Top 5 Beginner Tips for Confluence

[#1]

1. Create Your Personal Space - Your personal space is your 'sandbox' or 'playground' where you can try out Confluence functionality.  Since this is your personal space you can determine who can or can not view it.
2. Take Advantage of the Atlassian Documentation - Atlassian provides a hub of great resources. These resources will give you all the information you need to get started with Confluence.  
   1. Documentation - User Guides and Tutorials
   2. Knowledge Base - Troubleshooting and how-to-articles
   3. User Community - Answers, Support and Inspiration
   4. Guides on Use Cases for Confluence 
3. Understand the Structure of Conflunece - Confluence's base structure is comprised of Spaces.  Within each space content can be created or authored on pages. Understanding the base structure will help you determine the best way to organize your content, whether it be at the site level or just at an individual space level.
4. Naming Your Page - When naming your page think about how you want someone to find your page if they are searching for it in Confluence.  Be sure to use keywords in the page title that are related to the content contained with in your page. Avoid using any special characters in the title of your page. Use of special characters can cause pages to not be found in the Confluence Search.
5. Use the OOB Blueprints - Confluence comes with the bundled tempaltes, such as meeting notes, requirements templates, task report, decision template and more. These templates will help you start creating content right away.  It will also inspire you to create your own templates to meet your own business needs.

[Kesha Thill]

Thanks for writing this up @Karen_Mustain! I 100% agree with every single one, and particularly love the templates tip. We're adding new ones soon so be on the lookout! 

[Kim.Munchrath]

Thanks for the tips @Karen_Mustain! I'm a new user of both Jira and Confluence, and it's a bit overwhelming. I've been playing around with creating pages on my personal space to get started :) 

[Shawn Murphy]

Hoping the docs are better than their youtube presence. Most of the videos appear to be 7 years old, and were of little help.

[Roland Illig]

Your tips are great, but how do I actually do create my own playground? Is there a Confluence playground somewhere on this site? It would be nice if your suggestions would be linked to the relevant articles where I can get further information.

There's a typo "Conflunece" in the text.

[Karen_Mustain]

@Roland Illig  You can find all of the Confluence Documentation here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/.

You will need to filter based on your needs (Server vs Cloud, Confluence Version and Knowledge Base vs Documentation). 

You can search on keywords as well.  You can use the bold words above as search terms.

Your 'personal space' is your playground.  So just search for 'personal space' in the documentation type and filter by your Confluence configuration. 

Also, 'great resources' link above will take you the Confluence Server Support landing page where you can launch off to Support, Documentation, Community and Knowledge Base.

[Roland Illig]

@Karen_Mustain Thanks for your impressively quick response. I tried to follow your instructions, but since I don't have Confluence 7 installed locally, I clicked on by profile picture here on https://community.atlassian.com/, as suggested in the documentation. I didn't find any 'Add Personal Space' menu item there. I had expected it there.

Next, I logged in at https://confluence.atlassian.com/ and tried the same there, with the same result.

I explicitly asked where I can try out Confluence 7 since I don't have regular access to that version.

I'd expect something like https://demo7.confluence.atlassian.com/, where I can try out the latest, shiniest features. Does such a thing exist?

[Karen_Mustain]

@Roland Illig  You will need to have access to a Confluence instance.  All the links you referenced in our response is Atlassian's website it is NOT the Confluence Product.

You can try Confluence Cloud here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/free