Where to put your pages for meeting minutes, concepts, etc. if collaborating cross-departmental?

mraab 2017-11-06 13:34:46 UTC #1

Hey,

once again I am interested about recommendations, best-practices, and opinions when it comes to structuring and saving pages in Confluence.

I often realize that I found my own place in which to save concepts, ideation, notes, meeting-minutes, etc. I am creating for myself (or/and for others).

However, it happens quite often that one starts something small (by oneself) but the more time passes the more people are involved into this topic. Suddenly there are meetings, and other people also make notes, etc. about this specific topic in THEIR space ore preferred area. Of course all this information is interconnected, thus there is not right place to save it.

The result:
Redundant information, double the work, no real collaboration, etc. some information is stored here, some information is stored there, again no transparency although technically all the content is transparently available …

Any suggestions on how to improve that? Many topics simply belong to so many projects that it is a huge challenge to organize this information.

best
Markus

mseibert 2017-11-07 14:08:44 UTC #2

This again is a very good question, @mraab. And there is not “one right answer” to it. That’s also why it fits in such a forum well. Here is my thoughts for you:

Redundancy is a reasonable price to pay for the advantages of a wiki.

Redundancy is the number one problem of a wiki. There are measures to keep it small. But it’s a problem that is a result of the vast amount of advantages an enterprise wiki like Confluence brings. Keep that in mind. You get a lot from Confluence. But you have to accept that some level of redundancy will remain.

New digital and shared content is more important than structure and redundancy.

It is more important to train new users to add content than to structure it correctly and to reduce redundancy. Yesterday my colleague Matthias wrote a German blog post about exactly this needed focus on new content instead of ‘no redundancy and structure’. Read it. (Google translate can help.)

Prevent duplicate content in Confluence from the start.

We have created a Confluence App called Duplicate Content Defender (documentation) to limit bluntly created pages with the exact same title and content. Give it a whirl.

Archive and purge old content automatically.

One of the best answers at scale is archiving old and obsoleted content. The Archiving Plugin for Confluence (Atlassian Marketplace, German page) from Midori is a very good tool for this and it is regularly part of our Linchpin Intranet projects.