Confluence organization and clean up recommendations
If you have a large or long-lived Confluence instance, you're probably already struggling with a buildup of outdated, redundant, and disorganized content. Cleaning up inactive content and improving your organizational structure will make sure your users can find things quickly and easily.
Follow these four phases to keep your Confluence content clean and lean:
Phase | Description | Outcomes |
|---|---|---|
1. Conduct a current state analysis | Deep dive into the current state and usage of Confluence. This helps you understand the content and owners for the site. | |
2. Create organization and structure best practices | Based on the analysis from the first phase, create a plan for where specific types of content should live. | |
3. Clean up and reorganize | Clean up any inactive or unused spaces. Reorganize current spaces based on the structure defined in the previous phase. | |
4. Build processes to maintain and monitor content | To prevent similar issues from occurring in the future, build new processes to maintain and monitor content. | Document processes and best practices for: |
Phase 1: Conduct a current state analysis
Before you start making changes, it's important to understand how your organization is using Confluence today. Here are some questions you can ask:
- How many spaces exist?
- What types of teams are using Confluence?
- What are the different use cases for Confluence (for example, knowledge base, meeting notes, project management, etc.)?
- Who owns the content that gets created?
- What is the process for provisioning a new Confluence space? Can anyone create a new space?
At this point, you should also consider talking with stakeholders of Confluence. This will help you understand how they are currently using the tool, along with their goals and pain points.
Phase 2: Create organization and structure best practices
Below is an example of the organizational structure for a hypothetical Confluence site. Adjust the structure of your own site to work for your organization.
Content level | Type of space the content lives in | Example |
|---|---|---|
Organization-level content | A corporate space provides resources to the entire employee base. | The space is designed to provide knowledge and resources to help employees with their day-to-day work and corporate needs. |
Department-level content | Create department spaces for each individual department. These could also represent a business unit, business segment, or any other group based on how the company is structured. | These spaces can be used either for employee-facing knowledge bases or internal project-level documentation. |
Team-level content | Create team spaces for the individual teams within the department. Recommendation: Team-level spaces should be linked from the homepage of the department-level space. This makes it easier for users to navigate between spaces. | Examples of team-level spaces would be spaces for People Ops, IT Infrastructure, Finance, Marketing, etc. |
Project-level content | Sometimes a large project may be suited for its own space. The alternative to a project-level space is to use a parent page within in a team-level or department-level space. | A project-level space could be useful for the launch of a new product or the implementation of an application that will affect the entire organization. |
Personal or individual content | Individual content should be contained within one's personal space. | Personal spaces should be used for drafts of content, space planning, and testing of different macros and features. |
Phase 3: Clean up and reorganize
The more spaces and pages exist on Confluence, the more your users will struggle to find the content they’re looking for. Archiving old and stale content will drastically improve search results.
Clean up inactive spaces
There are a few questions you should answer to help you determine what can and should be removed:
- Are there any organizational policies on data retention?
- What constitutes inactive or obsolete content?
We recommend creating a page to document this effort in the Atlassian Administration space. To keep space owners informed and engaged, communicate often and share your plans for the project.
How to identify unused spaces using Confluence Analytics
Analytics is a feature offered with Confluence Premium and Enterprise plans.
- Select Apps in the top navigation bar, then Analytics
- Select the Spaces tab
- Set an appropriate date range
- Sort the table by views (ascending)
This will show you the spaces with the fewest number of views. Before removing or archiving any space, it is critical to contact the space owner to confirm that the space can be deleted. You may also want to contact the most active contributors and recent viewers to get their perspectives.
If a cleanup effort at this scale has not been done before, you may want to start with a small pilot, targeting the top three spaces. This can help reduce risk before you deactivate many spaces.
Reorganize existing sites
Based on your newly formed organizational structure, there may be spaces that need to be reorganized. Some spaces may require a page restructuring as well. When page trees are well-organized, it helps users navigate and search more effectively. You can also apply permissions and restrictions based on the access levels needed within one space.
Document your page tree best practices and share them within your user community. Pay close attention to your most active spaces to understand how page trees are used and if there is room for improvement.
Phase 4: Build processes to maintain and monitor content
What is the content lifecycle?
Just like a living thing, every piece of content undergoes several stages throughout its lifecycle, with differences depending on its type. A simple piece of content may go through planning, creation, design, and publishing, followed by evaluation and maintenance.
There are multiple different lifecycle models that you can adopt, based on your needs. Some include more stages than others, but one concept remains true: over time, content becomes outdated.
To prevent this, the maintenance phase of the lifecycle should include guidelines and processes for updating, deleting, and archiving content. These guidelines will look different for every enterprise, but best practices can help you develop a strategy that will prevent your Confluence instance from becoming bloated.
Archiving strategy
To help you develop an archiving strategy that suits your organization's needs, consider the following:
Roles and responsibilities
Maintaining clean content is a big job. Make sure you have someone responsible for the content in your organization. This can be a single individual, a group of people, or a part of the team or project manager’s responsibilities. The important thing is that the role is clear and the owner is trained properly.
Processes
Make sure the content manager is clear on your company’s legal and technical requirements around archiving and deleting content. Almost every modern enterprise is required to keep records and be able to retrieve them on a day’s notice.
It’s important that teams work with compliance to understand retention policy and how it applies to the data in their apps. Different policies may apply to different content types. For example, quarterly reports may be removed after four years, while news articles are archived after one year.
Governance board or a content maintenance workgroup
The Confluence archiving initiative should be part of a larger forum that is responsible for establishing processes and guidelines related to the usage of Atlassian tools across the company.
Here is a fantastic Summit talk on that topic: Documentation Domination: How to Build a Knowledge Sharing Culture in 4 Easy Steps
Confluence archiving methods
Archive a Confluence space
You can archive Confluence spaces by following this procedure:
- Open the Overview of the space
- Go to Space Settings
- Select Edit space details and navigate to the Archived space tab
- Select the Archive space button for Cloud or select Archived in the Status drop-down menu and select Save for DC
Archiving a space is useful when you have content that's no longer relevant, but you still want the option to access it at a later date. Archived spaces are less visible, but still available on your site. Archiving a space is easy to undo — you can make a space current again at any time.
The process of archiving a space can be viewed in more detail in the resources listed below.
Archive Confluence pages
This page archiving feature may not be available in older versions of Confluence, but archiving is possible using page restrictions. See the expand panel below.
Additional resources
Add or remove page restrictions
Archive a space
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