5 Powerful Confluence Use Cases You Can Create Using Metadata

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As an Atlassian Solution Partner, you want to be able to deliver solutions that are powerful and critical to your clients. With Confluence in the center of your offering, it’s important to know what helps the platform perform at tremendous capacity.

But another critical point to note is how to get the most value out of Confluence and deliver exceptional experience to end users. A recent research identified ten categories of intranet investment benefits that can help one to use their intranet like Confluence to its fullest potential.

Being an Atlassian Solution Partner ourselves, we have managed to improve Confluence functionalities and enhance its potential by offering metadata management solutions. Our clients have built powerful new use cases with high ROI in Confluence when they leverage metadata. We believe that you can offer your clients the same capability.

Continue reading to learn how you can get 5 powerful Confluence use cases through metadata management, from something as clear-cut as a product catalog to complex setups like a Quality Management System (QMS).

Use Case #1: Product Catalog

Establishing product catalogs that are comprehensive and well-managed is a key goal for many of our clients. This means two things; admins can deliver the right information when users search for it, and users can easily access product pages without having to be a Confluence “expert.”

Creating a directory page that contains all the relevant information about their products could solve this but the lack of structured metadata dampens the process. With a metadata management app like Metadata for Confluence, admins can now add metadata to individual product pages – instead of just relying on Confluence’s label feature – and gather information from those pages through additional macros, filtered by the metadata values.

Polished product catalogs are highly valuable marketing collateral, especially for SaaS companies as they can help sales teams sell. So, it’d be a loss if this capability isn’t further explored.

Use Case #2: Project Management Reporting

If your clients, like ours, manage multiple projects at a time, then we understand how important it is to keep tabs on each project and have all the critical information readily available when needed. However, we also understand that there are several limitations to Confluence; inaccurate user-generated labels will jumble up content, reducing searchability.

Thankfully, the same approach used in creating well-managed product catalogs can be applied here. Simply add predefined metadata fields like project owner, launch date, budget, and technology to project pages to create a comprehensive portfolio homepage. The result? Structured project management reporting pages.

The solution doesn’t only improve navigation of content on Confluence, but it also helps admins deliver accurate search results to their users. Admins can even pair it with Confluence’s Roadmap Planner macro to capture cross-departmental collaboration initiatives, giving them greater transparency to the reporting.

Use Case #3: Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering is a vital source of information for business analysts and product managers as it allows them to continue delivering complex systems that meet their customers’ needs.

However, without the ability to configure metadata fields and values, requirements managers may fall short in creating requirements pages that accurately capture critical product data for engineers. By leveraging our metadata management tool, managers can edit metadata accordingly and create standardized requirements fields.

Metadata-backed requirements pages have helped bring clarity to user stories, product design, and development for engineers – but that’s not all. When integrated with Comala Document Management, managers can successfully enforce a proper hand-off and customize their approval processes. Imagine the new possibilities that can be unlocked with your solutions!

Use Case #4: Quality Management and Security

The fourth use case is the ability to create a Quality Management System (QMS). QMS maintenance is critical to any business, particularly for ISO 9001:2015 compliance, but an obstacle is making sure that teams actually follow a structured workflow and consistently deliver exceptional value to their customers.

Metadata management offers a solution by allowing businesses to establish built-in requirements control for almost all internal processes. Confluence already has a process template that users can use so all that users have to do is leverage the predefined metadata fields to fit their needs in building the requirements control.

When paired with User Profile for Confluence, users can create personalized Confluence dashboards that display departmental processes specific to a user’s role and location. Just think, how much more powerful Confluence can be if metadata is added to your solution?

Use Case #5: Documentation and Knowledge Bases

By now, it’s clear that metadata is a critical component in expanding Confluence capabilities and meeting clients’ expectations.

Structured documentation and a robust knowledge base are the cornerstones of our final use case. With metadata configuration and management, users can generate pages and document information quickly. On top of that, they can ensure that a proper structure is maintained through and through.

This doesn’t only create a well-managed Confluence for users, but it has allowed them to deliver a user-friendly knowledge base to their customers as well. Attaching new pages with predefined metadata fields that users have to fill out has allowed admins to consistently capture key information of new documents. As a result? Users achieve better content discoverability and improved navigation capabilities.

Clients that can thoroughly benefit from this powerful capability are educational institutions like colleges and universities. Organized pages, consistently structured content, and the ability to glean information effectively are just some of the perks you can offer them when paired with your solutions!

More to come…

Whether it’s to help improve project management reporting or enhance documentation capabilities, metadata is clearly instrumental to Confluence users. Bottom line is, the platform can be scaled strategically if Atlassian Solution Partners continue to focus on building solutions that can improve clients’ business processes and meet their knowledge base development needs.

» Explore Metadata for Confluence