Top 3 Tips To Get Started with Atlassian's Confluence

Last week we shared Interfuze’s top three Atlassian tools to help support teamwork and collaboration - Jira, Trello and Confluence.

These tools are also available for you and your teams to use for FREE right away.

Being a long time and constant user of these tools, our team members have certainly discovered our favourite ways of using them to suit our internal workings and projects management.

So we wanted to share some of our top three favourite tips and ways of using Confluence that have saved us valuable time by not reinventing the wheel but also helped to impress our team members and stakeholders with professional documentation.

If you are just getting started with Confluence, it is a great online team workspace where you can manage and easily search documents and information in one centralised location.

Confluence has a host of features that make it a breeze to create project repositories, intranets, replace static documents like requirements docs and have areas for tracking training, development plans, the list is endless.

We’re not just writing out a sales pitch here – we here at Interfuze all use Confluence (and have also introduced it to our clients and their projects) for all of these and more.

We love it simply because it really does what it promises.

So here’s our top three tips for getting started with Confluence:

• Go with the template option - From product requirements to sprint planning meetings to marketing plans, create it quickly using one of 100 best practice, ready to use and customise templates in Confluence.

  There’s really no need to invent the wheel and create something from scratch. If you need to customise your templates, start with one that’s available and make changes as you require.

  It’s certainly saved all of our team members time and energy to choose a template for internal and external reports and plans.

• Try out the macros - Want to add a table of contents, an embedded roadmap, or a pie chart based on Jira issues in your Confluence page?

  Macros can do all of that (plus more). Just type the ‘{‘ key and open the macro browser. Macros can be a huge time saver and an easy way to make your plans, reports and Confluence documents more comprehensive.

• Don’t worry about getting it perfect – just start using it. Confluence is super flexible in how you can organise information – which can lead to analysis paralysis.

  However it’s also built to make it easy to change, want to rename or move a page? No problem, all the links to it will be automatically updated.

  Want to change your layout? Not an issue! Simply go to the space and choose Space tools > Look and Feel from the bottom of the sidebar and follow the prompts to change that layout to what you desire.

  Confluence’s brilliance at searching everything - wiki pages, document names, inside documents you’ve attached, emails (cc Confluence and it’ll store the email with your project) and even inside attachments to emails, means that even if you change how or where you store information it’ll be easy to find what you’ve already added in there.

Check out this Confluence video tutorial from Atlassian for step by step information to get you started.

Or reach out for more top tips.