Looking for Best-Practices: SME Finder, Q&A Broadcast, and Team-to-Team Knowledge Flow

john coles

I am somewhat new to Confluence, and trying to understand some of the features and capabilities. It seems to be a great one-to-many tool, but I need help understanding the best option for a SME Finder, Q&A Broadcast capabilities, and Team-to-Team capabilities. I imagine there are features, or macros that can facilitate this, but what is the best-way to apply it across our organization? What is the best way you have tackled this?

1) Need: SME Finder

- I want to locate Subject-Matter-Experts (SMEs) via a simple search.

o For instance, I have a question about the Healthcare Industry handles XYZ Processes. Thus, I want to find the Healthcare SMEs.

2) Need: Q&A Broadcast

- Similar to a Message Board or Forum, I want to be able to post my question in a General Area or specific Space for others to help me resolve.

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3) Need: Team-to-Team Capabilities

- This is more around reporting. How do I know the teams/spaces that are most productive? Where is the Knowledge Flowing?

o How many people have visited a space?

o What is the most visited space?

o What is the most active space? (New Pages, New Posts, Replies, etc …)

o Who are the most active users? (Views, Replies, Creates, etc …)

o Most active Teams (and Inactive Teams)

o Different # of Contributors

Looking forward to your insight.

John

John Paz1

John,

Glad to see you're trying to think of the "why" about using Confluence; as an administrator, I wish everyone knew how they wanted to use the tool like how you're envisioning.

Now, as to your question..

1. SME Finder: There are a few ways to accomplish this, and I imagine combining them all would yield the best results.
   1. Make sure all your users entirely fill out their profile. Most people don't and won't unless you force them. So be prepared for pushback. But when you pitch the idea to them use this SME finder as your selling point. Confluence search does search user profiles as well, so if you were to search for "Software," you search results would have pages from the Software Development space, as well as the profiles of anyone with "Software" in their description. Results might vary if you have a dton of content.
   2. Have all your users post an "About Me" blog post in their personal space. This puts some extra fodder for the search engines.
   3. Create a User Directory page with a list of all the people to search. This is the most labor-intensive method, but is the most direct.
2. Q&A Broadcasts: Blogs! Blogs! Blogs!
   1. Here is some information about blogs in Confluence: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Working+with+Blog+Posts
   2. When in doubt, use the Public Service Announcement plugin to draw attention to your new blog posts.
   3. A more costly solution would be to get Confluence Questions, which is designed exactly for this purpose: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence-questions
3. Team-to-Team Capabilities: A few ways you can accomplish this.
   1. Google Analytics: you can get some third-party plugins or do it yourself with some Googling.
   2. View Tracker plugin: plugin allows you to add some macros on a wiki page to report on usage.
   3. Content Report macro: comes bundled with Confluence, and you can add labels to the pages you want to monitor and add this macro to a wiki page and set the parameters to the chosen label. This gives a tidy little table of simple usage statistics. 

Great questions! Good luck, and let me know how it turns out!