Creating – Storing – Editing Policies

[Peter Fahlstrom]

Hi all,

I want to create/store and edit our company policies in Confluence, approx.: 50 documents. Each ‘document’ should be exported into PDF and include page header / footer including a logo. It’s important the versions of each document can be traced.

How do I best proceed?

 Thanks!

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Peter Fahlstrom ,

Creating editing and exporting are certainly all doable inside conference. However, might I ask the purpose of the export? The only reason I ask, is that I suspect that maybe there is more to your question here, but I have not addressed in my first sentence. I guess I'm trying to understand what problem you are running into regarding creating confluence pages that represent your policies.

here is an article that might help with your export regarding headers and footers - customize-exports-to-pdf 

[Peter Fahlstrom]

Thanks for your reply Jack, we ae publishing policies in PDF (non editable) format.

Thanks!

Peter

[Peter Fahlstrom]

e.g. we are publishing our policies outside the Atlassian universe...

[Jack Brickey]

Sounds good, so exactly where are you stuck? Did the article help?

[Peter Fahlstrom]

I am working on the suggested solution Jack and will let you know outcome, thanks!

[Jack Brickey]

It should be pretty straightforward. I would simply create a space for your policies, and in that space create a page for each policy. It is interesting, though that you will store policies, externally. The one thing to be cautious of here, which is probably obvious, is that you will want to ensure that exports are done every time the version is created in Confluence. Otherwise your external storage will be out of date. Auditors hate this.

[Max Foerster - K15t · Accepted solution]

Hey @Peter Fahlstrom

As Jack pointed out, you can start creating PDF Layouts in Confluence, but maybe it's also worthwhile to look at available solutions on the Atlassian Marketplace. I'm sure they will offer more features and more convenient handling. We at K15t have been offering our Scroll PDF Exporter solution since 2009 (so even years before the marketplace was launched 😄), and speaking from experience: The gain in control over the styling, different templates (and a WYSIWYG template editor), and conditional content for tailoring your documents to the target audience is huge.

Additionally, because you mentioned versioning and as you manage everything in Confluence, I'd suggest checking out Scroll Documents. It allows you to define a document in Confluence comprised of a whole space, selected pages, or a page tree. Then it adds authoring features like versioning, tracking of changes, and publishing features for this document. Feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions, and have a great weekend. :)

Best, Max

[Peter Fahlstrom]

Agreed, we are publishing our policies separately from where we create/edit them, this way our auditors can follow the document history (in the future) in confluence. We don't want the entire company to have access to Confluence for the sole purpose of reading a policy as those policies are often referenced in various articles / communications. So far the SOC 2 T 2 and ISO 27001 / 27701 auditors are fine with our current solution but i need to find a way to better manage the entire policy management process...it's huge!!