What organizational structure have you adopted for Confluence as KB?

Addy_Free February 2, 2018

What organizational structure have you adopted in your Confluence instance?

We are a small liberal arts college and implementing for just one office at this time. The plan is to build out an internal knowledge base. Thanks!

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Timothy
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February 2, 2018

What organizational structure have you adopted

This really depends. There are two answers for me. Your top level structure is Spaces and Spaces can / should reflect your organization by team or function.

Each functional unit can also have their own space where they put their own content in it.

or

Each team (in a functional unit) can have their own space where they put their own content in it.

Addy_Free February 2, 2018

Thanks, Tim. Even though we're adopting only for one office at the moment, the one bit of structure I think we've settled on is that our office will have a space, in anticipation of a moment when perhaps others across the enterprise want to join in.

I suppose what I'm after now is the next level of structure, answering questions like: should it be totally flat or rely on nesting? And to what extent? But I'm open to general thoughts as well.

Timothy
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February 2, 2018

Even though we're adopting only for one office at the moment, the one bit of structure I think we've settled on is that our office will have a space, in anticipation of a moment when perhaps others across the enterprise want to join in.

Yup. And this is why you have to plan ahead. Another thing to think about is how other people get onboarded. Do you want them to follow the flat or nesting. There will be a point where you will have no choice but to have nesting. It's part of the nature of Confluence.

E.L. Fridge
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February 6, 2018

Hi Addy, we use Confluence at the University of West Florida as a business process library.  We have one space for that which is share among all users on campus.  It really is one big wiki that anyone can refer to if needed.  The logic behind this was that many processes involve multiple people from many departments around campus (IT, financial aid, registrar, etc.)  Rather than document it multiple times from multiple angles, we've implemented a single set of documents.

While many employees have access to view documents here, only those that have gone through training are allowed to "get the pencil" and contribute to a document.  Certain departments have also set up "office manuals" within their group that pull together content from other parts of the knowledge base using content by label organization.  We also have separate spaces for our public knowledge base and for KBs for our individual service desks.  We also sometimes have private spaces for specific purposes or workgroups as well.

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MadelineBarr April 26, 2018

  We also have separate spaces for our public knowledge base and for KBs for our individual service desks.

This sounds like where we want to go.  We don't have a public knowledge base yet but we want to start one. 

You mention public and Service Desk KBs. Theses are two separate spaces?

I've also posted a question for KB best practises at https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Education-Questions/Building-a-knowledge-base-What-are-the-best-practices-for/qaq-p/783618#M13

E.L. Fridge
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April 26, 2018

Yes, we've go two spaces that we can refer people to. The public KB has about 10% of the info and BPL has about 90%.  It only goes in the public space if it's either solely KB-style help documentation or needs to be publicly accessible.  It's all searchable in confluence if you are signed in, if not you can only search the public stuff.  It's been a good solution for us, since people know clearly what the target audience and default visibility is for each space.

I've replied to your other question with more details about our setup.  I hope that makes sense.  I'd be glad to discuss more if needed.

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