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Confluence Knowledge Base: 9 Essential Tips You Should Know

Confluence Knowledge Base: 9 Essential Tips You Should Know

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If you’ve opted to get Confluence, chances are, you’re going to use it for the following use cases: as a social intranet, collaborative tool, or a knowledge base. The latter is perhaps what Confluence is known for and excels at. As is the case with any platform, it’s not necessarily about the features, but rather how you make the most out of them.

In this article, we’ll be sharing a couple of tips to help you build and run your Confluence knowledge base.

Tip #1: Start with a knowledge base space template

Regardless of whether you’re a new or seasoned Confluence user, starting from scratch is often challenging and time consuming. Instead, you can use the default Confluence knowledge base template. The template is quite handy as a starting point. It comes with a tailored homepage, a sample page tree, and built-in features commonly used within a knowledge base. But, it’s only the starting point. Your job is then to customize your knowledge base to mirror your needs and processes. 

How to choose a space template: 

Upon creating your space, you can choose one of the many available templates. After naming your space, select “Knowledge base”, set your permissions, and hit Next. Then you can choose which features to include within your space. By default, Confluence includes the features it deems necessary for effective knowledge management such as analytics, automations, and more. You can obviously opt to customize the default features. But as a general rule of thumb, you may want to keep the default settings at the start.

Knowledge base space template

Tip #2: Leverage page templates

A big selling point for Confluence on both Cloud and Data Center is its large array of built-in templates. There are basically templates for every need and use case ranging from knowledge management and collaboration to project management and more. 

Similar to spaces, you always want to get started based on a page template. This can give you a solid foundation for your page. Then of course, you can change the layout, include or remove sections, use macros, and more.

How to choose a page template: 

Hit “Create” from the top navigation menu or from the left navigation menu under a page tree. You will land on the page creation interface. Of course, the page is empty. Here you can choose one of the available templates. The latter are grouped under various categories.

Page templates

Tip #3: Properly manage permissions

Who can manage, edit, and view content within my knowledge base? These are questions you need to answer upon creating your space. This will help you properly assign roles and responsibilities, and ensure that sensitive content is only accessible to the right users.   

How to manage permissions:

Confluence allows you to set permissions at both the space and page levels. Of course, permissions at the space level are what you’re going to set up first. Navigate to the “Space Settings” and choose “Space Access”. Here, you can define who can add, archive or delete content and restrictions within your space.  

Space permissions settings

At the page level, you can restrict access by clicking on the padlock icon at the top of your page. Here you have three options: Allow any one in the space to edit, view only, or choose specific users or groups of users.

Tip #4: Personalize your space homepage

Your space homepage is the first thing users see, so you’ve got to make sure it is both functional and content-rich. A well-designed homepage acts as a gateway to important actions and resources across your knowledge base.

How to personalize your homepage:

By default, the homepage of a Confluence knowledge base comes with predefined sections. It includes a general description, a labels list, and recently updated content. Although quite minimalistic, the default layout is quite handy. Of course, you can keep it as is or add some other sections. For this you can use a variety of both built-in or third party macros. 

You can add macros such as “Filter by Label” to classify content, “Page Tree” for easy navigation, “User Profile” to introduce the team or Cards and Carousels for easy access and a more polished layout. Additionally, you can Include visuals like a header image, icons, or even emojis to align the design with your brand.

With this being said though, Confluence has its limitations when it comes to more advanced macros. For this you can rely on third party formatting apps from Atlassian Marketplace. For example, you can include buttons at the top of your homepage to link to both internal and external resources. If you feel that the default layout doesn’t do the job, you can include tabs (either horizontal or vertical). Tabs are ideal to group content and facilitate navigation without cluttering your homepage layout.

Tip #5: Organize content with page trees

Page trees act as the reference point that users go to when navigating your knowledge base. This is why you need to establish a clear hierarchy that ensures users can find what they need without unnecessary clicks.

How to organize page trees:

There are three keywords to keep in mind here: Parent page, child page, and folders. A page tree consists of parent pages or folders under which you will include your child pages.

You want to group related pages under parent topics. You can use either a typical page or a folder. The difference here is that when you use a page, you kind of have to add content within it whereas a folder simply acts as a container. 

Knowledge base page tree

For example, your knowledge base may include sections for documentations, troubleshooting articles, and getting started guides. Under each parent topic, you’ll include your child pages. They might be documentation by app, troubleshooting articles by use case, and more. 

Use descriptive titles for clarity, and periodically audit your structure to ensure it remains relevant as your content grows. 

For more tips on how to manage Confluence page trees, check out this dedicated blog post.

Tip #6: Classify content by labels

Labels in Confluence allow you to group similar content and facilitate access to information. They allow users to find related pages quickly using the Advanced Confluence Search function or the “Content by Label” macro which we discussed in the previous section.

How to add labels in Confluence:
Adding a label is pretty-much straightforward. At the bottom of any page, click on “+ Add Label” and add relevant tags. As you’re typing, existing labels will appear to help you avoid any duplicates.

As you’re creating and managing labels, always keep in mind your labeling strategy, so users know what to expect. Labels should compliment, not replace your page tree. 

Add a label to a Confluence page

If your knowledge base has parent pages like “Troubleshooting,” “Getting Started,” and “FAQs,” your labels can provide additional context such as “Error Codes,” “Installation Guide,” or “Account Management.” This ensures that labels make it easier for users to find specific content without duplicating the structure of your page tree.

Tip #7: Connect your Confluence knowledge base to Jira Service Management

If you’re using Jira Service Management, linking it to your Confluence knowledge base can streamline your customer support process. This integration allows your support agents to both create and access knowledge base articles inside Confluence and share them within JSM.

How to set up the integration:

From your service desk project, navigate to “Project Settings” > “Knowledge Base” and link your Confluence space. From there, you can create and feature knowledge base articles directly from JSM. You can further configure settings to allow customers to visualize article suggestions from within request forms. This helps your customers quickly find answers, and reduce the amount of raised tickets.

Suggest knowledge base articles

Tip #8: Enrich your knowledge base with Marketplace apps

Although Confluence is quite rich in terms of knowledge and content management features, it often lacks more advanced ones. This is done (in my opinion) as an attempt to keep the default experience as simple as possible. If you’d like to further build on the existing features, you’ve got a whole marketplace to choose from. It offers a wide range of apps to enrich your knowledge base. From content formatting to advanced reporting, there’s likely an app for your specific needs.

Apps you may want to consider:

Glossary for Confluence: 

A knowledge base should always contain a glossary of terms. This helps users stay aligned on a common shared vocabulary and avoid any miscommunications. Of course, you can create a glossary based on the “Glossary” page template that Confluence offers. However, the template is only suited for a small number of terms and doesn’t allow any advanced search and filtering options. 

Glossary for Confluence on the other hand is a dedicated app for terminology management. It comes with a holistic dashboard where terms are displayed by language, labels, and letters. Additionally, you can create and access terms from anywhere within Confluence thanks to the advanced highlight engine. 

To learn more about Glossary for Confluence, check out the dictated app listing page.

FAQ for Confluence: 

Frequently Asked Questions are among the most important resources to include within your Confluence knowledge base. They’re useful to both support agents and customers looking for answers. Similar to glossaries, we’ve seen some businesses rely on the built-in Expand macro to embed FAQs within their pages. 

The issue here is the manual nature of the task. Each question should be implemented separately, which is of course not suited for a large knowledge base with a growing number of questions and answers. Adding to that the challenges of filtering, search and continuous update, and you find yourself looking for a more advanced solution. 

And here FAQ for Confluence gets you covered. The app is designed to help you create rich FAQ hubs within your knowledge base. Your hub contains three main layers: FAQ pages that consist of multiple categories, that in turn, include questions and answers. 

categorize FAQs, and embed them within your Confluence pages.

To learn more about FAQ for Confluence, check out the dictated app listing page.

Tip #9: Automate content creation and management with Confluence Automation

The key to successfully managing your Confluence knowledge base is to identify manual and repetitive tasks that your teams are better off automating. This significantly reduces time spent on such tasks, improves efficiency, and reduces errors. 

Confluence automation templates

Confluence Automation is based on four main concepts: Rule, trigger, condition, and desired action. Basically a rule starts with a trigger, which results in action depending on the condition. 

Automations you may want to consider:

  • Auto-label pages: Whenever a user publishes a page, specific labels will be added automatically.  ensuring easy categorization and searchability.
Auto label content
  • Archive inactive pages: Schedule the archiving of pages which are considered inactive. You can specify the recurring schedule and time range of page inactivity. This keeps your knowledge base up-to-date and avoids any tedious manual archiving.
  • Update restrictions: Automatically update page restrictions when a page is moved, ensuring proper access control and security. Within the automation rule builder, you can specify the new permissions.

Managing a Confluence knowledge base effectively is about knowing when to use each feature, and how to make the most out of it. By combining both built-in and third party apps, you can create a robust knowledge base that is content-rich, easy to navigate, and maintain. 

For more content like this, make sure to check out the blog and our dedicated YouTube channel.