Best Practice for Managing Policies, Procedures, Manuals, etc?

[Nick Williams]

We've been using Confluence for a few years to manage all of our company Policies, Procedures, Forms, Training Manuals and more, but theres got to be a better way to do it.

Our current problem is duplicate content.

We have spaces broken into departments like, HR Policies Space, HR Procedures Space, Finance Policies Space, Finance Procedures Space, and so on. The problem comes in when users need to include a Policy or Procedure or Form inside another space.

Example: Our Employee Manual is its own space that contains tons of duplicate pages from all other spaces. Whenever a change is made on the original page in HR Policies, its up to the user to search out all the duplicates in manuals and make that same change.

Theres got to be a better way.

I would think a better option would be to embed the entire page of the HR Policy they are trying to use in the Employee manual, that way if a change is made to the original, it is mirror to all the manuals because its embedded. But I don't think you can even embed a page like this.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This is exactly why Confluence has always had an "include" macro.

When you identify a duplicate, delete the entire body of the duplicate and replace it with a simple "include: source of truth" macro.

[Nick Williams]

This is what I needed. Thanks a ton!

 Any suggestions as to the best structure to use?

Instead of us having 75 different spaces for "HR Policies", "HR Procedures", "Finance Policies", etc... I think it might be better to have 1 space that has all Policies and Procedures within it and then each space just uses that macro to organize those pages into other spaces?

[Peter DeWitt]

"Instead of us having 75 different spaces for "HR Policies", "HR Procedures", "Finance Policies", etc... I think it might be better to have 1 space that has all Policies and Procedures within it and then each space just uses that macro to organize those pages into other spaces?"  - I think this is the way to go.  I have used a similar approach for team status updates.  One space for the Status updates and includes back to the team spaces where each team can keep their own status up to date.

.pd

[Robert Reiner _smartics_]

In addition to the Include Macro Nic mentioned you could also use the Excerpt Macro and the Excerpt Include Macro in case you need to reuse only one part of a page.

In case you have even more complex single sourcing requirements, you could use a third party plugin that supports multi-excerpt.

[Davin Studer]

Related to the multi-excerpt macro that Robert mentioned is a free offering that does the same thing. It called the Include Content add-on.

[Dana Jansen]

I would recommend the use of a sub-space add-on that can help create a hierarchy for the spaces.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/de.communardo.confluence.plugins.subspace/server/overview

or

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.hivestone.confluence.plugins.spacehierarchy/server/overview