Do's, Don'ts and lessons learned with Confluence?

Jennifer Magoon

We are transitioning from a number of various knowledge bases to Confluence. Has anyone done this? Do you have any recommendations for do's, don'ts and lessons learned? 

Rob Woodgate

Hi Jennifer,

Yes, I've done this.  There are lots of lessons learned and gotchas (too many to put here), but they largely boiled down to things like:

• If you're a technical person, get a content person in before you move anything.  They'll spot issues you won't.
• If you're a content person, get a technical person in before you move anything.  They'll spot issues you won't.
• Plan your space structure, if you can, because you move things in.  It's pretty annoying having a structure set up and working only to find it doesn't scale to accommodate what you're transferring and you have to move things around again.
• Automate as much as you can (some wikis have export tools and Confluence has built in Word import functionality which is very good).
• Bring as much metadata over as possible, especially who last edited [whatever you're importing] and when.
• If multiple people are bringing stuff in, agree on common naming conventions, page structure, and labels.
• On the subject of labels, use them to say where a Confluence page came from, e.g. wiki name, shared drive, SharePoint, or wherever.
• Consider adding smaller documents as attachments rather than extracting the contents.  This will greatly reduce your import time and allow you to turn off [old system] much quicker.  You can then turn the attachments into actually pages over time if you want to.
• Manually porting things over can be boring and a lot of people won't do it right because of this.  Only get people who really enjoy doing this sort of thing to copy things over.
• Keep your old repositories for at least 6 months, just in case.  Transfer them to a portable hard drive that an admin locks in a secure cupboard if necessary, but don't "move and delete" because you'll regret it (even if no-one needs the back up you'll always be fretting that someone will need the back up).  If after 6 months (or whatever time frame you're comfortable with) you haven't needed the back-up, get rid of it.

There are 100 little things as well, most of which will be context dependent.  If you get stuck ask a question here; if you get really stuck try support.atlassian.com.  They're very, very good at answering, fixing, helping and generally supporting