Need help getting started with Confluence

[Colleen Gotling]

I've used confluence in the past, but it was not set up in a way that made it easy to navigate.  I'm at a new company now and we want to use Confluence for pretty much everything for our IT department.  We are using Jira and understand how they integrate which is why we chose Confluence.  The problem is that we just don't know where to start.  I thought if we could first determine what spaces we would like to have we can then work our way down to the pages within those spaces.  Some of the spaces we mentioned were: 

• Do you create one for each application or once space for all applications?
• Do we have a space for the various teams (scrum teams, developers, QA, etc)?
• Do we create a space for each business unit or once space for all business units?
• etc.

One of the problems is that for example, we could have a project for a specific business unit being worked on by a specific scrum team for a specific application.  So where should those documents live?  I spoke to them about using labels but either I didn't explain it well enough (which is very possible) or they didn't think it would work.  We just don't want a mishmash of documents all over the place with no organization.  I'm hoping someone can help.  

[Brant Schroeder]

@Colleen Gotling 

I would suggest organizing your spaces and content based on the way your organization works, who will be using / contributing to the spaces and your overall goals.

That might not seem like a lot so let me expand.

The way you work.

• Are you open and collaborative?  
• Do some units need to keep their information private?
• Will this information be used to serve employees?
• Will this information be used to serve customers?
• How do you currently organize information?  Is it easy to find or could you improve upon it.

Who will be using / contributing to the space(s)?

• Will the information be publicly available?
• Is it for your company internal use, for customers or both?
• Who will contribute to the information?
• What will be the process to contribute?
• What information will you have an who will use it?

Overall goals? (There may be many and some competing)

• What do you hope to accomplish by using Confluence?
• What benefits do expect to see?

By thinking through these questions and more you should be able to define specific spaces and how each space should be used.  It is important to have standards and processed before turning teams loose in Confluence or you will be cleaning it up in the end.

An example  

We wanted a knowledgebase (KB) that would provide answers to customers and to internal support staff.  We created a single KB space that housed all of this information and was organized but content area and we used labels to help bring related articles together.  We setup a guide on how to write a KB, what content it had to have to be published and provide a Confluence template to help KB writers.  We used Page security to lock down a portion of the space so only internal staff could see those articles and then tied the KB to our service desk.  

I would also suggest checking out the product guides here:

• https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/guides/get-started/set-up 
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/guides 

[Colleen Gotling]

Thank you!  We will try what you suggested and will also look at those articles.  Your example was extremely helpful.  If you have or anyone else have more of those type of examples that would be great.