Distribute content to multiple spaces for cross-functional and external collaboration in Confluence

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Beyond knowledge sharing, Confluence also serves as an excellent platform for managing collaborative projects. 

Through Confluence, teams have instant access to organizational knowledge and the tools they need to bring ideas to life.

However, content collaboration on Confluence comes with its own challenges, especially for complex cross-functional projects. 

Imagine having multiple teams working in separate spaces to complete their deliverables. Meanwhile, your stakeholders want to track the project's progress in a central location. This maze of content often leads to siloed information, inefficient workflows, and potential miscommunication.

But you can overcome these challenges by streamlining content management with Confluence macros and add-ons. Continue reading to learn more.

Common pitfalls when collaborating on Confluence content  

As the number of pages and content within Confluence grows, maintaining a well-organized structure can become difficult. You might find this scenario familiar:

• Our organization has a central space to broadcast important news and document knowledge.
• Each project team has a dedicated space to record information and collaborate on deliverables.
• We also have a guest space to communicate with external clients and contractors. 

We often coordinate content work internally before publishing it in the guest space. The only way is to recreate the page and continuously update both pages when there are changes. 

If the site is not properly organized, teams struggle to navigate and find the information they need. Not to mention the manual efforts required to keep content synchronized, particularly for external collaboration. 🤯

Other organizations may prefer to organize spaces by projects and categories similar to Jira, on top of having a team-level structure. This is great for maintaining a content directory since you can easily search for pages by associating fields. But the trade-off is the lack of a holistic view of projects and teams constantly switching contexts.  

When multiple teams contribute content without coordination, it can lead to overlapping information or, worse, important message gets buried under layers of pages. And the impact can be imperative if outdated or inaccurate content persists.

In a collaborative environment involving multiple teams, projects, and departments, you’ll need to ensure relevant content is accessible to the right stakeholders.

Let’s explore the different ways you can create, share, and maintain content effectively.

💪 Streamline your Confluence workflows with better content collaboration tools 

In this section, we’ll dive into various project environments and how you can facilitate content collaboration for different purposes.

The first principle is making use of cross-linking and references. By bringing together relevant information, you also help create content traceability across spaces. 

Regardless of how you may structure your site, you can establish contextual connections across pages by linking or referencing the page content using these macros. 

Include page macro for referencing content from another page

This macro allows you to dynamically pull and display the content from a source page into a target page, providing a way to reuse information and maintain consistency across different spaces or pages.

 

Instead of duplicating information across multiple pages, you can create a single source page and include it wherever needed.

Children display macro for displaying another page tree

In case you only need to provide an overview of related content, this macro comes in handy. You can list and display the child pages of a parent page. 

For example, when we want to gather all meeting notes under the project reporting page:

 

Similar to the “Include page,” this macro automatically reflects any changes made to the source parent page as well.

By referencing pages this way, you’ll avoid creating duplicated content and ensures information accuracy throughout the Confluence instance.

To leverage the power of these macros, you’d need to ensure team members are aware of these available resources and able to search for the right content when they need it. 

🤝 What about external collaboration?

Thanks to the single-space guest access, you can involve external stakeholders in specific projects or initiatives without providing them with full access to your Confluence instance.

As mentioned in our use case previously, our team often cross-publish the same content to an external space. But it often causes confusion around the page’s originality - whether this content is provided by guests or by our teammates. 

While we can rely on Confluence macros to optimize this process, it’s not always possible since our work requires frequent communication and changes to the final deliverables. 

As you can imagine, whenever someone updates a project page, we’ll need to be alerted and communicate these changes and revise the external version. It’s extremely time-consuming and error-prone.

That’s why we created an add-on called Space Sync for Confluence to address this problem. This app allows you to distribute the same content to multiple locations, including external sites.

🙌  Automate content distribution with Space Sync for Confluence

While Confluence macros are extremely helpful for cross-sharing content, it doesn’t accommodate complex knowledge management implementation. 

Say, you create an internal resource page that you think will be beneficial for two project teams. You can either share the page manually or request the respective space admins to re-publish the content for their teams. 

Instead, you only need to sync content between these spaces, and with just a single click, you can instantly publish this page to multiple spaces.

You’ll only need to configure the app once and select the spaces where you want the content to be synchronized.

Whenever you need a page to be distributed to other spaces or sites, simply sync the content once it’s published.

Or, if you previously worked on an internal space that needs to be shared with external users, it’s possible to clone the entire space using the bulk sync feature. So you don’t have to manually create a new guest space. It’s super helpful, especially for large spaces.

Of course, you can control the user permissions to ensure that only authorized users can perform the actions. 

By enhancing content discoverability, minimizing redundancy, promoting collaboration, ensuring consistency, and easing site maintenance, efficient content distribution fosters a positive user experience and contributes to overall productivity.

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🏆 Try Space Sync for Confluence for free. 

🎥  Watch this explainer video to see how it works in action. Or you can learn more about the app here: Sync Pages over Spaces Using Space Sync for Confluence