Reluctance to Reorganize Confluence

[Jason Lansdowne]

My company has a confluence site that has not been actively maintained for many years. We have 2-3 spaces with THOUSANDS of documents in each space. Many are 6 or 7 years old. 

People have been complaining about how hard it is to find anything on our Confluence site, and the task was given to me to make some changes. 

I'm suggesting three things:

1. Instead of 2-3 enormous spaces, create new spaces for each group within our company (QA, Dev, Product Management, etc. Ver time, deprecate the use of these 2-3 legacy spaces.

2. Archive documents that are no longer relevant and/or outdated to be no longer useful.

3. Teams move their pages to the new spaces.

One of the groups maintains a huge directory page of how-to articles. These articles have many authors from many groups. They do not want to move this page under any circumstances. They are worried that the page will be hard to find in its new location, and that they do not have "permission" to move someone else's content. 

I have tried to explain that moved content does not disappear and in-app links are adjusted. We are at an impasse. 

I am asking for the community to please critique my plan, and let me know your thoughts on moving these pages. Thanks in advance.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Well, this situation is not unique. We heard the same story from several teams and this is exactly why we developed the Better Content Archiving for Confluence app.

If I were you, I'd approach the problem in multiple phases:

1. Archive everything that is "obviously not needed" any longer and that you can make the decision about without talking to others.
2. (probably the volume is largely reduced at this point)
3. Update/archive those that you need to discuss with others.
4. (everything is current and relevant, although badly organized at this point)
5. Re-organize!

What is the "best" structure is something that your stakeholders should agree upon before you start to move pages around. It can be by-team, by-product, by-whatever.

[Tom_Carrott_Adaptavist]

Hey @Jason Lansdowne 

Interesting article, thanks for sharing! 

I'm in the process of exploring this problem space within the Atlassian ecosystem and would love to get your thoughts - i'm looking to setup some informal discussions in the coming weeks and wondered if you'd be interested in getting involved? 

Many thanks,

Tom

[Julie d_Antin _Elements_]

I fully support the idea of creating more spaces. You could try to promote this idea by explaining that each team can then have one or more space admins that then have extra permissions to customize their space as they see fit. It also will make it easier for search since people can limit to one or more spaces. There are apps that allow you to create nicer menus to group spaces together (for example, all the QA & Dev together, another group for HR/admin spaces, etc) so instead of going to the long list of all spaces, people can navigate more like on a website.

To facilitate the process, I would recommend inviting one person from each team to participate in the Confluence clean-up project, with the understanding that they will archive and organize pages related to their team in a way that will best serve the team and the larger company. By having one person, accountability should be clearer since it's not everyone's (read= no one's) responsibility.

An idea for the how-to articles: what about adding a label to each article, moving them to different spaces if needed, and then on the directory page using a content by label macro to display links to all the articles?

And last tip for people who are worried about finding content: opening the Recent option in the menu is sooooo helpful because instead of trying to navigate to that page you worked on yesterday/two days ago, you have a short-cut. If people are unaware of this, they might not realize that they can still easily access pages even when they are moved.