Have you ever been frustrated trying to find company information when working on a project, only to spend more time asking coworkers questions or searching for information than actually working on the project itself? Or worse, you had to spend extra time recreating the information?
That’s what happens when you don’t have the right knowledge management system in place. This unintentional information gatekeeping creates production bottlenecks that waste time and effort. In the age of remote work and distributed workforces, knowledge management becomes even more critical — teams must be able to access Information from anywhere and at any time.
Knowledge management — the process of putting all of the information (i.e., data and content) your company creates in a place that’s easy to access and share with others — is the solution for freeing key information trapped inside individual teams or colleagues’ computers. Without a well-structured system in place, our jobs get much harder — an average new hire will spend 200 hours trying to chase down or recreate lost information.
This guide will help you set up Confluence to manage and share vital company knowledge. We’ve included our best tips for setting up your spaces and pages so you can get up and running easily.
In this guide, you’ll learn Confluence best practices to:
In a knowledge-sharing culture, the information you need to do your job is readily available as opposed to a knowledge-hoarding culture, where information is guarded or withheld. You may not realize it, but keeping information tucked away can risk everyone’s performance and can even have a negative effect on your ability to thrive at work. In today’s world, free-flowing information is the name of the game.
Teaming up with others to create an environment where information is willingly shared will help everyone accomplish more in less time, and build a stronger sense of community. The act of openly sharing information builds transparency and higher trust, which leads to higher achievement.
Confluence solves knowledge management’s biggest challenges by helping you tap into the wisdom already inside your organization. Our spaces and pages are more efficient than using file and folder systems like Google Docs or Microsoft Sharepoint because everything is open by default. With all of your information in one place, your team has quick access to company knowledge and you’ll have an easier time organizing, managing, and searching for documents.
Confluence makes it easy to share and manage knowledge by allowing information to be visible across teams. The following tips will help you set up your site, spaces, and pages to facilitate open access to information:
If you’re creating pages for multiple projects, keep them organized with the page tree. With a page tree, anyone can get the gist of what the team is working on and choose to dig deeper.
Use space shortcuts to spotlight content team members will need to visit often.
As a space administrator, you can link to pages or spaces within Confluence or external websites.
Keep it simple, keep it beautiful! You may think that when it comes to your Confluence pages, the design is not a big deal. I'll reveal the secret: the design is a big deal. Give users a clean, easy-to-navigate view and they will embrace it right away. At Botron, we stick with one homepage for all apps with not much but enough information to display, as well as clean navigation. -Teodora V, Atlassian Community Leader
Knowledge sharing starts with creating an informative personal space. Your personal space is an area that’s all yours — it’s titled with your name, so your co-workers can easily see the pages related to your work in a dashboard-style view. You can use your personal space to store your documents and drafts, make a list of your current projects, test out new Confluence features, and play around with templates.
Your personal space is also a great place to introduce yourself to others. For example, you can add information like your working hours, time zone, what team you work on, and current projects. Sharing this information fosters open knowledge sharing with your teammates and can help you build relationships at work, which can actually make you happier and healthier.
You can access your personal space in several ways:
While we encourage you to keep your personal space open to others for transparency reasons, we understand you might want to keep it private. You can make your space private by following these steps:
When you open your personal space, you’ll see the Overview page, where you can customize your space.
You’ll see that some sections have already been added, but you can customize this area by selecting the Edit icon at the top right of the page and adjusting or removing anything that suits you:
When you’re done making adjustments, select Publish to save. (Don’t worry if you forget to hit Publish – your work will still be there.) You can go back to your Overview and make changes whenever you like.
One way to share knowledge is to mention a person on the page you want them to see. You can do this by typing ‘@’ in the editor, start typing their name, then selecting their name from the suggestions list. You can also share the page link in Slack, Teams, or other tools your team uses to communicate.
If you accidentally put something in the wrong place, you can move it back or change locations by following the same steps. And when you move the page, you don’t have to worry about manually updating the URL — Confluence takes care of that by automatically redirecting everything to the new location.
“I use my personal space as (1) a profile, (2) a working area/sandbox, and (3) a staging area for loose notes that don't yet have a home in a proper space.
- Dave Liao, Atlassian Admin & Community Leader
Your coworkers have a wealth of information, but it’s not helpful if that brilliance is gated on their computer. Confluence provides spaces for knowledge-sharing so teams can take advantage of each other's expertise. A Confluence space is a way of organizing related pages and documents into high-level categories of content. You can think of Confluence spaces like bookshelves in a library — spaces are where the pages and documents are displayed for easy access.
We recommend creating spaces for every team or department and additional spaces for larger ongoing projects. This division of spaces will improve knowledge sharing by making it easier for teammates to find the relevant information they need.
Your team space serves as a place to centralize your team’s collective knowledge. Make sure others can benefit from your team's expertise by setting up your space with the right permissions and configuring it to make it more accessible to everyone.
Your space settings let you manage who can see and/or edit your information. To adjust your permission settings:
When you create a team space, Confluence automatically creates an Overview page. Think of it as a landing page — it’s the first page everyone will see, so it needs to highlight your team’s focus and important knowledge to be shared.
Your Overview is the perfect place to introduce your team members and highlight your group’s projects and goals. While we give you a head start by populating your overview with a few suggestions, we recommend spending some time customizing your space to include information your team shares most often.
To customize your Overview page for knowledge sharing:
Add your team information, including names, roles, and photos so others can get to know your team on a personal level. Insert the user profile element to display a short summary of a specific Confluence user, including their profile photo and role. Be sure to include contact information like @name, phone numbers, email addresses, team Slack channels, and other preferred ways to get in touch with your team.
Adding elements with slash commands will make it easier for knowledge seekers to find what they are looking for. To add an element, type "/" on a page, and the options will automatically appear.
You can help your teammates by adding the following elements to your spaces:
Providing easy access to knowledge is a fundamental part of setting up a new space. Confluence has several features that will help you organize your space and serve as shortcuts for finding information:
Labels are like keywords or tags you can add to pages and attachments to organize and group related content. Adding labels to a page is possible while editing it or after it's published. When you add labels to a template, the labels are automatically added to new pages created from the template. You can also add as many labels as you want on a page.
Space shortcuts live just above your Page tree. This is an excellent place to add links to frequently used resources, like pages inside Confluence or external web pages.
Adding a link is simple — click Add shortcut in the Sidebar, add the link in the Web address field and name your link if you like, then click Add shortcut. When you’re done adding links, click Save and your links will appear in the Sidebar.
To add to or edit your Space shortcuts, hover over Space shortcuts in the Sidebar and click the Edit icon when it appears.
Child pages let you organize your content into categories and subcategories. These subpages nest below top-level (parent) pages, so any page can have its own child pages.
You can create a child page from any place in Confluence—select Create at the top of the page, select the menu at the top right of the page, then choose which page you’d like the child page to live under in the dropdowns and hit Save.
Smart links help you create key knowledge content — like best practices — by adding in-page URLs. This special type of link can add context and make links more visible. Smart links include an icon from the source of the link, which gives people more information about the type of content at a glance.
There are four options for displaying Smart link content — a URL, inline link, card, or Confluence Smart Link embed.
To create a smart link, simply copy and paste a URL into a page. If you’d like to change the URL to an inline link, card, or Confluence Smart Link embed, Click the link you just created to select your preferred option.
If you’re not sure what to add to a new page, a template is a great place to start. We offer more than 70 templates to help you get started and you’ll find even more templates on the Atlassian Marketplace.
To learn more about specific templates for different team functions, see the appendix at the end of the guide for suggestions on pre-made templates for different team functions
To create your own template in a space:
When you create a new page, you have the option of pre-formatting your content with a page template. To use a page template, open a blank page by selecting the Create button in the top navigation. The template browser will open on the right. Templates can be viewed by space, filtered by category, or searched for by name or keyword.
To preview a template without selecting it, hover over the template card. If you click on it, the template will appear inside your page.
Editing a template is very similar to editing a page. While you can’t include images or attachments, you can add labels, variables, and placeholder text to help you create pages more efficiently.
If pre-made templates don’t suit your needs, you can create your own templates. By developing your own templates, you can format your content the same way each time, which will improve your processes and consistency.
“Labels allows me to group and view related content in a flexible way. Let's say I'm working on a project with my team called "Project Moon." I've created pages and so have my teammates. Those pages are scattered in different spaces or in different places in the page tree hierarchy. If we label each related page with project-moon, I can use the content by label macro to generate a list of all the pages with that label. It allows me to view all the relevant pages in one place, without having to worry about where the page lives. Also, the macro updates so that any new pages with the label will show up.
– DJ Chung, Product Manager, Confluence
Now that you understand the importance of setting up your spaces and content to promote knowledge sharing, let’s take a look at how to find knowledge and key content across your company. Confluence delivers several tools that improve the relevancy of your search so you can spend less time digging around for that critical piece of information.
You can start by using your Home page in the top right corner of your Personal Space. Keep your finger on the pulse of work happening inside and outside your team by seeing activity from the people and spaces you follow.
You can star, like, watch, and share a page directly from the feed, all without leaving Home. We’ll also provide recommendations to help you improve your feed and stay up-to-date with people and spaces most relevant to you.
Discover what’s happening across your company with the Popular feed on Home. Whether it’s learning about an upcoming office event or reading about a team member’s recent experience volunteering, the Popular feed helps you stay connected with what’s going on across your company.
The Popular feed cards give you a glimpse into the page to help you decide which to view. And if you click to view the Popular feed, we’ll remember your selection the next time you view Home.
There are two main ways to view spaces in Confluence:
The spaces list macro allows you to display a list of spaces on a Confluence page, and lets you filter them by category.
Quick search is exactly that — a fast way to look for a page, file, attachment, person, or space. To perform a quick global search in Confluence, go to the search bar in the top navigation and enter your query.
Shortcut: Typing the backslash (/) from any page or space will also take you right to the search bar.
Search results will appear as you type, so there’s no need to hit enter — you can go straight to the correct result by clicking on it. If you don't see what you're looking for, hit Enter to prompt a full search.
The Advanced search function gives you the flexibility to hone in on the details that will help you find that needle in the haystack.
To use the Advanced search function:
Here’s how each field filters your search:
You can also search by person by using the People drop-down menu on Home. Click on Search people and teams and put in the name of the person or team you are looking for, depending on permissions.
You can also filter your Page tree view by clicking on the horizontal menu (represented by 3 dots), then selecting an option from the drop-down menu.
If one Confluence space seems small for all your content, divide! Having separate spaces for each product or service is crucial for the proper usage of your knowledge base. Having the same structure across spaces allows the users to quickly dig into the topics and find the right spots even in different product spaces.
- Teodoro V, Atlassian Community Leader
You can use Labels to search for information across your entire organization by typing in the name of a label. This will display only the content that matches those labels. For example, if you want to find notes from a meeting you went to with another team, you can filter by label to find them.
Labels make it easy to find related pages. If you're on a page that has a label on it, simply click on the label to see other pages that match the label. To see all the labels that are used in a space, use a modified version of the following URL:
To modify the URL so it works for your site, replace mysite.atlassian.net with your site's domain details, and TCS with the key for the space you are interested in.
When you have data about the usage of your pages and spaces, you can make informed decisions regarding the existing and future content you create — like deciding if you need to update or add pages. And this data is helpful to more than just your team — when you share these insights with other teams, they can discover where their spaces and pages need some work and better understand how to scale what's working.
If you take the time to dig into your content analytics, you’ll gain powerful insights into the way your organization uses Confluence, including understanding how — and if — people are engaging with your content.
Taking a peek into your page analytics is something that any Confluence user can do to assess a page’s performance. To see if people are viewing your pages, open the page, click on the horizontal menu on the top right of the page, and then click Analytics (a premium option) from the dropdown.
If you hover over the graph, you’ll see the number of people who viewed that page for the selected time period. The date range can be changed to view data from another time period.
Premium and Enterprise Confluence users can view more detailed page analytics, including which specific team members viewed a page, the versions of the viewed page, the time a person viewed a page, and the total times someone viewed that page.
Another feature for users with Premium or Enterprise accounts is the ability to access analytics about your spaces and pages, including details about other team members’ activities.
To view analytics for a space, select Analytics from the sidebar on that space’s dashboard. This will take you to the Overview, where you’ll see a graph that displays space views over time.
The cards below the chart display the top insights from the Pages and Users tabs for whichever date range you choose.
If you’d like to see a complete list of rankings in each tab, click View all.
Sooner or later, you’ll need to declutter and reduce the overall size of your Confluence site. We recommend auditing your spaces and pages regularly, then making adjustments. You'll find it much easier and less time-consuming if you routinely clean up your spaces and pages.
One of the biggest challenges to cleaning up your spaces is figuring out where to start and choosing what to remove. Here are several ways to get started:
Sharing knowledge is a habit you cultivate over time. If you make a consistent effort to share what you know, it will eventually become part of your daily routine. That same practice needs to be ingrained in your company culture to make sure critical information stays ungated and doesn't vanish when a project ends or someone switches to a different team.
Become a knowledge-sharing ambassador by encouraging your organization to follow the practices in this guide. The tips we've included will make it easier for people to share their expertise and discover a golden nugget of information that will make their next project a success.
For more information about knowledge management and sharing, we invite you to explore these Atlassian resources:
There are several ways to sort the [search] results list. The default is to sort by "relevance." Here a complex algorithm takes effect, which automatically finds the best search result for the search term. Thus, even "old" knowledge in Confluence is made findable again — by default.
– Robby Holtmann, Product Manager, IntraFind Software AG
While anyone can make use of Confluence templates to share content, we have some specific templates that were created for different functional teams: marketing, software and product, finance, IT, and HR and People ops. Here are some of our top suggestions.
Marketing teams may want to consider adding editorial calendars and go-to-market strategy documents, like customer interviews, personas, and roadmaps. They can also use part of their space as a sales engagement collateral hub to make it easier for sales teams to find what they need.
Templates for marketing teams:
HR and People Ops Teams can turn their team space into a portal by including links to the most requested information about benefits, training, policies, and new hire information like handbooks and onboarding materials.
Templates for HR and People Ops teams:
Operations teams can use their team space to develop a hub for storing and sharing product resources, training information, metrics, and standards. They can also add, track, and manage operations requests inside their space for full visibility.
Templates for Operations teams:
How-to articles - Teach teams to do just about anything
Troubleshooting article - Document common problems and share how to solve them
Finance teams can help other teams and stakeholders understand if their projects are moving the needle by adding information in their team space about past, present, and future company performance.
Templates for Finance teams:
Business plan one-pager - Set your strategy (and stick to it) with a short and simple plan that helps other teams understand your vision
Executive business review - Assess business performance and set goals to keep your teams on the same page
Software development and product teams can provide links to their most important work, such as project milestones, roadmaps, and build/release planning pages so other teams don’t have to guess what’s coming down the pipeline. They can also create filters in Jira, embed them into a page, and send it as a report that’s self-updating, which eliminates the need to email a report.
Templates for Software and Product teams:
Dev ops run book - Help your operations team respond to system alerts and outages
Product launch - List key players and let other teams know who's responsible for each launch task
Incident postmortem - Learn from your performance and support your engineering team
Product roadmap - Create a high-level overview of upcoming features to share with leadership and other teams
Elevator pitch - Quickly and clearly describe the value of your project to stakeholders
IT teams can provide instructions and information that can help other teams locate configuration files, understand how to start or stop services, and guide others through tasks.
Templates for IT teams:
ITSM known errors - Document solutions and update status information about known errors for later reference
AWS architecture diagram - Inform others how services work together and how AWS solutions are stored, hosted, and deployed
Incident response teams can add a Jira dashboard or element in their team space so people from other teams can quickly check in to see the status of major incidents.
Templates for Incident Response teams:
ITSM post-incident review - help teams understand an incident’s causes to prevent it from recurring
ITSM weekly major incident report - track the status of incidents and update your team on how they’re being resolved
