Confluence's recap: Best practices and advanced features for efficient knowledge management

[#1]

Managing Confluence for hundreds or thousands of users, each with unique needs, is a difficult task.

Whether implementing a corporate intranet, a document repository, or even a collaborative project workspace, you can design Confluence to accomplish different goals. It all boils down to how you and your team structure and organize information across the site. 

It’s even more crucial to have a clear and structured approach to knowledge management at the advent of Atlassian Intelligence. With relevant and accurate content, you can enable teams to leverage the power of AI for instant access to information for any purpose.  

We’ll review some of the best practices and Confluence features for efficient knowledge management.

🏗 Building a solid and adaptive foundation that can scale with your teams 

The key to effective knowledge management in Confluence lies in structure. Imagine a vast library with no organization, books scattered haphazardly. Like in a library, effective knowledge management requires clear categories, intuitive navigation, and consistent naming conventions. This makes it easier for users to find the information they need, regardless of their specific purpose or role.

Let’s start with the basics:

• Spaces: You can structure the spaces that mirror your business functions, projects, and teams, even for individual use with personal space. This helps to compartmentalize information for better permission controls and content management.
• Pages and subpages: Utilize a hierarchical structure for organizing content within each space. This allows for both broad overviews and deep dives into specific topics.
• Labels and categories: Use labels and categories to further categorize information and enable more granular search and filtering.

 Regardless of how you might organize work into spaces and pages, the next important tip is to tie them together through a centralized homepage. You can utilize navigational macros or smart links to build an interconnected web of similar or related content, no matter where they live. That way, even if your site evolves over time, your team can still easily find relevant information following these links or page labels.

🔮 Atlassian Intelligence in Confluence: Unleashing the power of information

The advent of Atlassian Intelligence adds a new dimension to knowledge management in Confluence. The best part is you can enjoy Confluence AI's powerful features where you’re already doing work: from the editor or through Confluence search. 

• Instant access: AI-powered search gives you immediate answers through search, so more going through each search result to look for the right information.
• Quick insights: Leverage page summary to save time on reading long content, plus the ability to generate meeting notes and action items. It can also demystify company-specific concepts, jargon, or acronyms on the spot.
• Optimized content creation: Let AI do the initial draft to get your creative juice flowing! Using AI suggestions, you can quickly spin up content based on prompts - no worries about writer’s block!

Read more about Confluence AI here: Use Atlassian Intelligence to help write or edit content 

As you can see, the effectiveness of Atlassian Intelligence relies heavily on the existing content on your site. Imagine having tons of pages with contradicting content due to a lack of content life cycle management, it won’t help AI generate the most reliable information. 

So, we’ll tackle the most important topic next: content management.

🗄 Best practices for content management

There are many common practices you’ve heard a lot about: using page templates to get started quickly, leveraging macros to build engaging pages, establishing governance and content workflows, etc. In fact, Atlassian has compiled the complete resource on Confluence best practices.

We’ll highlight only the key learnings from our experience maintaining internal and external Confluence content.

• Content ownership: You can easily assign or transfer page ownership to ensure accountability and quality for important content.
• Content moderation: Implement moderation processes to ensure the accuracy and relevance of information shared on your Confluence. Utilize native features like page status and automation rules (Premium feature) to maintain page relevancy. 
• Content discoverability: Content is only useful when it’s getting seen. You’d want to encourage more users to review and share content openly across the site. Use macros that embed content from other pages can be a great way to achieve this.   

🎊 New Year’s resolution: Tidy up Confluence for improved navigation and content management experience

We’re excited about the future of Confluence AI and how to make the most of it in 2024. If you’re looking to revamp your site to start taking advantage of recent Confluence feature improvements, we’ve got your back!

We’ve developed Pages Manager for Confluence to help you:

• Get a birds-eye view of content from all spaces across your Confluence site
• Review the space list and restructure page hierarchies right as simple as working on a spreadsheet - simply drag-and-drop
• Quickly gather information about your pages, such as authors, page status, labels, and restrictions 
• You can perform bulk page operations like copy, move, archive, or delete while auditing the page info
• Last but not least, the app will display alerts for old pages so you can consider updating them

You can use it completely free! If you have any suggestions to improve it for your team, we’d love to hear from you! 

Submit feature requests

[Brant Schroeder]

@Linh Pham_Ricksoft_Inc Great app.  I will take a look at it.  Glad to see the focus on creating great content not only for users but also for AI.  We often forget that AI is not magic but uses the information that we have already created.  If it is poor then we get poor AI recommendations.  

[Chris K]

Thank you @Linh Pham_Ricksoft_Inc, for this awesome guideline about knowledge and content management in confluence cloud! :)

To keep content organized and up to date is also a goal, which I strive to achieve. As a Data Center User, I am a bit sad not to have access to a lot of these awesome features like page owner, page status, Atlassian Intelligence, as well as your free app! Guess, I need to convince my colleagues to move to the cloud asap ;)

One question about "the app will display alerts for old pages so you can consider updating them":

How and to whom will these alerts be displayed? Is it possible to create rules, where page owners receive notifications to review outdated pages? I am thinking about something like a monthly email report, which includes links to the pages which need to be updated or archived.

Please let me allow one more question: When does a page receives the status "old"? Is this time frame configurable?

Greetings

Chris

[Linh Pham_Ricksoft_Inc]

@Chris K Thank you so much for the encouraging feedback! I agreed that Confluence Cloud is great :D 

One question about "the app will display alerts for old pages so you can consider updating them":

How and to whom will these alerts be displayed? 

Currently, the app will show the alert icon if the page was last updated more than 1 year ago. Any Confluence user will be able to see it:

Is it possible to create rules, where page owners receive notifications to review outdated pages?

When does a page receives the status "old"? Is this time frame configurable?

Both of these are excellent ideas! While the free app only offers basic alert notifications (configurable time frame is something we've planned for the future roadmap), we'd definitely want to add more capabilities as you suggested. 

While there are other Marketplace apps that can expertly address content life cycle management, we wanted to bring those capabilities into our app while keeping it simple and accessible by any users, not just Confluence admins.

I'm always happy to learn how the community members use and organizes Confluence so I trully appreciate you sharing your thoughts here :D 

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Chris K In the meantime, have you come across Better Content Archiving for Confluence? It's a go-to tool for Confluence content lifecycle management on both Data Center and Cloud with automatic page status, flexible notifications, advanced page ownership, and automatic archiving/deletion. The DC version has been helping customers realize Confluence content management best practices for 15 years now and the Cloud version is also gaining traction to implement their strategy.

While the cloud version is more flexible and focuses more on Confluence analytics, the Data Center version does automatic page statues, notifications, and Confluence page archiving as well.

I'm part of the team developing Better Content Archiving and I'm curious what you think!

[Patricia Modispacher (appanvil)]

Great insights! 🌟 Managing Confluence effectively is crucial, especially with the need for structured content management and streamlined collaboration. Have you considered Mantra as an intranet solution? Its advanced features could be just what your team needs for improved productivity and seamless knowledge sharing! 

[Softwaretao]

@Chris K, some data center AI apps have the similar features.

You can search on marketplace and try them out:

Jira AI DataCenter App: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=dataCenter&query=AI%20Jira

Confluence AI DataCenter App: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=dataCenter&query=AI%20Confluence