Best practices for handling attachments on confluence

[Nermine Abdulhafiz]

Hello all,

We will roll out Confluence soon as the wiki for our team (a big/multi-location team). I would like to know experiences, best practices from big teams who have been using Confluence for long regarding attachments.

- How should we handle attachments in our space so that it does not blow up and slow down our server? We have a confluence server license.

- We want people to attach PDFs, PPTs as it would be helpful to take advantage of the search functionality, but how can we limit/control that?

Tips and tricks based on experience would be much appreciated.

Thanks a lot in advance.

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

Hi,

we're running a 250 user Confluence site for 6 years now & like you, when we started, scratched our heads about how to handle attachments. When discussing this topic with other Atlassian communities you'll get a lot of different opinions.

Let's start by asking a question:

* Is your team / your company already using some service to store & make attachments searchable?

If yes, you should make (organisational) rules, how & where to store attachments. If no, well, then go for it. We use a (free) addon Purge Attachments, to make sure that based on definable rules, attachments on a page are deleted/purged after some time. The newest attachment is always kept.

The ability to search PDFs, PPTs, XLS, DOC, etc was such a push in our environment that we actually never looked back.

Another question is how to organize attachments in a space. Make sure you create a page listing all attachments of a space (There are macros for that). Define, if you want all attachments of a space being stored in a single page (and referenced from all other pages) or if you allow attachments to be stored in each page. The advantage of the first approach is that there will be only one single source of truth attachments referenced from all relevant pages. The second approach is more user friendly. But still having a page giving you an overview over all attachments in a page is a must.

* Keep in mind that some files that are read from other systems should not be stored in Confluence: Like Excel files referencing each other using certain formulars & macros... These won't work, if stored inside Confluence.

Hope you got some ideas.

Best

JP