How to Organize Confluence Spaces
Asked by Jason Lansdowne:

I work for a large organization that has been using Confluence for years. They did not receive any sort of formal training, and the site is currently very disorganized. Its incredibly difficult to locate specific documents, and people are creating documents on other people's spaces. This makes accountability for documents very difficult.

My group came up with an action plan to improve how Confluence is used. We have started training all employees on Confluence best practices. Part of this action plan is to encourage people to create documents in their team's home spaces, and to migrate their documents from other people's spaces to their own.

Another reason why we want to have people move their content into their group's space is for security reasons. Certain documents have to be regularly audited by the space owner to ensure it meets security standards. When a team's documents are scattered everywhere on Confluence, its very difficult for the team leader to locate all these documents for the security review.

Here's the problem: people are revolting at the idea of having to move content. They see it as very time consuming and conflicts with their busy deadlines. And this project has basically ground to a halt.


Answers:
author: Andrew van Ingen {ServiceRocket}
body: [@Jason Lansdowne](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5055977) : first of all I can highly recommend this talk "Organizing a Confluence hoard, or, does this page spark joy?" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrGCWTxeA94>  
It's really insightful.

It made a lot of sense. I myself have managed and maintained an intranet for 10 years and came across similar problems. I am now in a market research role and was asked to find feedback for "Birdview", which is free. [https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1223906/birdview-for-confluence-preview?tab=overview\&hosting=cloud](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1223906/birdview-for-confluence-preview?tab=overview&hosting=cloud)

Basically, it is a way to **visualize Confluence structure in a 'mindmap' format, *and organize content with drag and drop.***I was wondering if you would see a use-case for this in your line of work. Your thoughts are valuable because I believe it is helpful to hear from different people how this app could be used and what jobs need to be done. Would you be willing to check it out and let me know your thoughts?

Best, Andrew


author: Tom Zhu
body: Hi [@Jason Lansdowne](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5055977)

Your proble is very common in organization .

1. System will absolutely mess up without any design (permission , space)
2. Most people know what is the problem , but they refuse to solve it, because any change will only bring additional work.

The trigger to solve the problem is listed as below

* A - Bottom to Top?a power user or group of people can't bear the chaos anymore , they use technique and initialise certain project
* B - Top to Bottom?Boss, CXO position manager realise the problem and DECIDE to pay money to hire external consulting company / atlassian solution partner.
* C - Disaster driven?Most company's boss can not be persuaded by ROI report , only serious disaster such as fatal data leak , system collapse for a long time .

When you get support from the boss, then you can go further

1. Do the system diagnosis
2. List all the duplicate / similar page
3. ask people to move the content
4. archive the duplicate / similar page
5. improve the permission scheme
   1. revoke some edit and view permission from space
   2. establish CAB to approve the change/maintain the process
   3. design the permission scheme and open account / permission change process

Regards,

Tom Zhu


Tags: confluence-server

server