Top tips for new Confluence Cloud admins?

[Bridget]

Hello seasoned admins and newbies alike! 

Share your top tip for new Confluence Cloud admins on this post. I'll make a roundup and share with the larger Community! 

Hopefully new Confluence admins can learn from our mistakes and/or benefit from our wisdom 😅

I'll send the tip with the most likes some fun swag! 

[Mykenna Cepek]

I've worked with a lot of small/medium and relatively new companies in recent years. For those that don't have an intranet, I offer Confluence as one! By building out just a simple skeleton at first, the investment is tiny -- but the value is easy to see.

I like to model it top-down based on the business, starting with low-hanging fruit. Here's an example outline of initial spaces and pages for a mythical Acme Corp:

• Acme Corp
  • About Acme Corp
  • Company Offices
• People Operations (HR)
  • Employee Directory
  • Company Holidays
  • Benefits Info
  • Onboarding

Each team or project usually gets their own Confluence space as well.

The key to success is to get a few critical leaders on-board, and then support their learning journeys. A simple page of links to some introductory Confluence documentation / videos can help people self-start. And I make myself available to talk them through learning something new, or brainstorming options to put their collateral into Confluence.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's not specific to Confluence Cloud admins, but when someone asks you for something, default to "no".  That's harsh, but you are the one who is going to have to clean up any mess people make, and part of your job is probably to be thinking about content, ease of use and looking after the platform. 

Always temper that "no" with "but why?".  Don't just do things because people ask for it, talk to them, find out what they're trying to achieve - you'll be surprised how many times you will say "ok, but how about you do it this way?" or "oh, use that thing instead, that's the way other teams do it and that seems to be working well for them".

After the big and very vague "talk to your people", my other tips are small - use blueprints, and encourage your people to use templates, have standards and write a short simple guide to them, have a space for "looking after <the tools you look after>" (I usually end up writing that as "looking after the Atlassian stack") and, finally, make yourself readily available to help your people.

[Annette Herzog-Lang]

Make sure to set up some simple basic rules and best practices for the use of Confluence, e.g.:

• using a certain date format for the  naming of meeting notes (set up templates!)
• make sure that people understand the structure (areas) and set up a logical structure that is easy to understand
• use "starting pages" where the content of the pages below is displayed automatically
• search before posting new content

In addition to this, it is very valuable to set up permissions properly, check macros very well before installing them and to tidy up once in a while. 

[Taranjeet Singh]

Though I am not that much into Confluence Administration recently than Jira Administration, but joining this group has provided me a really great opportunity to learn from all the experienced Confluence Admins and Community Leaders. Thank you all for sharing these great tips & tricks for new Confluence Admins. They are really useful.