First impressions with folders?

[Ned Lindau]

Welcome to the beta! For those of you that have created folders so far, what are your initial reactions? How will you use them versus parent pages?

[Scott Beeson]

I probably won't use them at all. I don't really see a benefit, only disadvantages. For starters, I noticed in the macros I checked that I cannot filter by "parent folder" like I can for "parent page". Once this is added, I might consider trying them again, but it seems unlikely.

[Ned Lindau]

@Scott Beeson _CIS_ thank you for this feedback! Can you provide a bit more info / send a screen recording of how you set these macros up with pages so we can properly scope the work to do the same for folders?

[Scott Beeson]

[Scott Beeson]

Page Properties and Page Properties Reports are literally the only reason I still use Confluence. There's nothing else like it. Please don't leave them behind.

[Ned Lindau]

Nice, thank you!

[Scott Beeson]

Here's a more real-world use case.

[Abel Lineberger]

When your team obsessively takes meeting minutes with every vendor and every internal discussion, and consistently checks back to track accountability and delivery, you end up with a lot of meeting notes!

In the past the tree structure would look like:

• Meeting notes (love the task tracking!)
  • (Topic Category: Vendor, Product Interview, Roadmap Review, etc) 
    • (Year) - blank page
      • (Quarter) - blank page
        • dozens of pages

Now, we can ditch those blank pages.
Nice QOL improvement.

[Scott Beeson]

But what actually changes other than

• You can't actually view the blank page (now a folder)
• You can't define a custom icon for the folder

Like, functionally, isn't it identical?

[Filip Callewaert]

@Abel Lineberger  >> transform this into a Confluence Database!! One single list with all your metadata in columns. Filter for the right metadata values then (or create views)...

[Filip Callewaert]

Then Confluence Databases got introduced (2024) -- that is revolutionary: goodbye 2D, welcome metadated information bucket. 

But now, the introduction of folders confuses me and, more than that, it brings me back to a mental model of a 2D information management of the eighties (files in folders). I was so much surprised when I first met Confluence as it introduced a completely different mental model of hyperlinked webpages, different from Microsoft's, Apple's (and later Google's) dominating mental model... Ok, page trees were still very 2D too, but Databases meant the real evolution of the product to me.

I think that the Confluence product team lost an authentic vision on the product. What is its dna? I had a quite clear vision about that till now. It's merely getting a patchwork of "successful" features (Notion's databases, files and folders, smart links, whiteboards ...) 

Moreover, when I see folders, I want to store files in it -- but that is not possible at all here - I tried to drag and drop files from my desktop, and it only created chaos: it opened browser tabs showing the pictures, but it did not bring the expected behaviour of adding files into this folders. 

[Ned Lindau]

Hey @Filip Callewaert — thanks for the feedback. You mention that you use databases. Do you use whiteboards or smart links at all?

A common piece of feedback we've gotten from customers is the desire to organize their content using a think that is not also a piece of content itself. We've heard this especially from folks that are using more than just pages, as it seems less than logical to organize e.g. whiteboards and databases underneath a page.

Does this resonate with you at all? Or are you saying that you will primarily use databases for ad hoc "organization" going forward and encourage your users to rely on them over the page tree to find what they're looking for?

[Filip Callewaert]

Hi @Ned Lindau ,

Thx for this context. Yes, I use whiteboards and databases, and in that context I do understand the value of folders, but now I organize these items using (parent) pages. 

[Lars Maehlmann _avono_]

@Filip Callewaert—My first imppression: I completely agree. Due to the massive amount of data, I don't think it's feasible to organize data in folders anymore. It may work for one person, but for teams, larger groups, or departments, it feels like we're back in the late 90s. I also prefer not to treat it like a file-sharing system and would recommend using Database and other Confluence macros to organize the data.
I will play around with it a bit further because I have to overcome my prejudices. 
Confluence's simple structure: space and pages got me in love with it and the flexibility to work with metadata got me into it.

@Ned Lindau 

>> over the page tree to find what they're looking for?

In my experience, people have a hard time finding information through the page tree if there are more than 10 pages below a parent page. It just gives you the impression it might be possible because you are used to it.

[Julian Xhokaxhiu]

I decided to join this Beta because in my own ingenuity I thought Folders at least would allow you to have two folders with the same name in the same space ( but not tree ).

Apparently that's not the case, and this to be honest makes the entire feature pointless. Is like forcing me to have only one Folder with one name IN THE ENTIRE PC. How on earth is this reasonable to you?

If you want to make this feature useful at least, allow us to have folders with the same name in the entire space, but not on the same tree ( as much as you're not allowed to create two folders with the same name in a folder on Windows, Mac or Linux ).

Thank you in advance.

[Ned Lindau]

@Julian Xhokaxhiu thanks! Can you give me an example here? How would you like to set your hierarchy up in an ideal world?

[Julian Xhokaxhiu]

Sure, here an example:

• Engineering
  • Architecture
    • Guidelines and Principles <-- OK
      • Backend
      • Frontend
    • ...
  • Deployment and Release
    • Guidelines and Principles <-- CLASH
      • Backend
      • Frontend
  • Development
    • Guidelines and Principles <-- CLASH
      • Backend
      • Frontend
  • Infrastructure
    • Guidelines and Principles <-- CLASH
      • Observability
      • CICD
      • ...

Hope this helps, thank you!

[Ned Lindau]

You're the best — super helpful, thank you! Will get back to you here.

[Scott Beeson]

If Confluence allowed duplicate folder names it would be the primary reason I would actually use them.

One of my biggest complaints is the inability to have a common "folder" structure for various things, like Julian's example.

I just recently created about 50 separate spaces just so I could have "Customer > Devices". It would be nice to be able to have duplicate page/folder names.

[Julian Xhokaxhiu]

I agree with @Scott Beeson _CIS_ I know it's about Folders here, but if we could extend it to Pages as well that would be even better. I'm not sure why Confluence is the only tool that have this issue ( probably because of how you generate URLs, but this could be easily fixed by using titles as a "display name" for Pages independently on how they are managed internally in the node tree ).

[Laurie Sciutti]

Still reviewing...

[Sara Tucker]

The removal of the empty page is great! One thing we would like to see in the future is being able to reference a folder in macros like child pages. 

[Ned Lindau]

Nice, thanks @Sara Tucker! Which macros would you most like to see folders work with (aside from child pages)? 

[Scott Beeson]

Any macro that currently allows you to filter by page (ancestor, parent, etc) should also allow you to filter by a folder!

[Randy O_Neal]

Initial reaction: This is how it should have been since day 1.  I've used countless parent pages to act as folders... and this just flat out works.  I'll try more shortly, but I'm very pleased with what I see so far!

[Darrel Jackson]

Just installed the beta today. My initial impression is great. It has been a pain in the past to crate fully fledged pages using the editor when all I want to do is a simple grouping. This is doubly so in nested hierarchies. For example, we'll have weekly meeting minutes that are filed in the hierarchy as Meeting Minutes -> Year -> Quarter -> Page per weekly meeting.

I do see the role of Page Properties and Page Properties Reports when you need to summarise and report on your page hierarchy that has structure metadata. However, I'm conscious that I only do that for around 20% of the page hierarchies I create. The rest of them I want a simple, low-effort grouping and Folders is a great solution for that.

[Kelsey Easterbrooks]

I love being able to use the new folders as I personally strongly dislike using blank pages as "folders".

As far as improvements go:

• I echo what @Julian Xhokaxhiu said about wanting to be able to re-use the same names for folders.
• Would love to be able to show some visual difference in the folders like we can by adding emojis to page titles. (I commented on the new thread related to this as well.)

[Justin Chan]

For JSM help centre, I am currently using pages for parking/nesting purposes and to automate page labels. Problem with this method is the parent page is always shown on JSM help centre. I can't restrict parent page as child pages will not be discoverable.

Folders will help me solve this problem. However, it caused problems with page label automation.

Confluence automation will need to incorporate folders in the automation rule.
1. {{smart value}} for folders
2. folder condition?
3. Trigger: folder moved/archived/copied/etc

Enable folders to have labels would be useful too. Use case - pages in folder will inherit folder labels through automation

[Justin Chan]

@Ned Lindau will we be able to attach labels (similar to page labels) to the folder soon?