Confluence Implementation

[EveO_Mahoney]

Hi, I'm new to the community and wanted to reach out to you all to see if anyone has any pro tips for implementing Confluence into an organisation! It's the age-old story, our documentation is in multiple repositories making it very difficult to locate or collaborate on projects.  I've been tasked with the roll out, which I'm really excited about, and am looking for any pointers from those who have already been there!

[Laura Campbell]

Hi @EveO_Mahoney and welcome!

I wrote up an article a while ago about my favorite features in Confluence, and it might help you discover more ways of using Confluence https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-articles/My-favorite-Confluence-tips/ba-p/2982184

I also have become a big fan of Confluence Automation, and wrote about how I use for regular team meetings https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-articles/How-to-use-Confluence-Automation-to-create-a-page-amp-send-a/ba-p/3015372

Here are some more tips, in no particular order

• Make use of space homepages to explain what is in the space and link to key pages
• Rovo, whether the 'regular' chat or an agent you create, is pretty good at finding Confluence pages. I am now regularly asking things like "Where is that page that Sarah created about 3 weeks that mentioned the Acme project". I also created a Rovo agent that just searches a specific subset of pages related to our processes so team members can ask "Do we have a process documented for XYZ?"
• Check out the Marketplace. There are a lot of great things out of the box in Confluence, but there are also a lot of apps that can help with specific needs, and to make Confluence perfect for your company, you may need the help of an app.
• Confluence is like a garden. You need to make sure you are helping it grow without it becoming an overgrown jungle. Basically, plan for maintenance (updating pages, moving them around, archiving out of date pages).

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Hi, @EveO_Mahoney and welcome to the Atlassian community!

That is a big question! I would start with this page: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/resources, which will lead you to this big guide: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/resources/guides/get-started/overview#about-confluence 

And then I offer the advice: a little (or a lot) of planning up front will save you a lot of time later

Think about:

• What Confluence plan you have, so you know what features are available to you (note: I ignored a lot of features because they were only available to Premium and Enterprise, but later they were/are being rolled out for Standard)
• How the information should be organized—1 space, multiple spaces
• This will be impacted by who can/should have access to the information, who should own the information, whether you have licensed users, guest users, or want to make information public 
• Importing the content from those other repositories as Confluence pages, rather than just attaching the files (sometimes it's easier to copy/paste the content than to import so you can make nested parent/child pages from a document or include/not include images)
• Probably myriad other things I can't think of at the moment 🙃

Also, if you have questions:

1. Search in the Confluence product forum here to see if it has already been asked and answered
2. Feel free to ask your question here if you don't find it—many users are happy to give you the benefit of their experience (or commiserate with you)
3. Join groups in the community and sign up for the daily digest email. When I was starting out, I learned many things I hadn't gotten to yet from the questions that other people asked.