What content does your team write in Confluence?

[Judd Garratt - Path of Trees]

Hi everyone,

We write pretty much everything in Confluence - website content, marketing campaigns, blogs, product docs, feature ideas, design specs, technical plans, business strategy, legal contracts and even Atlassian Community posts :)

Confluence is amazing for collaboratively creating content, gathering feedback, iterating and keeping everyone aligned.

A lot of what we write is 'used' elsewhere - e.g. website content, marketing campaigns, product docs. The status of this content is important ('draft', 'collecting feedback', 'published', etc) and we track the progress of such work in Jira. The best way we've found to keep Jira issues and Confluence pages connected is the out-of-the-box Jira issue macro.

For the most part this works well, though there are some downsides. People need to jump from Confluence into Jira to update the status of work and there is a lot of copy/paste between completed content in Confluence and that content's eventual destination.

I'm interested in how others handle these types of situations. What type of content do you write in Confluence? Is the 'destination' of this content elsewhere and, if so, how do you get it there? How do you track the status of content work and keep Confluence in sync with this tracking system?

Thanks all for your insights!

[pelumi_moveworkforward]

Great question Judd and I'm keen on seeing suggestions too. We also use Confluence for everything in our team same as yours.

Copying and pasting blog posts can be unbearable, One fix I've seen some companies do is to have public confluence pages as their blog but then this isn't ideal for everyone. 

[Judd Garratt - Path of Trees]

I hear you on the copy/paste! I feel like I do that daily.

[Jay Maechtlen]

What do you think of the 'export as Word' function? Seems like it should be better than cut-and-paste.

For stuff that will be used outside Confluence, I have been using Word docs, and for Confluence users I attach/embed them in a Confluence page. 

Importing a Word doc to Confluence has enough limitations that I won't do the prep work unless it will be stable. (para numbering, graphic elements, xrefs within doc, lots of stuff that doesn't work without substantial extra effort).

Some of my audience doesn't have access to Confluence, and many who may have access use SharePoint pages and folders full of documents instead. A number of my docs need to go out as PDF, and some are over 100 pages in length. 

I am sure there is room for improvement, but this works for now...

[Judd Garratt - Path of Trees]

Good input Jay :) Most of the time I'm copy/pasting to another system, but this would be effective anytime we need the content as a standalone document.

Do you add the word/pdf docs to other systems like SharePoint directly, or do you copy out the content (e.g. into a blog, tech doc, presentation, etc)?

[Jay Maechtlen]

Usually I create a pdf that I can use for delivery in all venues.

Unless someone has already created the content in Confluence (ready to use) I'll usually build it in Word and create the PDF from Word. 

(I am really reluctant to deliver a PDF without bookmarks, and bare Confluence doesn't seem to generate those. )

In fairness, it does a nice job with its TOC, but - hm. 

As Jerry Pournelle used to say - good enough is the enemy of better.

And for us, at this moment, Word/PDF is good enough.

[Judd Garratt - Path of Trees]

Makes sense, cheers for explaining your approach Jay :)

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

If you want to keep tracking the content lifecycle in Jira, then you can conveniently link Jira issues to Confluence pages. The link is visible on both ends, and in my opinion this is the most intuitive way to express the connection.

But, the problem is still that you have to jump back and forth, because:

1. you can see the issues status, but not the content on Jira side
2. you can see the content, but not the issue status on Confluence side (at least not immediately)

It is okay though:

An alternative would be tracking also the status of the content on the Confluence side! Our Better Content Archiving app allows that, and you can see the status on the top of each page:

Or, you can also get the list of content in a given status:

The app provides a lot more features to manage and automate content lifecycle, make sure you check out the documentation.

(Discl. it is a paid and supported app, developed by our team, free for 10 users.)

[Judd Garratt - Path of Trees]

I agree with you on linking Confluence pages and Jira issues, Aron. We do this too and see similar benefits/downsides.

Thanks for sharing your content lifecycle app :) It's helpful to see other approaches.