Get the most out of your Confluence instance: 11 top tips
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Get the most out of your Confluence instance: 11 top tips
Will Kelly
21st February, 2024
Will Kelly
21st February, 2024
Our tips:
Our tips:
1. Become a player-coach
2. Go beyond defaults
3. Use analytics
4. Create custom templates
5. Import content
6. Improve navigation
7. Use it for communication
8. Manage access and security
9. Go beyond team spaces
10. Be an early adopter
11. Use AI features
Flexing your Confluence expertise means being a player-coach and collaborating directly with users to support their workstreams.
Atlassian Confluence is a feature-rich collaboration platform that offers wiki-like spaces for asynchronous teamwork, information sharing, and project management. For knowledge workers, becoming a Confluence expert means digging deeper and learning features that might have value for your team.
Here's a look at how you can flex your Confluence expertise to support your team:
1. Become a player-coach for all things Confluence
A knowledge worker is best suited to become a player-coach for maximising Confluence’s potential. Publishing content isn't everyone's job or interest, making it necessary for admins like you to use Confluence to its full potential. The right admin puts themselves in a position to collaborate with their teammates and other users and convert that experience into creative solutions that lead to Confluence page improvements.
Remember, as a player-coach. If you're building out a new Confluence space, it should be an example of the best practice, so your teammates can emulate this.
2. Learn Confluence beyond its defaults
Think of a default Confluence space as a starting point for collaboration that you need to build upon to meet your team's requirements. Customising your Confluence space is more than a nice thing to do. It helps provide a consistent experience for your users, including setting the sidebar with links to your calendars, analytics, and other Confluence features for quick user access.
A good starting place is integrating your team’s apps into Confluence when it makes sense. For example, if your team is standardised on Google Workspace, you can integrate it into Confluence. You can also integrate other popular team applications, including draw.io, and Miro.
3. Activate Confluence analytics
Content performance is good to know, even on internal collaboration sites, especially if your organisation is rolling out Confluence or pursuing another collaboration initiative. Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise include analytics that enable you to view the success of your content across Confluence spaces. Such data-based evidence of internal content performance saves you from relying on anecdotal stories and complaints. It puts you in a better position to report progress and challenges to your management team.
4. Create custom templates for your documentation
Confluence comes with built-in templates for various content use cases, but creating custom templates for documentation and other content is helpful. Custom templates are especially beneficial if your organisation establishes content standards or has other special needs, such as authoring security or compliance documentation.
You can start creating Confluence templates from a blank page or by modifying a default template.
5. Import content into Confluence
Microsoft Word and Google Docs drive today's business and technology teams. Importing external documents is another way to flex your Confluence expertise, especially if you’re on a team that wants to author original content in their spaces and move beyond document libraries.
6. Improve Confluence navigation for your team
When users can't find something or find it too hard to deal with human nature, they'll work around it. Keeping Confluence navigation simple yet elegant is a move that demonstrates true Confluence expertise.
Here are some Confluence navigation best practices to follow:
- Start each of your Confluence pages with a table of contents that maps automatically to the headings on the page
- Use Child pages to create a custom list of content nested under a page
- Make a Page Index a standard for every Confluence space you create
- Create a shortcut on the left nav for frequently accessed pages in your Confluence space
7. Turn your Confluence space into a communications channel
Ideally, you want your Confluence spaces to become integral to how your team communicates with each other and their internal stakeholders. Here are some ways you can do that for your team:
- Encourage team members to blog on Confluence about such things as project status and lessons learned because updates will show on the top-level page of your space
- Make commenting on Confluence content part of your team culture by setting an example
- Teach your team how to use inline comments when reviewing page content, especially if your team is remote or hybrid, to give a way to track reviews.
8. Manage Confluence space access and security
Your team needs a site admin who can grant user access privileges at the team level versus having your users go through a busy central service desk for access to the space or to products.
9. Look beyond Confluence as a team space
While Confluence excels for team collaboration spaces, there are also space templates available from the “Create a space” option to create Confluence documentation, knowledge base, customer support site, or sites for your HR, finance, and legal teams.
10. Be an early adopter of Confluence features
If you find yourself with Confluence users asking for more, be an early adopter of beta and new Confluence features. For example, Atlassian recently released Confluence Whiteboards into beta. They also launched a beta of Confluence Databases to offer more flexibility in organising their information and an apparent response to Notion’s growth in the enterprise.
Start small with a proof of concept when implementing beta features and demo it to your team. Offer to install the betas into a Confluence space of their choosing.
11. Bring AI to Confluence
Generative AI is growing as a force in content creation and collaboration. Confluence administrators can enable Atlassian Intelligence, which promises actionable insights from your Confluence data. It lets you use generative AI to author Confluence pages with options to translate jargon and adjust tone.
The Atlassian Marketplace includes 50 AI apps for purchase that support a range of use cases, from AI tooltips to data leak prevention to measuring team performance.
Shop around for add-ons that bring value to your users
Atlassian has a robust partner ecosystem, many of which build Confluence add-ons and apps. So, if you’re looking for new ways of approaching formatting, forms creation, community management, and other page enhancements, check out Confluence apps from Kolekti and other partners.
We create tools to help people work efficiently
Check out our Confluence Apps to see how we can help you with your workload - free trials are available now.
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Written by
Will Kelly
Content Writer
Will Kelly is a freelance writer. After his earlier career as a technical writer, he’s passionate about easing collaboration pain points for teams, whether technology, process, or culture. He has written about collaboration for IT industry publications.
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