Best practice for 'mirroring' content from a restricted space to a public space

[Nikki Hailey]

We currently have a "public" space on Confluence where we house instructions for users. This space is going to be a central location, pulling from multiple other spaces. In an effort to prevent duplicate work, we tried using the Insert Page or Include Excerpt macro so that each team can continue to edit the document in their own restricted spaces, but the public version of the article is always up to date. This does not work due to the fact that Insert Page adheres to each space's restrictions and will not display content from these restricted spaces.

What is the best practice here to work through this? Allowing all the multiple teams full access to public space and putting all public articles may be the only way, but there would be so many chefs in the kitchen, it has caused confusion on some teams as to why some info is in one place and some in another, and it simply doesn't make sense in some cases - the original article needs to stay in the team space and only the excerpt needs to be displayed in the public space.

What are some ways you guys have handled this? Thanks!

[Matt Reiner _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hey @Nikki Hailey, my team makes an app called Scroll Documents that we use to manage this type of content. With Scroll Documents, you can select the pages in your space that you want to be part of your “document”, which you can then version and publish to another space all together. You can also manage multiple variants of your content, so maybe there’s different content displayed to admins as opposed to everyday users.

we also use our app Scroll Viewport to publish the content as an external help center. We’ve found it makes it a more natural fit for our readers, since they might be confused by the Confluence interface.

https://help.k15t.com/

[Nikki Hailey]

Thanks for your help, Matt! I was wondering if there was a cost associated. These look like great answers, but I need to make sure we can fit it in the budget. Thanks!

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

@Nikki Hailey, sure thing!

There is a cost for sure, so we can provide our great support and updates, but your team won't have to do any guesswork on those. They're listed right on our marketplace app listings:

• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1217608/scroll-documents-for-confluence?tab=pricing&hosting=cloud
• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211636/scroll-viewport-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=pricing

[Nikki Hailey]

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[Vera Spöttl-Zeisberg]

Hi @Nikki Hailey,

we have the same problem and haven't found a good solution. Most solutions either respect the restrictions of the source pages or have problems with other add-ins we use. :-( 
Would you mind to share your solution?

Thanks a lot,
Vera

[Nikki Hailey]

We let each of the teams utilizing the space make their own judgement call on two options and they chose which worked best and felt like less effort on their end: 1. Simply put anything that should be public-facing in that public space and make sure to train all new hires that documentation they are looking for could exist in either space, or 2. Leave the original document in their team/system space and make a full copy in the public space. If they chose the second, they have to add a note with a link to the public article just below the title in the team/system space article that instructs them to make sure they update that linked article. So basically... neither of these are real solutions, just sad bandaids.

[Vera Spöttl-Zeisberg]

Thanks, @Nikki Hailey . We will most probably work similar with your option 2. I just couldn't believe that there is no better solution. :-(