Using Confluence as a Doc Manager with tags
Asked by Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba:

Hi,

I am planning to use confluence to manage my company's docs, especially commercial (proposals, methodologies, etc.) and deliverables (project-end presentations, steering committees, etc.).

My plan is to have them in a page and attach these documents, making sure that they are proper tagged for future reference (according to our internal taxonomy).

I am concerned about tagging quality - I would like to:

1. Make sure that people tag when uploading; and
2. Make sure that the tags are right (close fields, rather than tagging whatever you want)

Therefore, I was trying to create a form (Google's, Microsoft's, it doesn't matter) that people had to use to upload their documents, that would have a fixed list of tags and that would, in turn, implement the form's result in the proper page with the right tags.

Is this a good approach or do you have an alternative way? Any ideas about how to make this work?

Thank you!


Answers:
author: Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
body: Hi [@Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3561993) - If you used an external form then you would need to solve the problem of synchronizing the attachments with tags to Confluence. This is not a trivial task. I couldn't find any Confluence Cloud form apps that support attachments either.

An alternative to consider is to curate attachments rather than control the process of adding them to a page. By this I mean creating a dashboard page that uses Confluence Query Language (CQL) and the free [CQL Search app](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1213090/cql-search?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) to show reports of attachments that have tags (labels) that are not in your taxonomy or have no tags (labels) at all. Then you can establish a process of reviewing non-compliant attachments.

You could even add this macro to every page which has attachments (perhaps using a page template) as a "nag" to encourage users to correct their labels.

comments: author: Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba
body: Hi Michael,

Super useful, thank you very much! I'm planning to use a workaround, something like a "biologic RPA" - meaning that, still having the form with all the fixed taxonomy, but then centralize it in a person (or team of persons) that can then upload it to its respective page and with the respective tags.

I like the Dashboard page idea for control the tagging!

Thank you very much for your help and swift response!


author: Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
body: Great! If the list of uploads and tags get's to be long and tedious to process, you may want to consider the [Confluence CLI](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/284/confluence-command-line-interface-cli?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) to automate the upload and tagging from a list.

Full disclosure: I'm the product manager for the Bob Swift CLI line of products. :)


author: Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba
body: Hi Michael,

Actually, both CQL Search app and Confluence CLI would be super useful! Let me explore the links you shared!

Also, we're a company that uses a lot of google documents. However, I'm not able to find a way to attach google docs rather than creating a txt file and copying inside it the link. As may imagine, it is a really bad work around... I know that I can add google docs to a page, but then I can't tag those objects (only the page itself). That means that we'd have to create a page per google doc (which is too cumbersome).

Do you know any way of solving this in a manageable way? It's really a deal breaker not being able to tag each google doc separately in a simple way (as with the other attachments...).

Thank you!

Sebastiao


author: Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
body: Hi Sebastiao - Your workarounds are basically the only way to add tags/labels. However - since you are considering the Confluence CLI - there is a way to ease the pain:

You could use the Confluence CLI to add a page with the configured [Google Docs macro](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1213092/google-drive-for-confluence-official?hosting=cloud&tab=reviews) embedded and the page labeled in one step:

Example command:

--action addPage --space mySpace --title MyPage --labels "label1, label2"  
--content "\<p\>\<ac:structured-macro ac:name="google-drive-docs" ac:schema-version="1" ac:macro-id="0dd47e6c-53e1-4bcc-8ea8-abf44b206dcf"\>\<ac:parameter ac:name="width"\>720\</ac:parameter\>\<ac:parameter ac:name="showLink"\>true\</ac:parameter\>\<ac:parameter ac:name="url"\>***GDrive Sharing URL***\</ac:parameter\>\<ac:parameter ac:name="height"\>960\</ac:parameter\>\</ac:structured-macro\>\</p\>"


author: Sebastiao Geraldes-Barba
body: Hi Michael,

So what you are saying is to automate the registry of documents having one document per page using Confluence CLI. This sounds good. Nevertheless, I have a couple of questions, please:

1. What are the licensing costs for Confluence CLI?
2. Can the search engine handle thousands of pages?
3. How do I integrate the result of a Google form with Confluence CLI?

Thank you very much,

Sebastiao


author: Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
body: Hi Sebastiao

1. The pricing works the same as other Atlassian Marketplace apps. Here's the [pricing page](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/284/confluence-command-line-interface-cli?hosting=cloud&tab=pricing).
2. Yes, it should have no problem. Our very large [documentation and support site](https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/info/overview?mode=global) runs on Confluence cloud with no problems.
3. The simplest way would be to save the sheet containing the responses as a CSV and then use that CSV file as the source for the [runFromCsv action](https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CSOAP/pages/10584068/Reference#Reference-runFromCsv).


Tags: automation

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