Edit a page or archive and replace?

[Jenny Gallagher]

Hi community, I'm a new hire tech writer and am updating documentation/pages—lots of formatting. Which one is best practices:

• Create new docs, archive outdated docs, then upload/replace?
• Do a live edit on outdated docs?

Note: I'd like to create a draft of the newly updated doc for approval before publishing. Is this possible? I am waiting for an upper editing level status so I can play around (i.e., I'm currently restricted).  

Thanks in advance.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

My understanding is that documentation experts don't recommend removing/deleting documentation, as it is still valid information, just for an older version of the software that could still be relevant for some users.

If I can recommend some reading on the topic, look into K15t's guides and expert articles on how to use Confluence as a fully-fledged documentation solution, like this webinar with Matt Reiner _K15t_ or this article.

They also offer tools for publishing your documentation and managing the different versions of it. 

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jenny Gallagher

The actual steps when updating your knowledge base probably are

1. defining criteria or workflow rules for when a page is considered outdated
2. automatically identifying your outdated pages based on these criteria
3. establishing a review process that also considers ownership of pages and spaces
4. bulk archive/delete all obsolete pages

All of this can easily be done with Breeze.

Breeze is made for maintaining your knowledge base and ensuring that pages are continuously reviewed to keep Confluence clean and organized.

👉 Give it a try, or feel free to schedule an appointment with me for a personal demo.

Cheers and all the best, Adrian from B1NARY (we are the developers of Breeze)

[marc -Collabello--Phase Locked- · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jenny Gallagher ,

If you have documentation with an approval flow, I'd recommend to have all "ready" documentation in a separate space.  When you need to update the documents, you make a copy into an "edit" space.  Then you can edit the copy and approve it.  Move/archive the previous version in the "ready" space, and move the new version from the "edit" into the "ready" space.