Spaces vs Pages general hierarchy best practices

[Torfinn Olsen]

I'm curious. Managing relatively simple but technical software and hardware projects and I'm curious what the advantages or disadvantages more experienced Confluence admins would have experienced with the following scenarios:

1) utilizing a customer space and project pages within that space

2) utilizing customer spaces and project spaces independently of one another

Option 2 seems to be how the software intends to be utilized, but to me it seems like that would get rather cluttered quickly if you start to have a lot of projects at the same time?

What are your opinions?

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello there Torfinn! Thanks for sharing your question with the Community.

Well organizing your Confluence really depends on what and how you share content.

I am not a Confluence administrator myself, however, in Support I have seen many styles of setup. The most common one for multiple customers/clients/departments is having one space for each one.

Inside each space, we then set pages for each project. Having this may make things easier when:

• searching for content (you know where to find it)
• creating content (you know where to put it)
• permissions and restrictions (group management is made easier)

Again, instance setup is really up to the administrator and the company needs, but those are my two cents on that!

Let us know your thoughts.

[Torfinn Olsen]

Thanks for taking the time to respond Diego,

This is basically the logical conclusion I arrived at, but I've seen some mention of creating spaces for projects as well, and overall my longterm goal is the full integration of JIRA with Confluence for task and process management so I want to futureproof a simpler rollout with that in mind.

I suspect that pages for each project will ultimately simplify all of the user needs you've specified. My only outlying concern is that associating JIRA epics with the SPACE rather than particular pages will create visibility of all projects everytime such an association is made.

So embarking down that structural path nullifies the ability to permission more finely against visibility in JIRA from one project to the next and will collect and aggregate all the pages created from one customer on EVERY project we do for them visible to anyone associated with viewing all of those customer pages if I'm understanding the hierarchy correctly.

Is that something you've experienced first hand? Segregation of user visibility and capture of the different meetings/records by page? Or do you simply have all users permissions Space wide transparent?

[Diego]

Hi Torfinn!

Confluence has both Page Restrictions and Space Permissions. Page restrictions are much more granular than Space permissions.

If someone or a group of people can not see or edit an specific page, you can set that at restriction level. You can also set what each group or individual can do within an specific space with permissions.

There are also Jira Permissions. The user accessing Confluence also needs to have permissions to access the specified filters and issues.

A little more information on restrictions and permissions:

Permissions and restrictions - Confluence

Permissions overview - Jira

I had not experienced this first hand, but the situation sounds manageable by using the available tools to restrict and allow access in both applications!

Let us know Torfinn!

[Bill Rudy]

Obviously circumstances vary so it depends on your specifics, but In my experience, at least in a typical hierarchical company situation, it's best to err on the side of fewer spaces vs more.  With fewer spaces and simply having depts (or teams or whatever the main breakouts are) create a main page in the main space and calling everything under it "their space" (conceptually speaking), each of those sub-areas is still under the whole in the same literal space, which promotes a more unified feel to the whole and being better able to visualize and go up and down the company hierarchy.  With more spaces, they are independent of each other and there is no such structure, which generally I think invites more fragmentation and a cobweb of pages, mitigating cohesion.

My .02 for the day!