Seeking Advice & Best Practices for Using Confluence as an Intranet Site

[Nick Hoffmann]

Hi everyone!

I’m currently exploring the use of Confluence as the platform for hosting our company’s intranet site. This would be for technical and non technical teams alike. I’d love to hear from others who have experience with this tool in a similar capacity.

• What are some best practices you’ve found for organizing and structuring content?
• How do you ensure ease of navigation and user engagement?
• Any tips for integrating Confluence with other tools or systems?
• What challenges have you encountered, and how did you overcome them?

Thanks in advance for any insights you can share!

[Lisa Forstberg]

Hi @Nick Hoffmann ,

Welcome to the community! 

First of all, are you on Confluence Cloud or Confluence on prem?

I have done a handful of these assignments where we use confluence as a base for an intranet. My experience is this:

• Get yourself an addon that helps with navigating in Confluence. Typical addons are: Refined, Mantra/Karma or Linchpin. This is an absolute must to get the intranet "feel"
• Have an idea on how news will flow. To keep your intranet lively you want it to be the central place to go to.  Identify and categorise news channels. Typically these will be different spaces that holds content of blog type. categorise in Need to know vs nice to know. Group users into who is the editor for each channel (space). 
• Integrate with your chat tool to keep it relevant. Slack / Teams.
• Where is information stored today? Do we need to go through a lot of old data and verify it is valid?
• Decide on how to structure and organise the content. What is logically grouped into a Space. How should the page tree structure look like. 
• Use templates to ensure a consistent look

About challenges.Intranet assignment really put the light on a few organisational questions

- how are people getting important information today and how to we want that to be in the future?

- how to keep information up to date? 

- do we want that the intranet to be managed by a few "editors" and a lot of users just "consuming" information or do we want it to be more of a collaboration hub. 

well a few thoughts to get going :-)

all the best

Lisa

[Zoriana Bogutska_Adaptavist_]

Hi @Nick Hoffmann 

As an alternative solution for content structuring and engagement, you might consider Content Formatting Macros for Confluence. This app includes all the key formatting features you will need to make your content outstanding, professional-looking, and easier for end readers to consume. 

Also, for inspiration, you can use advanced templates for a variety of use cases your team will need to build the company's internet. 

Happy to help if you have any questions, as this app was created by my team :)