Using Confluence to create document based knowledge base

[Shawn Yates]

Hi!

I have been tasked with making a lot of documents available in a searchable knowledge base. We already own Confluence so I want to leverage that. The documents live on SharePoint, but the UI there just isn't what we are looking for. The conecpt of having a page for each document with a brief summary then a link to the document is very well received.

Now, my challenge is to make the process of adding documents VERY simple for non-technical people (don't even talk about using wiki markup language). I have used Scaffold to create an "add new page" link that takes them to a easy enough page with a place to enter the doc title and a description. Easy enough.

The challenge now is how to I get them to link the document? I am hoping for some kind of "browse" button where they can browse to the doc and that will put the link right on the page.

Any thoughts? I am also open to general thoughts on how others have used Confluence to do this same thing.

Thanks,

Shawn

[Shawn Yates · Accepted solution]

Thankks for the suggestions. I will check them both out.

I will close this question as it seems this may be as close as we get for now :).

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist]]

Three very quick points/ideas which may not apply to your cases

1. My current client discourages attachments, and find the "word import" trick has enabled us to get rid of a nice wide swathe of documents completely.
2. Confluence 4.0 doesn't have wiki markup - the editor has been rewritten. Worth a look and an upgrade?
3. Have you looked at user macros? My thought would be a macro that you could a) stick on a template page and b) derive the document location from the title of the page? (e.g. if they called the page "My Doc 104", your macro would display a link to https://yourdocrepo/space-name/my.doc.104 and you can play tricks like "open in new window" with the url and so on)

[Sarah Maddox [Atlassian]]

Hallo Shawn

This documentation may be useful:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Developing+a+Knowledge+Base+on+Confluence+Wiki

It is a set of pages written by the Atlassian support team, about building a knowledge base in Confluence. One of the pages is about templates, and there are other useful techniques too.

I hope this is helpful!

Cheers, Sarah