Confluence space organization depending on product/software
Asked by 2iopenservice:

Dear Community,

I am reaching out to seek guidance on optimizing our Confluence space to accommodate the needs of our organization, which offers three distinct products/software.

Currently, we have a Confluence space housing all our help pages. While there is a common base, each product has unique features. Our goal is to enable users to easily filter content based on their product, ensuring that relevant pages are displayed, and irrelevant ones are hidden.

We are considering two approaches:

1. **Single Space:** Implement a system within the same space where users can filter content based on their product. We would like guidance on how to achieve this seamlessly. We initially experimented tags. However, we have encountered a usability challenge where users need to either conduct searches or click on tags, leading them to a "search results" page. Our preference is for a simpler and more straightforward functionality and display.

2. **Multiple Spaces:** Create a separate space for each product/software. However, we want to avoid redundancy and duplication of efforts by writing help pages only once and having them displayed where needed.

We appreciate any recommendations or best practices you can provide to help us organize our Confluence space effectively.

Thank you for your time and support.


Answers:
author: Kristian Klima
body: Hello,

So you have three products, they share some core features and those core features would share their documentation.

That sounds like feature-based product segmentation.

Confluence-native solution would be using page or excerpt inclusions. However, depending on granularity of the differences, this would eventually become diffucult to manage.

Enter 'conditional content'. I'm going to describe a solution that I actually implemented in the past, and implementing now to differentiate External and Internal-External content.

Using Scroll Documents and Variants for Scroll Documents + Scroll Viewport (all apps by K15t) allows you to create a single space and then use Confluence labels to specify Variants (conditional content) as per your individual products.

So you would have, for example

* label ALL for pages that are shared across your porfolio
* label Product 1
* label Product 2
* label Product 3

Your Variants would be ALL + Product 1, ALL + Product 2 etc. Scroll apps also allow you to specify individual sections the pages to only appear in the specific Variant. (on a side note, if your product 2 and 3 share some features, you can specify that the page/section appears in BOTH variants).

Once you set this up (it takes minutes - Scroll Variants allow you to apply labels en masse to whole sections of the tree), you use Scroll Viewport - which builds a static website site for you. (can be public or behind SSO).  

In Viewport, you specify your Variants as individual Sources. The result would be a Documentation portal showing your three products' documentations.

Users would be able to select the one they have and they'll have the ability to search ALL products or any single product.  

Once you have your content ready in the Confluence space, the whole thing (document, variants, viewport setup) takes about an hour.  

The advantage is single space editing and maximized content sharing. If you're editing / adding content for the common core features, you only do it once. Your users will have the benefit of only browsing what's relevant for them or embark on a product discovery of your other products.

Disclaimer: I do not work for K15t, just have been using their products for years in multiple companies.

comments: author: 2iopenservice
body: Hello Kristian,

Thank you for your detailed response.

Your suggestion of utilizing Scroll Documents and Variants, along with Scroll Viewport, appears to be a robust solution for feature-based product segmentation. However, given the budget constraints for a smaller company like ours, the combined cost of these applications might be a bit prohibitive at the moment (3 x 5$ per month = 180$ per year just to display product based documentation).

We would prefer exploring alternative approaches and any additional insights you may have would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you once again for dedicating your time and providing valuable answers.

Johan


author: Kristian Klima
body: Hello Johan,

Look at Refined for Confluence, it's in many ways similar to Viewport albeit built with around a different concept.

There seems to be the option to build a site from Confluence content determined by a label. It probably doesn't offer Scroll apps' granularity but may be worth looking into.

<https://help.refined.com/space/CLOUDDOCS/4812800371/Pages+module+(Page+Builder>)

And I think it's free for 10 users.


author: 2iopenservice
body: Thank you for suggesting Refined for Confluence.

After checking it out, it seems Refined might not do the trick for us. The option to filter by tag is available only within the "Pages" module, which seems to work as a widget displaying some pages thumbnails. But if we wish to display the module showing the page hierarchy for instance, this tag-filtering option is not available. This limitation restricts us to a specific section of the page and doesn't provide the granularity and the graphical result we were hoping for.

After all that digging, it seems that the initial solution with "Scroll Documents" remains the only solution...

Thanks again for your precious help !


author: Bal?zs Szak?l _META-INF_
body: Hey Johan,

We have an app called[Advanced Content Navigator for Confluence](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1218865/advanced-content-navigator-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) which is free under 10 users in the Cloud.

With ACNC you can

* include pages with children pages from a selected root
* show metadata like table of contents, statuses, tasks and more
* detect changes on pages and quick preview them
* on space level overview some stats, and reorganize the content

Also when you insert multiple macros, you can build a dashboard like this:

![Screenshot 2023-12-13 at 10.18.58.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/299639i333E8B944CFC880D/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2023-12-13 at 10.18.58.png")

I think it could help you visualize your content, any way you organize it (i would go with per prodcut based).

Cheers,

Balazs - PO

comments: author: Kristian Klima
body: Hello Balazs. Unrelated but thanks for the app tip!


Tags: cloud

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