand. Maybe I just write some thoughts that came into my mind.

I think there will always be a remaining risk in all scenarios and you could check what options are more important to you. For example the dedicated whiteboard space has options to restrict on the whiteboard and folder/pages levels, but the space permissions need to be given to all users that would potentially create whitebords. One risk here is that whiteboards will be made visible to all by accident which should rather be restricted. If you allow teams to create their whiteboards in their own spaces usually the space permissions are already used to avoid this (one additional permission level on top in this scenario). Maybe anonymous access is also a relevant topic, which would work easier and safer in a dedicated space.

For cleanup purposes you could also delegate this to the teams instead of trying to clean it up on your own. It is easier for the authors to decide. On the other hand there is a risk that authors won't do it out of different reasons, but that applies to all kind of contents. The best would be to have self-organized teams, that take care of their own spaces. At the end it is in their own interest to have a clear and easy to navigate space, right? If there is a centralized space for whiteboards, there should be one space admin that takes care of a space that belongs to all. If you allow it in team spaces, you could give this responsibility to a team lead or dedicated team space admin.

The centralized whiteboard space would require the authors to switch between spaces, which could become unhandy after some time. For example, the team sits in a meeting and is viewing Confluence pages in their own space and then need to switch the space in order to create the whiteboard. Links in Jira issues would lead to the dedicated space and their own team space for all other content. This is not really a huge problem, but worth mentioning.

I would recommend you to think about all important criterias (permissions, cleanup, intuitive usage, etc.) and maybe even document it and from there decide what is more important to you. It's also important to listen to the users that will actually work with it. You could at the end present the advantages/disadvantages, make a suggestion to the users, and decide together which way to go. In both scenarios you could introduce some kind of rule for content authors on how to organize own pages/whiteboards that are not requried anymore. Maybe even as a part of an onboarding traninig/tutorial.

I think that is not the 100% solution, but hope I could help you a little bit with my thoughts. Just let me know if you have further questions.

Best regards,

Vitali

Becker_ Rene

Actually, we treat them just like regular pages and keep them pinned to the originating page (sub, link etc.) - if there is one. More often than not, they are standalone. If you are familiar with presentations that are interactive (moving along a canvas while talking, to follow a train of thought), you will learn to appreciate them. Works great for us and increases accessbility.

Also, for us, it would be a shame to "lock them away" into a single space. That would require a lot of crosslinking.

I think the most important thing is - the first step basically - to show users, where they change the name of a whiteboard :-) Naming them accordingly will come naturally. (for example, we name all pages YYYY-MM-DD - <Title> -> same for Whiteboard).

Best regards

Ulf Rask

@Mirek

Think about this for each whiteboard, document or whatever you and your organisation is creating.

Will this information become...

more relevant over time -> good candidate to be "pinned" / referred to from some or several master pages.
or will it become less relevant as time pass -> maybe just a note in some communication channel / plog update in confluence like "this has happened" is enough

Also consider deleberate linking pages that links to other pages.

This can be manual selection and linking. (team or role specific handpicked)
Lists of pages based on macros (context specific sorted on latest of labes XX or all as an example)

Whats the purpose of the document?

specific brainstorming session thats over within one hour.
medium term thinker board that allows for collaboration across a couple of weeks.
The source of truth, like an organisation map, thats always updated as things change.

Regarding "where" it should live I prefer to keep information close to where it is consumed and is also easy manage access.

Liz Tanner

Opposite: Whiteboards are the organizational tool. Lucidchart preceded Confluence Whiteboards by 15 yrs and were instant hits w/ asynch/remote, content dev teams. Before Lucidchart included templates, we built branded Scrum boards, PM charts, slide/animation storyboarding, wireframing (done in Figma now), etc.

Full content lifecycles--planning, design/dev, to QA--in Whiteboards create complete post-project records, i.e. "source of truth" docs, that collaborators may self-service (if admin allows) by exporting all or selected board parts in PNG, PDF, and JPG. During the project, clients, teams, and leaders can self-service progress reports since they can view or export the board anytime. Whiteboards have RBACs (role-based access controls), so admins can grant view permissions w/o editing to client & stakeholders on the same board copy designers/devs w/ edit & build permissions

Pragmatically, Whiteboards will clutter the same as all other content types if an admin doesn't enforce SOPs and role guidelines, or consistent controls across all spaces, content types, and assets. Poorly controlled Spaces, Whiteboards, Pages, Blogspots, Live docs, etc. will all result in a cluttered mess.

1st & 3rd Q&As Relate: Training program Planning docs include the "Course Content Plan/Outline" requiring client approval. Nomenclature, content architecture, tags/labels, and standardization are in it. I usually copy it to a client's Knowledge Base (and copy the backup to a file manager). Label, type, and title in saved CQL filters makes team board retrieval easy; admins can also use CQL to easily retrieve all Whiteboards with "type=whiteboard". Since teams usually have their own Spaces, I keep their specific filters to their Space.

2nd Q&A: That is all usage dependent! My personal Whiteboard (Lucidspark) is my testing ground that gets wiped frequently. You requested examples, so I linked a Lucidchart PDF export of "QA Review Process" I designed for a former team. The board lasted ~4-yrs!

Kelly Fiorella Drozd_0sdd6j

Right now, I usually cross-link or embed whiteboards into related pages and try to keep them nested under relevant parent pages.

It would be really helpful if there were a way—at the top of each space—to easily view all whiteboards within that space, or even across the entire instance.

I’ve been considering creating a dedicated section in my page tree just to house all whiteboards.

A lot of my team tends to prefer Miro, and I think part of that is because whiteboards as a page type can get a bit lost - people don't think of confluence first when it comes to visualizing - but we have some converts

Don’t get me wrong—I love having whiteboards so closely integrated with my work. I’d just love to see some improvements around how they’re organized and surfaced.

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