Confluence for Support Teams: Highlights, Tips, and Your Questions Answered

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I always get a thrill when I get to run a live learning session, and back on January 9th I hosted a live learning session on Confluence for support teams (check it out here if you missed it!). The session covered how support teams can leverage Confluence to house their documentation, team information and more. I’ll recap the main points of the training here, and check out the Q&A at the bottom for answers to all the questions we had!

There are many reasons support teams can benefit from using Confluence, including things like:

1. Process mapping - There are many different processes these teams have to manage, and keeping them all straight can be challenging. Having a single spot they’re stored, and maintained, gives the team an easy place to go with questions.

2. Onboarding - When new team members join, it’s incredibly helpful to have a single place to send them to learn about their role. Having a dedicated spot in Confluence for this makes it simple to help new hires get spun up.

3. Integrations - Many support teams that use Confluence also happen to use Jira to track issues. This is great news, since these systems are tightly integrated. This allows teams to easily share information from Jira tickets on Confluence pages and vice versa.

Support Team Processes

The tool itself, however, isn’t everything. We also need to put in place processes to ensure Confluence is regularly maintained and that we plan out its evolution. Personally, I find this is where most groups run into trouble - they simply don’t invest the time necessary to plan for success or maintain what they’ve built. Over time this results in their content getting stale and folks begin to distrust the system.

Taking even 15 minutes every few months to check on things can have a huge impact on your support teams ability to operate!

Check out the live training here!

Q&A

These questions were pulled from the live training. They may have been answered live, but we may also have ran out of time before I could answer them!

The challenge with a virtual training is building a connection with the audience since we aren’t physically together. To help give everyone a feeling of “togetherness” I encourage people to ask questions and interact with each other. This gives a much closer feeling, however, I frequently run out of time to answer all the questions!

Below are questions from that live training - I did my best to pull all of them out (even if they were answered live) to help ensure folks get the answers they came to find.

Documentation & Support Processes

1. How do you manage documentation in multiple languages?

   1. Typically the teams I work with happen to have mono-language instances (e.g. English). Out of the box there aren’t any translation services, however, there are multiple marketplace apps that can help with that.

2. How do you ensure that documentation in Confluence is regularly updated?

   1. Personally, I set this as an ongoing project (check out this course for more on managing projects) and set a calendar reminder every few months to go in and check my space analytics. I specifically look for content that either hasn’t been updated in 3+ months or hasn’t been viewed much in the past 30-60 days. From there I tag in subject matter experts to update as necessary.

3. How involved are support teams in change management processes?

   1. I try to involve the team as much as I can, although I will tailor my approach. The entire team, for example, should get updates on what to expect and how to use the system. Smaller groups (e.g. team leads) may get more in-depth information about what is changing and why. I prefer to get as much time as I can with the team so I can both explain the changes, but also get feedback… that said, depending on the environment this can be hard to do!

Confluence and Automation

4. How can review and archiving processes be automated in Confluence?

   1. Confluence automations support auto-archiving. Typically I trigger the automation based on time (e.g. every X months). Review processes can be a bit tricker, but automations can also support alerts to individuals when a page is in a specific status.

5. What Confluence automation features are available in the standard version?\

   1. Standard currently allows for any type of automation, however, you’ll be limited to 100 “runs” per month per instance (e.g. the automation can only trigger 100 times every calendar month).

6. Is there a "Back to Top" plugin for Confluence?

   1. I am not personally aware of one, but the marketplace has a lot of great options.

Whiteboards & Alternatives

7. Which whiteboarding tools do you use in Confluence?

   1. I’ve started to use Confluence whiteboards as much as I can. It is certainly lacking features that other products have, however, it has some major bonuses over other products (mainly that it is included in a Confluence license so everyone has access and that it very tightly integrates with Confluence and Jira).

8. How do Confluence Whiteboards compare to Miro or Lucidchart?

   1. Both those products are more robust (mainly due to being around longer, but also due to their focus in just diagramming). They both, however, require a license outside Confluence (which has caused me issues in the past) and lack the integrations whiteboards have. Check out this video for more on Whiteboards!

Tips & Best Practices

9. Which Confluence hotkeys are particularly useful?

   1. Honestly I need to get better at these! The one I use the most commonly is CMD/CTRL + /. This brings up the hotkey menu. After that it’s CMD/CTRL+Alt+#. This changes the selected font to the indicated header size (saves a lot of mousing!).

   2. Although, if you count “/” as a hotkey, that is by far the useful as it pulls up the list of macros you have.

10. How can templates be managed efficiently?

    1. Most folks are simply unaware of templates or what they can do… having a plan and training folks on how to find/use them goes a long way. Your plan should include evaluating what templates you actually need, or which ones need adjusting and then promoting or flagging them (makes it easier for folks to find). Training you team helps ensure they know where those templates are, how to use them and what they’re for. Check out this live learning and this article for more.

11. Are there best practices for integrating Jira and Confluence?

    1. Like many things it starts with figuring out what you need to do. Are you integrating them to share Confluence docs with support agents? Plan a retrospective? etc. Once you understand what you need to do, it’s a lot easier to integrate. That said,:

       1. Become familiar with how they integrate natively (e.g. linking Confluence pages to Jira tickets, “Create Jira ticket” macro, etc).

       2. Talk with your team to understand their pain points

       3. Map those pain points to what integrations you have

       4. Document out how you’ll use them

       5. Train the team

       6. Follow up to get feedback and monitor how it’s being used

Audience Interaction

There was a lot of audience interaction during this session - and not just asking questions! Members shared their experience in a wide range of topics, from what roles they’ve had at work to their favorite documentation tools, to the biggest challenges they’ve had helping support teams.

I did notice an interesting split in how teams handled internal (team facing) vs. external (customer facing) documentation - many groups used ZenDesk for external, and Confluence for internal. In my experience this isn’t all that uncommon, but does raise a few questions-

1. Why have two systems?

2. What does one do better than the other?

3. Why not just use Confluence?

Confluence can be setup for “anonymous access” - this allows anyone online to access content, which solves for the challenge of needing a separate customer-facing system. That content can be included in it’s own space, providing access and editing controls (similar to using a separate system).

Another interesting split I saw was in how folks use diagramming software. Confluence now has whiteboards, which is similar to other products like LucidChart or Miro. The advantage is they live inside Confluence making it easy to manage, restrict and share. While other tools may have more features (for now…) they typically require an additional license and need to be imported - two barriers that make them more challenging to use.

Overall the biggest challenge the group had with supporting support teams was the reliance on an IT team to help provide support, as well as the need to track changes. Confluence helps with both of these - the first by giving Space Admins a lot of power to control access, features etc. and the second by monitoring every change made to a page and letting you roll them back.

Overall it was a great sessions! Definitely add your comments here about how your support teams use Confluence, the challenges you’ve run into and how you’ve overcome them!  Also check out other live learnings - I'm typically on every Thursday at 6 AM PST (UTC-8), but others also have great content.