Using Confluence as a Doc Manager with tags

Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba September 17, 2019

Hi,

I am planning to use confluence to manage my company's docs, especially commercial (proposals, methodologies, etc.) and deliverables (project-end presentations, steering committees, etc.).

My plan is to have them in a page and attach these documents, making sure that they are proper tagged for future reference (according to our internal taxonomy).

I am concerned about tagging quality - I would like to:

  1. Make sure that people tag when uploading; and
  2. Make sure that the tags are right (close fields, rather than tagging whatever you want)

Therefore, I was trying to create a form (Google's, Microsoft's, it doesn't matter) that people had to use to upload their documents, that would have a fixed list of tags and that would, in turn, implement the form's result in the proper page with the right tags.

Is this a good approach or do you have an alternative way? Any ideas about how to make this work?

Thank you!

1 answer

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Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
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September 17, 2019

Hi @Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba - If you used an external form then you would need to solve the problem of synchronizing the attachments with tags to Confluence.  This is not a trivial task.  I couldn't find any Confluence Cloud form apps that support attachments either.

An alternative to consider is to curate attachments rather than control the process of adding them to a page.  By this I mean creating a dashboard page that uses Confluence Query Language (CQL) and the free CQL Search app to show reports of attachments that have tags (labels) that are not in your taxonomy or have no tags (labels) at all.  Then you can establish a process of reviewing non-compliant attachments. 

You could even add this macro to every page which has attachments (perhaps using a page template) as a "nag" to encourage users to correct their labels.

Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba September 18, 2019

Hi Michael,

Super useful, thank you very much! I'm planning to use a workaround, something like a "biologic RPA" - meaning that, still having the form with all the fixed taxonomy, but then centralize it in a person (or team of persons) that can then upload it to its respective page and with the respective tags.

I like the Dashboard page idea for control the tagging!

Thank you very much for your help and swift response!

Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
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September 18, 2019

Great!  If the list of uploads and tags get's to be long and tedious to process, you may want to consider the Confluence CLI to automate the upload and tagging from a list. 

Full disclosure: I'm the product manager for the Bob Swift CLI line of products.  :)

Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba September 24, 2019

Hi Michael,

Actually, both CQL Search app and Confluence CLI would be super useful! Let me explore the links you shared!

Also, we're a company that uses a lot of google documents. However, I'm not able to find a way to attach google docs rather than creating a txt file and copying inside it the link. As may imagine, it is a really bad work around... I know that I can add google docs to a page, but then I can't tag those objects (only the page itself). That means that we'd have to create a page per google doc (which is too cumbersome).

Do you know any way of solving this in a manageable way? It's really a deal breaker not being able to tag each google doc separately in a simple way (as with the other attachments...).

Thank you!

Sebastiao

Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
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September 24, 2019

Hi Sebastiao - Your workarounds are basically the only way to add tags/labels.  However - since you are considering the Confluence CLI - there is a way to ease the  pain:  

You could use the Confluence CLI to add a page with the configured Google Docs macro embedded and the page labeled in one step:

Example command: 

--action addPage --space mySpace --title MyPage --labels "label1, label2"
--content "<p><ac:structured-macro ac:name="google-drive-docs" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="0dd47e6c-53e1-4bcc-8ea8-abf44b206dcf"><ac:parameter ac:name="width">720</ac:parameter><ac:parameter ac:name="showLink">true</ac:parameter><ac:parameter ac:name="url">GDrive Sharing URL</ac:parameter><ac:parameter ac:name="height">960</ac:parameter></ac:structured-macro></p>"

Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba September 24, 2019

Hi Michael,

So what you are saying is to automate the registry of documents having one document per page using Confluence CLI. This sounds good. Nevertheless, I have a couple of questions, please:

  1. What are the licensing costs for Confluence CLI?
  2. Can the search engine handle thousands of pages?
  3. How do I integrate the result of a Google form with Confluence CLI?

Thank you very much,

Sebastiao

Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
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September 24, 2019

Hi Sebastiao

  1. The pricing works the same as other Atlassian Marketplace apps.  Here's the pricing page
  2. Yes, it should have no problem.  Our very large documentation and support site runs on Confluence cloud with no problems.
  3. The simplest way would be to save the sheet containing the responses as a CSV and then use that CSV file as the source for the runFromCsv action.

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