How do you use Confluence for knowledge management?

Your company will naturally create institutional knowledge as it operates. If you don’t document this knowledge, you’ll unintentionally create knowledge silos, or risk losing the knowledge altogether through staff turnover. Having this knowledge centrally documented in a KMS will enable your workers to be more efficient, make better, more informed decisions, and facilitate faster onboarding and self-service, rather than having someone act as an information gatekeeper.

A KMS will help standardise your processes, reduce errors, and lead to improved performance, efficiency, and resilience. It’s therefore worth investing in creating a system that works for you and your business context.

Confluence is a centralised information repository with collaboration and teamwork at its core. It allows everyone to read and contribute to the documentation. This not only means there's a single source of truth to which you can direct people, but also that when information needs updating, it's easy to do so.

Confluence also has powerful search and organisation capabilities, which means content is easy to find and logically structured—after all, there's little point investing in a KMS if it's too onerous for users to find what they’re looking for. Better still, its enterprise credentials mean that security is at the forefront. With granular permission controls, your admins can set access at either a space or page level, ensuring that sensitive content is secure, while still allowing transparency within your team.

Confluence is powerful on its own, but it can also integrate with your other Atlassian tools like Jira or Trello. It also plugs into third-party applications, allowing you to bring additional context to your pages without requiring users to leave your space.

Still not convinced? How about the fact that Confluence supports themes and is customisable with macros. For example, apps like Mosaic: Content Formatting Macros & Templates can provide templates and macros for better and more efficient formatting.

Mosaic allows you to structure content and add interactive elements such as Advanced Cards, tabs, and buttons. Mosaic’s range of templates and customisable features eliminates the risk of Confluence pages becoming a boring wall of text. Keep your team engaged by making your content interactive and visually coherent.

Implementing Confluence as your KMS involves a few key steps:

First, establish what knowledge needs to be documented. This could be anything from company policies and standard operating procedures, to product information or customer service scripts.

Next, organise this knowledge logically. Confluence allows you to create spaces for different departments or projects, and within these spaces, you can create pages and sub-pages. Make sure to use labels and tags to make content searchable.

Once your knowledge is organised, ensure that it is accessible. Set permissions to allow the right people to access the content. Remember, the goal of a KMS is to break down knowledge silos, so make sure your content is as accessible as possible.

Finally, encourage contribution from all team members. Confluence allows for collaborative editing and commenting. Make sure your team knows how to use these features and encourage them to contribute their knowledge.

Making use of templates (such as those provided by Mosaic) will help standardise the aesthetic of your pages, and help your knowledge workers document their processes without having to worry about design.