Getting Started with Confluence: My Journey and Tips for New Users

[#1]

Hey everyone! 🙋‍♂️

I wanted to share my journey with Confluence and how it quickly became one of my favorite tools for collaboration. As someone who was initially a bit overwhelmed by all the features, I thought I’d offer a little insight into my experience and share some tips for those just getting started.

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Explore!

When I first started using Confluence, I found the interface to be packed with options, which felt a bit intimidating. But once I started clicking around, I realized that everything is designed to be intuitive. My advice? Explore the different templates and see how they fit your needs-there’s a ton of useful pre-made templates for everything from meeting notes to project plans!

2. Create a Space that Makes Sense for You

Confluence allows you to create different "spaces" for various teams or projects. At first, I kept everything in one space, which felt like a bit of a mess. Then I created dedicated spaces for each project, and it made everything so much more organized. Tip: Keep your spaces simple and logical—it'll save you time later when you’re looking for content!

3. Collaborate Like a Pro

One of the things I love most about Confluence is how easy it is to collaborate with others. Whether you're adding comments, tagging colleagues, or sharing documents, everything happens in real time. It’s become a great way to communicate with my team and get feedback directly within the content. Trust me, it makes work flow much smoother.

4. Integrate with Other Atlassian Tools

If you're already using Jira (or planning to), you’re in for a treat! Confluence and Jira integrate seamlessly, allowing you to link Jira issues to your Confluence pages. This was a game-changer for me because it allowed me to track project progress without switching between tools constantly.

5. It’s OK to Start Simple

As someone who loves a neat and tidy workspace, I initially felt pressure to make every page perfect from the start. But over time, I realized that it’s okay to start with something simple, and then improve upon it as you go. This helped me feel less stressed and more focused on the work itself rather than getting every detail perfect right away.

Would love to hear from you all: what are your go-to tips for making Confluence work better for you? Are there any features or tricks that I missed?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and learning from your experiences!

[Ala _Wisary_]

Great tips! To further streamline the process, AI-guided workflows can really help new teams hit the ground running in Confluence. For example, an AI solution could suggest consistent page structures, prompt the right questions for each project type, and automatically tag or categorize content as you go. This way, every new page or space follows a best-practice baseline—making onboarding easier, speeding up documentation, and helping teams stay aligned without added overhead.

[G subramanyam]

Hi @Anahit Sukiasyan you have captured the essence and features of the Confluence beautifully. Keep exploring and share the features.

[NHMG]

I've only just set up a Confluence in parallel with our Trello.

While the bulk of the larger organisation runs on SharePoint, our department had always been Trello-focused. Moving on to some much needed "meta-work" for our projects though, SharePoint felt counter-intuitive, and the step from our Trello workspace to a Confluence instance seemed the way to go.

The current setup now does have one main space because of that, but for now that works very well.

I quickly drifted towards a dual hierarchy of sorts, where one approach is pages with subpages, the other is folders with pages. You decide, it just depends on how conceptual or practical the work is.

And since we're a small team, it's pretty clear what's what--we don't need to explain everything like it's a portal. To be honest, I've never even set up a website where things just came about this naturally.

What to say? The integration with Home and Trello is just brilliant. I already had some Goals set up in the former a good while back, and I can easily integrate the latter.

I've been amazed at how Goals, Projects and Folders/Pages are so versatile and interlinked. One part of the Space can be linked to certain Goals or subgoals, the other is mostly linked to Projects, which in turn can refer to the broader Goals. It's just splendid. 

In a way I've not only created a "hub with some collab tools"--I've done a mind-map rethink of what we're actually doing and how everything ties together with that.

Just thinking about the structure of our space made me look at our work here, and what we eventually do outside of all the digital and into the field--we're a social non-profit connecting people--so really, even before any Confluence work has really taken off, it's already given me tons of ideas. 

So as a takeaway maybe, I'd say: don't get carried away with features and 'gimmicks' like all the macros, embeds, smart links, tags, mentions and so on. Sit back and let the way you live the work you do guide you; it'll all come together.