More than just a document collaboration platform, Confluence can be implemented as a full-fledged content management system (CMS), thanks to its robust features and extensive customization with add-ons.
A content management system (CMS) “…” enables users to create, edit, collaborate on, publish and store digital content.
Source: What is a content management system (CMS)? Definition from WhatIs.com
You can use Confluence for internal team knowledge bases and building dynamic customer-facing documentation sites, among many more use cases.
To ensure the platform can efficiently accommodate all these different needs, it’s crucial to optimize the content workflow, from information searching and content creation to publishing in Confluence.
Explore these key use cases and see how Space Sync for Confluence app helps you streamline your content management processes.
Breakdown of Confluence’s most popular use cases
In a cross-functional environment, many teams juggle between platforms to coordinate content development, publishing, and sharing, not to mention the lengthy process of review & approval among stakeholders.
Confluence eliminates this hassle by providing a centralized hub for internal knowledge sharing and collaborative editing in one place.
Confluence for enterprise knowledge management
Confluence is a centralized repository for all your company’s knowledge, procedures, or resources, where teams can find and access relevant content to complete their work without searching multiple sites. With Confluence as a go-to source for organizational knowledge, you don’t have to worry about information silos.
However, these functionalities will only shine if you have a knowledge management process that empowers teams to create and share content.
Elevate knowledge management across internal spaces
It’s common for organizations to structure Confluence by departments and each team will manage their own space. This structure, while considered a standard approach, may lead to silos or duplicated content.
Internal knowledgeis co-created and shared across teams. For example, the product team maintains documents about products and share them with the rest of the organization to ensure their colleagues have the latest information about new feature launches. This information can be consumed and translated into relevant deliverables like knowledge base or marketing assets.
Space Sync for Confluence allows teams to distribute and maintain content from the product team’s space and other spaces at ease. This ensures all teams have instant updates on important information, without relying on manual page sharing (that will end up in layers of notification).
For example, you can enable the auto sync by label feature to auto publish relevant product updates to the marketing team:
Read more: Distribute content to multiple spaces for cross-functional and external collaboration in Confluence
Public-facing Confluence: Building a customer self-service knowledge base
Besides internal collaboration, many teams adopt Confluence to build a comprehensive customer knowledge base. One of the most popular use cases for Confluence is technical documentation.
Detailed articles, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides can empower your customers to find solutions independently, reducing support ticket volume and increasing customer satisfaction.
Integrated with Jira Service Management, Confluence documentation gives you and your customers a seamless experience in gathering product knowledge. Internal teams can also create help content or release notes following the development work in Jira. This complete workflow makes Confluence a great solution for building a knowledge base. As with intranet, it also requires a structured publishing workflow.
Automatically share approved content to a public Confluence site
You may create a separate Confluence instance to host these documents. However, manually maintaining content from the internal space and this external public site can be error-prone. Not only ensuring the latest content is cross-published to the right destination, you’ll also need to perform frequent updates to old pages, in cases the product features change.
With Space Sync for Confluence, it’s extremely easy to automate document lifecycle processes between a draft space and public space (site).
By utilizing the content status, you can manage your draft and finalized content across instances without manually reuploading the page content. All you have to do is configure the automatic synchronization between internal site and the public site based on the status. That way, once a draft is approved, it will be automatically published on the synced site.
For future updates, you can simply move the page status to “In Progress” or “Ready to review” if you need to make changes. Only when the page status is marked as “Approved”, these updates will be synced to the public document.
Streamline Confluence content management workflow for better collaboration
Space Sync for Confluence can help you set up automated workflows for content approval and publishing across spaces and sites. This translates to:
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Reduced manual work: No more manually copying drafts to separate publishing spaces.
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Faster time to publication: Approved content gets published instantly, keeping your audience informed with the latest information.
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Enhanced accuracy: Eliminate the risk of errors that can occur with manual copying.
Space Sync for Confluence helps to unleash the platform’s powerful CMS capabilities. With synced content across relevant spaces, you have a connected environment for information sharing, streamlined publishing workflows, and the ability to manage internal and external knowledge bases effectively.
Read more: Automatically publish & sync pages to multiple locations with Space Sync for Confluence