How to keep organized? Confluence structure.

[Laurent Bazinet]

Hi,

I am sure this question comes often and doesn't have any right or wrong answer but I have to ask it as I am wondering if we are starting the wiki on the right foot.

We are a hardware developping company. We have many projects (products). The big question is: how to organize this?

Right now, we started as one space per project. This will grow (tens of projects; hopefully hundreds). Is this a viable approach since we can't have nested spaces (tried the subspace plugin but it does create a space after all and the space list grows the very same way).

The dilema I have is that I could cathegorize projects and have a shorter list of spaces. I am also unsure of how confluence will handle so many spaces (probably doesn't matter much but still, I don't know).

Any input is welcome,

Thanks,

Normand Leclerc

[Mick Davidson · Accepted solution]

Normand,

Interestingly, I'm looking at one section of a space and that has at least 82 pages, and it's not a particularly large area. Some have over 400, so a wiki space can have a great many pages. You're not going to change that unless you have lots of spaces instead.

If you don't want everyone to see everything in a sapce, you can always use permissions to hide the areas you don't want them to see or find in searches.

You should be able to print only the pages you want to print if you look in the Space Admin area. I haven't done this, but if you look at the page tree in there, you can select the ones you want to print and then print them as one document. (There's more to it than that, best check the Atlassian docs.)

You can also create an empty page and then use the page include macro to add all the pages you want to print, then save that and export to PDF.

Cheers.

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

Hi,

I myself have managed and maintained an intranet for 10 years and had quite some challenges with keeping spaces organized.

I am now in a market research role and was asked to find feedback for "Birdview", which is free.  https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1223906/birdview-for-confluence-preview?tab=overview&hosting=cloud 

Basically, it is a way to visualize Confluence structure in a 'mindmap' format, and organize content with drag and drop. I was wondering if you would see a use-case for this in your line of work.

Your thoughts are valuable because I believe it is helpful to hear from different people how this app could be used and what jobs need to be done.

Would you be willing to check it out and let me know your thoughts?

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

Hi Normand @Laurent Bazinet

I'm happy to add-on to Andrew's comment regarding this app. We've just rebranded & improved the app recently: Space Manager for Confluence?

We want to ensure that organising your Confluence space(s) remains easy & quick, and I'm positive this app would be able to help you in doing exactly that. 

You get a free-trial if you would like to test it out and I would love to hear your thoughts on the app. Please feel free to leave any questions/feedback here. 

Thanks & have a great day! :)

[Laurent Bazinet]

Hi Mick,

I see you point. Eack project will have requirements, development docs, schematics etc. Many type of documents; hence why we opted for a space per projet. The pain is in the browsing; the tree is just too big.

The Wiki is, for now, only for our R&D. But we wish to eventually be able to print our product specifications directly from the wiki. This is a bone when export to PDF adds header/footer only to a complete space export.

I really appreciate your point of vue; thank you very much.

[Mick Davidson]

Normand,

My first thought is how do the people who are going to use the wiki view the projects/products? You might be able to organise by project/product type, but is this how your users (and possibly your customers) see group them? What natural groupings do your projects/products have?

I'm not sure that having 100s of spaces is much of a problem, I believe Atlassian have at least that many, so theoretically Confluence should be able to handle it.

One of the nice things about having seperate sapces is that you can limit search results to that space only. On the other hand, there's not much point in having 25 spaces that only have 20 pages in each. So another criterion might be how much content will each space have?

Cheers.