Best practices for building effective, clutter-free, and scalable Confluence content: Part 2
This is a two-part blog written by Good Software and Adaptavist. To read Good Software’s blog on content maintenance, head over to their blog.
Have you ever looked at a space in Confluence and wondered where do I start? How do I find the content I’m looking for? How do I ensure the content I find is current?
Two of Confluences’ greatest strengths are the ability to create content quickly and the flexibility to order content to fit the needs of your reader. However, these strengths are also Confluences’ greatest challenges, as teams often prioritise content creation, while management and maintenance gets pushed to the backlog.
In part one of this blog series, Good Software looked at ways to create and structure content that resonates with readers and enhances discoverability. In this blog, we’ll look at three ways ScriptRunner for Confluence and Analytics for Confluence can help your team scale content efficiently and ensure that the right content falls into the right hands.
If you’re dealing with a large Confluence instance, don’t forget to take a look at Atlassian’s Enterprise Content Management Guide.
Tip 1: Tackle Stale Content Head on
Have you ever stumbled across a page that is over two years old and thought, ‘Hey, Bob doesn’t work for the company anymore, is that page still relevant?’
If you’re anything like me, the next thing you’ll do is drop someone a Stride message and ask if the content is still relevant. They’ll then hunt down the link, update it, delete it, or put it on their should-probably-get-around-to-updating-backlog list.
You’ve probably already spotted this, but this is a lengthy and inefficient process.
So, what do you do?
Get an understanding of how active your spaces are with Analytics for Confluence.
The first step is identifying spaces with stale content using Analytics for Confluence. With this app, you can quickly find how many people are looking at a space, which pages are still being used, and when they were last viewed or updated. These metrics are essential for optimising stale and ineffective content.
Tip 2: Use automation to flag and act on stale content
As organisations, teams and spaces scale, how a Confluence administrator handles stale content becomes increasingly important. Hunting and pecking for stale content is a painstaking, manual process. However, using ScriptRunner for Confluence, you can automate the flagging of out-of-date content and trigger an event based on the content itself (such as archiving or trigger an email send).
Automatically add a requires review label or a bar that tells users that the page has not been approved yet.
A few use cases for finding and acting on stale content:
- Flag a page for review if it hasn’t been edited in a certain amount of time, adding in the automated comment the owner of the space or space admin.
- If the page isn’t edited by that space admin after a certain amount of time, you can automatically archive it and notify them that the page has been archived.
- And what about Bob? You can change all of Bob’s content to a team member who will be looking after the content or automatically add a comment to the page, tagging in the space owner if the content owner is deactivated.
Tip 3: Improve performance by stopping content creep
As Confluence users, we often take for granted that Confluence just works. However, the number of pages, links, attachments, videos, gifs that accumulate across your spaces take its toll on your servers and can really slow down your intranet. Luckily using ScriptRunner, maintaining Confluence can be easy and create order from madness with automation.
One of the most effective ways to improve performance is to nip large attachments in the bud. Videos and presentations are great for sharing knowledge in your company but can pose a challenge. Your Confluence server can fill up quickly, resulting in your company having to spend more on upgrading your servers.
Identify at risk spaces using the space statistics built-in script.
So, how do you fix this?
- Identify problem spaces by comparing the size and attachment count using space statistics.
- Run a scheduled job that adds a comment to problem pages notifying your users that they should either take their large attachment offline or request them to compress it.
- Run a scheduled job that flags old pages to be archived.
Prune old versions of Confluence pages to save space.
When you work on a page on Confluence, how many times do you edit and save it? If you’re like me, that number is high. However, these old versions are of little consequence and take up a lot of server space. Using ScriptRunner you can run a scheduled job that will archive or delete old versions after a certain amount of time using ScriptRunner
Content creation should be a creative process that inspires, however, content creation at scale can often lead to frustrated users and confused readers. Using tools such as Analytics for Confluence and ScriptRunner for Confluence, admins can spend less time on support tickets and readers can find the information they are looking quickly and with a smile.
