Confluence Crazy Template Idea.

[Damian Ball]

Hi Everyone,

First time poster, long time confluence fan.

I work for an IT Services provider and we rely very heaily on confluence for our client documentation. We use it pretty well with lots of Data being pulled into confluence from our Remote Management tool, and our ticketing system. It all works well, and all is well managed through templates etc.

I'd like to take things one step further though. The challenge we face is that if we want to , add a new field or table to our client documentation, we currently add it to the template, so any new client documentation has it, but we need to then go and add the change manually to our many hundreds of existing clients documentation. Really frustrating!

What I'd really like to be able to do is get my technical staff to set up some sort dynamic template whereby if there is an update on the template, it automatically populates the change to all the client documentation pages (assuming we merge all our existing data into the new dynamic template). We could then run reports on areas with missing data and update our info easily and methodically. This would signficanly reduce documentation overhead on our business. I'm not terribly technical, so please excuse me if I'm not making sense.

Any advice is appreciated, and I welcome Questions if you need more detail.

Thanks,

Damian

[Bob Swift OSS (Bob Swift Atlassian Apps)]

Have you tried live templates from the Scaffolding plugin?

[CharlesH]

Bob's suggestion is the way to go here.

To get an insight into the use of Scaffolding, you can read this blog article where we describe how we've used Scaffolding to construct a company Glossary which is easily maintained.

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/01/how-to-building-a-company-glossary-with-confluence/

The Reporting plugin from the makers of Scaffolding will help you in analysing which pages have missing data.