Organizing Policies and Procedures, and a Summary of Policies?

[Andrew Legrand]

We use confluence to manage our policies and procedures, but I'm trying to find a better way to manage them.

For now, we have three main sections: Internal Policies, External Policies, and Procedures.

Within each group is children-pages, parent pages, tables of contents, etc.

What I'm trying to do is better link the policies and procedures. 

One method is to have a page with a policy (i.e., we bill every two weeks) and then link to the procedure page (i.e., here's how to send bill). The procedure page would then need a backlink to the policy.

However, I'd prefer to have those on one page, and then a summary page of policies (mostly, for onboarding new employees. They should be aware of policies, but don't need to review all the procedures just yet). 

Any suggestions?

I've looked at the include excerpt macro, but it seems like I'd have to update the "policies summary" page with every single except/policy. That's a ton of work.

[Andrew Legrand]

I'm going to answer my own question here.

The answer is excerpts, but the way to include the excerpts in a summary page is via the children display macro. 

Set the Include Excerpts parameter to Rich content.

The only drawback is that every page needs an excerpt in it.

A good feature would be a combination of rich-text and simple excerpts. Show the whole excerpt if it's on a page, but show nothing if there is no excerpt.

[R Smith]

Hi Andrew. I'm about to start this process of putting Policies and Procedures in Confluence. Can I ask about how you set up your pages for the policies? Any black holes to avoid? How do you manage the meta details?

Thank you

[Andrew Legrand]

Our pages are setup in a hierarchy such that children pages contain policies and procedures, and parent pages contain indexes of those children pages.

Black holes: Don't assume the work is ever done! Ours is a constant work in progress.

I'm not sure what the meta details are. We may not be managing them. :)

[R Smith]

Thanks. The page metadata is what I'm meaning things like:

Department

Office

Reference

Approver

ISO Code etc..

The indexes you've created, is that using the Page Properties Macro? 

[Andrew Legrand]

We don’t deal with metadata, so I can’t speak to that. 

I think it’s the children pages macro.