What makes a great team? Is it the people, process, or tools used?
Of course, all three components are essential to make a successful team. But even with the right technology and incredibly talented people, sometimes you don’t always get the desired results.
This has been the case for the hugely popular Atlassian tool, Confluence. The online knowledge base and wiki solutions are of immense help for teams to get real-time hyper-access to all types of information from anywhere, anytime, and from any device. Confluence also provides a great way to build team collaboration and helps track all your essential documents with a centralized version control system. But not everyone seems to be using it to its fullest potential. Here are some excellent tips that can help you unlock the true potential of the tool.
Confluence Best Practices: What Is The Best Way To Organize Your Confluence Space?
Confluence serves as the centralized knowledge base across your organization. So, you have to understand that it is not just for personal use or for a particular team’s benefit. Everything stored in Confluence should be named and organized to make it easy to search for and navigate the topic in question. The main goal of Confluence is to make information sharing and knowledge discovery more accessible and more collaborative. Consider making your documents easy to find for anyone, even when they’re complete beginners to the system.
Here are some significant criteria you should keep in your mind when creating new Confluence pages and organizing your current information:
- Information organization and structuring of your spaces and pages
- Formatting and style
- Ease of information gathering and search
- Integrations with other tools
Why Does Having A Mature Confluence Space Matter?
So why is it essential to keep your Confluence Space neat and clean? Well, for starters, the very reason why you use Confluence is to make discovery and information-sharing easy. When pages and spaces are sloppy and disorganized, searching for information and keeping track of all the different versions of data stored in Confluence becomes too difficult.
Here are some reasons why you should always aim to maintain a mature confluence space:
- A mature Confluence space is decluttered and helps you search for and make edits to the information quickly.
- By reorganizing the page trees, you can identify obsolete pages and make sure they are correctly tagged to get accurate information.
- With proper version control of your pages and documents, you can ensure that information is up-to-date and accurate.
A well-organized Confluence space can easily integrate with other Atlassian marketplace apps and efficiently incorporate page archiving, page discovery, and information identification.
When you have a well-organized Confluence:
- It becomes easy to identify outdated data and take the necessary action to archive them or update them properly.
- You’ll save disk space and lower database storage requirements by identifying duplicate data and removing old and inaccurate data from Confluence.
- If your Confluence space is mature, deletion of data, identification of large attachments that are no longer needed, backup, and restoration become more efficient.
Some Tips On Decluttering Your Atlassian Confluence Space
Here are some tips to help you achieve a mature Confluence space required to make your team more efficient.
Start Making Use Of Spaces
Many beginners tend to create pages and store them in their Confluence just as a standalone document. This method can be an organizational mess when you have thousands of documents that range in topic from installation instructions to meeting notes stored in one space. Start creating and making use of spaces. Spaces help create an information hierarchy and act as a home for various types of content. Spaces are also a great way to implement effective content management and knowledge management within Confluence.
For instance, you can create a separate space for a particular project or team, Confluence allows you to create as many spaces as you want. It's important to remember to associate your pages with the relevant space to avoid orphan pages. You can also have team spaces, project spaces, and personal spaces. Once your spaces are ready, assign parent pages and child pages to organize the pages and form a meaningful content hierarchy.
Make Use Of Page Templates
Remember, when you add something to Confluence, it is not just for your use. It is shared, stored and versioned as more people access the document. So it makes sense to follow a proper structure and consistency to your documents. Use pre-defined templates or create a custom template that makes it easy for anyone to understand and navigate through a page quickly. You need to ensure that your pages are aptly formatted and easy to navigate. Making use of templates will help you achieve that and more by enforcing uniformity across your pages.
Space Layouts Help You Highlight The Most Important Content
When designing your templates and page content, use a hierarchy that will display the most critical content at the top to make it more visible to readers. You can also customize the space around the page to add custom sidebars and search bars or any custom macros to enable faster information discovery.
Categorize Your Spaces
By categorizing your spaces, you can help Confluence users get access to related information quickly. For instance, content marketing space, customer insights, user persona, and such can be grouped into the marketing category, whereas your project management documents can be grouped in another category.
Archive Old Pages
Eliminating old pages helps you maintain an organized page track and helps people find what they are looking for quickly. For example, if the user searches for a topic and finds two documents on the same topic, they might get confused about what to follow. Archiving old and outdated pages allows users to gain clarity and always receive the most up-to-date information.
Promote Collaboration And Engagement
Make it easy to share the confluence pages across your team members. Confluence can be of enormous help as a collaboration tool to create transparency at work and promote productivity. Allow users to get ownership of the confluence pages and enable sharing options. You can also promote internal blogging to enhance a transparent and open culture. You can also measure your engagement with the analytics functionality provided by Confluence to see the active reader count, most active users, the popular spaces, and common searches.
All this information can also help you build better Confluence governance and a user experience that fosters collaboration.
Creating a Confluence infrastructure to support your ITSM and other teams can be a time-consuming task, mainly as your organization is growing and information updates begin to be overwhelming. As an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we'll help you get the most out of your infrastructure and enhance it to meet your business goals now and as your company grows. Contact us today!
