Concurrent posting on pages in Confluence
Asked by Tim Milner:

Hi. I have an issue which I am not sure whether Confluence can address or not. Has anyone faced a similar issue and come up with a solution or workaround?

I have teams in my organisation who need to attach a lot of documentation within Confluence for their projects. These projects are run across 7 stages, and their documentation can be put up at any one of those stages within the project. Each stage in a given project will be represented by a page within Confluence, eg. Project A, Stage 3). We are talking about hundreds of documents over the lifespan of a given technology project. This then creates a problem: if I want to find a certain type of document and browse through all of that type of document all in one place (on one Confluence page) it is very difficult, as they will be spread over the 7 different stages (represented by 7 different pages) of a project; and then that multiplies across every single different project. So for example, if I want to find all the top-level documentation for all the projects we have running, I would need to trawl every page to find each one. This would be unwieldy, and we have explored the use of detailed labelling and use of search, but neither suit our requirements.

My question is: can Confluence support the functionality to be able to post up a document on Page A (eg. Phase 3 of Project X), but also automatically or in the same process putting that document on Page B (eg. Top-level Documentation For All Technology Projects). I know this is something that dedicated Document Management Systems offer, but is there any way Confluence can acheive something like this, either via a plugin, or a suitable workaround, or perhaps even something in-built that I am missing?

Appreciate very much any advice.

Thanks,

Tim


Answers:
author: Mark Hrynczak
body: I think you can do this using either the Include Page or Excerpt Include macros.

See the documentation for these two macros:

* <http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Include+Page+Macro>
* <http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Excerpt+Include+Macro>

Also, here is a blog post from an Atlassian Tech Writer explaing in more detail how we do something similar: <http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/content-reuse-on-a-wiki-a-case-study>

Cheers,  
Mark

comments: author: Tim Milner
body: Thanks for the reply, Mark. I don't think this would work quite for what we want, however, because although you can bring existing pages into eg. a new page, it crucially only includes page content, not attachments, which is ideally what we want.


author: Tim Milner
body: Ideally, what we are after is a way to very quickly bring together in one place all the disparate documents that are sitting on various pages across the platform. OR a way for a user to attach documents of a certain type to a master page while also posting it within a new project page - ie. so someone can come along at any point and see eg. all the Design documentation in one place, rather than having to go to each separate page within each project. And also need to limit human error, which is why labelling pages with certain documents on is not ideal, as open to spelling error and/or users not labelling a page, or not choosing from existing labels.

While looking at the macros you suggested (they are both the same, but assume one was meant to be inlcude-excerpt?), I came across the Search Results macro, which is another useful option.

Thanks,

Tim


author: Mark Hrynczak
body: Sorry, about that, the links were indeed supposed to be to <http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Include+Page+Macro> and <http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Excerpt+Include+Macro>

There is a new macro available in Confluence v4.1, which may do the job - it allows you to display all the attachments in a particular space on a page. See <http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Displaying+a+List+of+Attachments+in+a+Page> for details. Perhaos that would help in your use case?

Cheers,  
Mark