Defining Document Properties for Document Management in Confluence

Question

I am evaluating Confluence for managing a collection of marketing collateral for a small business since they are using the Atlassian tools for software development already.  I have read several articles about using wiki pages basically as "folders" and then attaching the documents to that page.  Where I am running into questions is with defining searchable properties for each of those documents.  For example, if I wanted to setup and search on the following properties (among others) for each document, how would I do so?

Type: Article, White Paper, Press Release

Topic: Marketing, Success Stories, Customer Service

Thanks for any suggestions!

Vickey Izzard · Answer

We've recently committed and have been using Confluence On demand for internal non-functional requirement documents. We decided to keep it simple and just use labels for contexts like your "Type" and "Topic" for everything - spaces, pages and attachments.

Labels create an automatic search of anything with that label. Using your example, Article, White Paper, Press Release, Marketing, Success Stories, Customer Service would all just be labels on that document. I've found it handy to create a page with common labels that I use as a "template" with Tools > Copy.

A side note, we decided to use the wiki pages for the information or data choosing to have few attachments to help control that the user have the most current version, which, for us, would be the wiki.