Solution for organization of Content and Spaces

[Ashley Bird]

Hello, 

I would like to solutions for how best to organize content in Confluence. At the movement, it feels messy and employees do not know where to look to get content. We have too many publishers and content is not reviewed. 

We are looking at doing an internal audit of all content as well as a clean-up. Do you have any suggestions on how best to get this done?

Also: Looking long-term, can Confluence host an external web page for our documentation? Is there a way to make this a secure page, with a possible login?

Thank you

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

@Ashley Bird - Welcome to the Atlassian Community.

I think this is a common problem, the company gets Confluence, it gains popularity and now you have a jumbled mess of content sometimes spread over lots of spaces.  I would suggest putting together some sort of governance and process to get content published.  

Have firm rules and processes that govern the content that is available in Confluence to the company is a great way to ensure that good content is created, content stays up to date, content stays organized and you do not end up in a similar situation again.

Using the delivered product you can do a lot to implement policies that will help you control content and ensure that you do not end up with content sprawl.

For example, I have set up Confluence to only allow a select few individuals to create spaces.  To get a space individuals, teams, departments, etc. have to submit a request and the request has to have certain information and meet specific criteria or the space request is denied.  

Once the space is created the content has to meet specific criteria and must be maintained.  This is occasionally audited and if the requirements are not being met the space becomes read-only until the issues have been rectified.

We also established a governance committee who is made up of the major contributors who help create and enforce the policies.  

There are tools like Comala Document Management that can make your job easier but cost extra money to implement.  

My suggestion would be to create policies and procedures that will help maintain a functioning confluence instance.  It should cover space, content, and user access.

Confluence can host public pages that could have your documentation on them.  If you use sharable links you will not be able to have a public space.  As far as making it require authentication you would need to use a license for that.  There might be an app in the marketplace that provides this functionality but I do not know of any off-hand.

[Ashley Bird]

Hello Brant,

Thank you for this detailed answer, this is extremely helpful in getting things turned around for the better. This will help us get a start on cleaning up our content. Yes, I have identified that content needs to meet specific criteria and policy needs to be established. 

Can you clarify what you mean by using sharable links? Are saying that the content must be present on the page and not referred to in an exterior link? Is this correct?

Do you have any resources or suggestions for how we can get the Dashboard/ Landing page in confluence to have larger tiles that are user-friendly? I believe we are using the standard page, if we can change this view, it would be really nice. 

Thank you so much for your time.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Ashley Bird 

Confluence Cloud either allows you to have anonymous access setup or public links.  You have to choose one or the other.  Public links is a new feature.

Depends on what you are talking about.  Can you share a screenshot?

[Ashley Bird]

Hello Brant,

I do not have an example of that, I only wanted to clarify the specifics. We have a long-term goal of publishing on a website externally and I am just investigating different options. The immediate need currently is to organize our content which you explained perfectly in the first response. I will have questions as I move forward. Is this forum a place where I can ask the questions or should I start a new message?. 

Thank you!

[Brant Schroeder]

You can continue to append to this if you want but if you are asking a new question I would suggest that you start a new thread as it will help others that have the same question.  

[James Conway · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ashley Bird ,

Welcome to the community! Your post raises some really interesting points and has already generated some great discussion. 

As @Brant Schroeder suggests, having firm rules and processes can really help control your content and add ons from the Atlassian Marketplace such as Comala Document Management can help you ensure your content follows those processes. You can get a free trial from the Marketplace and check out our webinars to learn more. As you explore your options for hosting documentation, one option could be Comala Publishing that allows you to maintain different Confluence spaces for your public and work-in-progress content.

One way to work on a clean up would be to use the Confluence advanced search capability to filter for Pages or Blog Posts last modified before the start of the year. Once you have completed your audit and clean up, Comala Document Management can help you maintain it by automatically notifying you or other team members of potentially Obsolete content that has expired after set a period of time. 

I understood the suggestion by @Brock Price to organise your content by teams to mean something like a space for each of 'HR Team', 'IT Team', 'Sales Team'... this can help promote use of Confluence within teams which hopefully leads to leveraging the power of Confluence to collaborate across teams. 

Regarding your follow up question about user-friendly landing pages, one option would be to consider 'Theme' add ons from the Atlassian Marketplace such as Refined. These add ons can help you customise the look and feel of Confluence to better engage your users. 

I hope that helps, let me know if you have any follow up questions.

Kind regards

James
Senior Product Manager

[Ashley Bird]

Hi James, 

Thank you for all of these ideas. I have been looking at external add ons such as Comala. At this point, we really need to get the spaces organized. I like the idea of creating spaces for the reach team or department. I have been thinking about creating a hierarchy with Department info and then locking each of those spaces. Then have spaces for departments called "Product Teams" this is where individuals can collaborate. Our documentation is mixed up with other content that is not useful for training or customers. 

I have not done anything yet; I have had trouble installing a theme. Are all of these add ons something that you need to purchase, or can I add a free theme? I also want to add a theme to an individual space; that way, I don't

completely crash the entire companies site. I think a "test drive," so to say, will help implement these changes. 

I will see if I can request a budget for using an add-on like Comala; this may be a little while out as I am developing a plan to do this- hopefully one step at a time.

Thank you

Ashley B 

[Brock Price]

Our instance has 3 "levels", so to speak, of spaces.

• One level is private spaces.  These are restricted to each product team, for discussing matters among themselves.  This helps to filter content mostly, so there is not so much chatter on the more public spaces.
• There is one space ("Internal Team Space") where each team has a folder/page to share information with everyone in the company (still restricted, not allowing clients to view).
• Finally, there is a "Knowledge Base" space with curated content that clients can view.

There is some content overlap among these levels, but it helps to think of them more in terms of audience than in content.  Hope that helps, Ashley.

[Ashley Bird]

Are there any free installs or themes to add to our internal Confluence to help with better visuals and organization? Also, I want to make sure it looks good and "test it" without messing up the entire organizations' internal site...

[James Conway]

Hey @Ashley Bird 

I'm not sure if there are any free forever Theme apps, but all apps on the Atlassian Marketplace are available for free for a 30 day trial. If you have questions about trialling specific theme apps, I recommend that you contact the relevant support teams.

All the best

James

[Ashley Bird]

Thank you, James, I appreciate the help!

[Matt Reiner _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ashley Bird

That sounds like a company starting with Confluence, alright! @Brant Schroeder makes some great points above!

I'd also recommend this amazing talk by Abi Southerland on how to organize content in a Confluence space.

Also, maybe this talk about webinar where I share our tips for boosting Confluence adoption throughout your organization might be helpful.

Finally, you asked about how to put some content online, and whether to use public links (sharing single pages) or anonymous access (sharing an entire space). You can learn all about the two approaches here.

Also, maybe check out my team's app Scroll Viewport. With it, you can publish content to a customizable help center, like this one.

[Ashley Bird]

Hello Matt, 

Thank you for these helpful tips! I will definitely use these as I'm tackling this challenge. Also, I appreciate the information about getting content online. I will look into the information you shared. 

[Ashley Bird]

This talk and video was super helpful to thank you! I am learning a lot about Confluence. 

[Brock Price · Accepted solution]

Do you have teams?  Can you organize by team?  In a way, this may reinforce the notion of teams being siloed, but there are many wonderful ways for Confluence to encourage and enable cross-team collaboration.

[Ashley Bird]

Hello Brock, 

We do not have teams we only have Confluence, so I am trying to figure out the best solution with what we already have. Thank you! 

[Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}]

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 @Ashley Bird

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! :)

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY]

@Ashley Bird

Managing content in Confluence can become a challenging task. Especially if things are already getting messy and many pages seem to be outdated.

A proper solution for this is the Confluence plugin Breeze.

It automatically identifies outdated pages and implements review and archiving workflows for keeping your pages up-to-date.

Overall, Breeze is a feature-packed content lifecycle management solution and includes

• automated content analyses,
• page review and archiving workflows,
• page and space ownership,
• reports and notifications,
• bulk archiving and deletion,
• analytics,
• data export for all your content, ownership, and status information
• and more to update outdated pages quickly and enhance collaboration.

👉 Anyone interested might Give it a try, or feel free to schedule an appointment with me for a personal demo.

Cheers and all the best, Adrian from B1NARY (we are the developers of Breeze)