Confluence best practices

[Lexie Westbrook]

I was wondering if Atlassian has any type of user policy best practices or tips and tricks. We're looking to roll out a user policy to our company and wanted to see if anything existed for me to base our policies off. Thanks in advance! 

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lexie Westbrook , welcome to the community.

This is such a broad ask is sort of difficult to answer. I will offer this article Confluence-best-practices . But that's just the tip of the iceberg in my opinion. It really comes down to how your organization likes to work. Here is another article that I found useful - confluence-configuration-best-practices . There are quite a number of resources out there and I would highly recommend searching the community here and simply doing a Google search.

if you have some specific use cases you could share along with questions for these use cases we might be able to advise.

[Lexie Westbrook]

Thanks Jack! This will definitely help. I was wondering if you have any guidance on retention policies? I know we have some ideas about what could work best for us, but we were curious to see what else was out there and if you had anything you could suggest for us! 

[Jack Brickey]

Retention of pages? My personal experience is that we rarely remove old content. However if we choose to it's a fairly simple matter. We can archive it and delete it later if you like.

[Lexie Westbrook]

Spaces and attachments. I was curious to see if you guys had guidance around when we should archive pages/spaces that haven't been accessed within a certain timeframe, but if the choice is up to us, that's okay too! I figured I'd ask if you had guidance on any thing like that before attempting to start our own policy. I appreciate your help! 

[Steffen Burzlaff _K15t_]

Hey @Lexie Westbrook ,

we at K15t are using Confluence more than 10 years now and we've started to share our best practices on our YouTube channel.

We have a a Confluence best practice playlist which contains all of our best practice videos and live streams.

Specifically to your when to archive pages and spaces we have a video about the Analytics tools which might help you to find the right timeframe to archive pages for you.

I hope this helps

Cheers,
Steffen

[Lexie Westbrook]

Thank you! I will definitely take a look at it! I appreciate it!

[Darin - Opus Guard]

@Lexie Westbrook  As many have answered, there are best practices on configuration, space setup, access, and so on. I can share some light on best practices around data policy and information governance. Remember that everything you write in Confluence can live on forever, for better or worse. Many legal teams will caution about letting content live in perpetuity as it can open up risk down the line. In the age of ISO/SOC2 compliance, in general it's best to have a published data retention policy and train your users on content retention practices. Keep what's necessary, purge what's not. I wrote some content within the Opus Guard docs that's worth a read. The importance of information governance 

If you find you want to deploy a retention policy and have an easy means to remove old content or set retention policies check out Content Retention Manager for Confluence  in the Atlassian Marketplace.