What tactics have you used to spread Confluence throughout your company?

[Brittany Sudlow]

Hi Community folks!

I'm Brittany, a Product Marketer on Confluence Cloud looking for your insights and opinions!

We know sometimes not everyone is on the same Page (literally 😉 ) with using Confluence. So we want to better understand how we can help you, our Confluence fans and champions, more easily spread the word. 

If you have a couple minutes, we would really appreciate if you could answer the following questions so we can build resources for teams that will reduce the Space ( 😉 ) between colleagues caused when not everyone is using the same tool. Thanks!

1. What tactics have you used to spread Confluence throughout an organization? What benefits of Confluence do you highlight?
2. What common roadblocks or objections do you hit when trying to get your colleagues to use Confluence more?
3. What resources would be helpful to make it easier for you to increase team adoption of Confluence in your org?

[Ignacio Aredez]

1_Transparency, understanding why we do what we do, allows us to save time, standardize and automate.

3_ More templates

[Brittany Sudlow]

Thanks @Ignacio Aredez ! How have you communicated why you do what you do? Do you provide coworkers examples of how to standardize or automate? If not, how do you encourage them to change what they have been doing (or where) and do something different?

What new templates you would really like to see? I can pass the feedback along to the team that creates new templates!

[Patrick Haley]

@Dave Liao i love this suggestion. How do you actually create public and private page trees?

[Dave Liao]

@Patrick Haley - make the space as public as reasonable.

Then, make a page intended for team-only purposes only. Use page restrictions to lock the page down. View restrictions will inherit to all pages nested under the team-only page.

[Dave Liao]

...but edit restrictions don't. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-5095

Got to love product quirks.

[Bernhard Breit]

Hi Brittany, in the past I tried my best to convince coworkers and customers that confluence is a fine tool. That is past, nowadays I warn everybody to stay away from confluence as Atlassian does not give small customers any alternative option to "the cloud" and I cannot in good conscience recommend any cloud solution. After all, what "cloud" still means is that your data is stored on someone else´s computers, and that is something I will never recommend.

[Dave Liao]

@Tilaak Goswami - can you rephrase your ask?

Also, Bernhard probably doesn't work for Atlassian...

[Bernhard Breit]

Eh, nope, I do not work for Atlassian, however interesting opprotunities they may offer. But I wonder how you might have guessed .... :-)

[Dave Liao]

There are folks who are used to working in silos, so when setting up spaces for them, I suggest they have an Open ("Public") page tree, and a Team-Only page tree that's locked down. That lowers some resistance I get from users who are uncomfortable with spaces being open by default.*

* you DO have newly-created spaces visible to all Confluence users upon creation, right? I always make sure to enforce this 🙂

[Brittany Sudlow]

That's a great tip @Dave Liao ! Any requests from Atlassian on resources we can build that would help you with this or other obstacles you face when trying to get people understanding and using Confluence?

[Dave Liao]

@Brittany Sudlow - it would be nice if Confluence was more obvious (than a blue box) about the view-permissions are inherited, but not edit restrictions.

It'd be nice if it were possible to allow for inherited edit restrictions on a Cloud instance level too 😅 It's been a pain point forever, and I spend half of my time (as an admin) explaining this behavior to users.

Oh well, I'll vote up CONFCLOUD-5095 for now. 

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Interesting discussion!

Well, in a previous job I used to be a project management. I started gathering all data and all project requirements in Confluence. Whenever a development asked me about some requirement, I used to tell them to search in Confluence. Little by little, they understood that everything I did was organized in Confluence and they started using it. For sure, this change didn't happen quick, nor by next morning. It took at least 1-2 years, with constant reminders towards developers. And of course, the developers themselves had to be that person who was willing to change.

[Brittany Sudlow]

Dedication @Alex Koxaras _Relational_ ! Is there anything that would have you helped you and your coworkers do this faster? Were there objections to Confluence itself or more like "Rome wasn't built in a day" mentality?

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

@Brittany Sudlow a help from my supervisor as well as the supervisor of the IT would be highly appreciated. However, lack of communication between them, was a factor that slowed this process down. And another factor that slowed the overall procedure, was that they had little trust in me.

[Brittany Sudlow]

Thanks for the transparency @Alex Koxaras _Relational_ !