What is Confluence, and Why Use it for Knowledge Management?
Although Confluence started out as an easy-to-use Wiki solution for teams back in 2004, it’s since grown and developed into a much more versatile tool that supports a number of use cases, including remote collaboration and project management.
For more about the many ways teams can use Confluence, you can check out our resource on what Confluence is used for, but here we’ll be focusing on one of Confluence’s strongest use cases: knowledge management.
Confluence’s intuitive editing and publishing interface, templates, integrations with other tools, and organizational features like labels make it the perfect tool for creating and maintaining a highly effective knowledge base.
But what if you want to take your knowledge base a little further? The Atlassian Marketplace has plenty of options to help you do just that, with many apps that expand the base functionality of Confluence, amping up the features that make Confluence great for knowledge management to make it an even more valuable resource for your team. Plus, you can try any Confluence app free for 30 days, so your team can get familiar with each one and how it works for you.
We’ve compiled a list of a few of our favorite Confluence apps that support the knowledge management use case by making your knowledge base more engaging, customizable, accessible, and easy to understand. Keep reading to learn about each one ⬇️
Back to top5 Marketplace Apps to Check Out
External Share for Confluence
If your knowledge base is internal, designed to offer information about company policies and processes, there could be times when you want to share this information with external parties, e.g. contractors and customers. But you don’t want to make your whole space public just to share the odd page occasionally or temporarily.
External Share for Confluence lets you securely share live links to individual Confluence pages and page trees, and give external users the option to add comments or attachments, even edit the text.
“When deciding what tool to use to share Confluence pages externally, our top tip is to think about how much collaboration you need,” says Chris Cooke, Old Street’s CEO. “If you need the external party to add comments or edit text, then you need External Share. If you want to share diagrams with them, like those made with Gliffy, you also need External Share. This is because, unlike other options, our app is integrated with a variety of popular macros.”
Content Formatting Macros for Confluence
Confluence is a great workspace for building out your knowledge base. Still, as you develop it, you may want a few extra tools at your disposal to make your content even more visually appealing and engaging. Content Formatting Macros for Confluence provides teams with macros that make your content easy to consume.
Content Formatting Macros helps you improve the structure of your content with tools like tabs, numbered headings, and a progress bar. You can make your content more visually appealing with backgrounds, cards, and buttons, and you can expand the functionality of Confluence with other macros such as LaTeX, pop-up dialogue, BibTex, tooltips, and footnotes.
To amplify and improve your Confluence content, try experimenting with different macros until you land on a combination that maximizes their value and meets your team’s needs. For additional help getting started, the Adaptavist team is available for demo calls and has created documentation and videos for various use cases.
Comala Document Management for Confluence
Comala Document Management automates the document lifecycle process and provides the control needed to meet high-quality standards. The app enhances Confluence as a Single Source of Truth with automated workflows for pages and spaces. When edited or expired, documents automatically go through a review, approval, and maintenance process, keeping the data current and reliable.
Whether you’re part of a large enterprise or a lean start up, the app lets you easily manage the governance of Confluence content by assigning permissions, page reviewers, approvers, and e-signature requirements.
Integrate Comala Document Management with Comala Publishing to create a working space and a published space, so that draft content and approved content are kept separate. This will help teams ensure that only approved documents are shared with the right audiences and users know where to look for the finalized information.
Refined for Confluence Cloud
Refined can turn even the largest knowledge bases into easy-to-navigate sites that look and work like modern websites. New layers of structure—group spaces into categories, and categories into sites—translate into a streamlined navigation bar top-of-site. And you can build-out site and space overviews using a layout editor, adding links to important pages, activity modules, search bars and anything else the team needs quick access to. The end result for teams: drastically less time searching and clicking while you hunt for information.
Layouts, themes and structure/navigation are huge selling points for Refined — but don't forget about personalizations. Adding view permissions to portions of page layouts, or entire sections of your site, for that matter, can shrink your knowledge base around users and keep irrelevant content at bay. The result will be a vastly improved user experience, especially on larger enterprise instances.
Gliffy Diagrams for Confluence
The information contained in your knowledge base should be engaging, accessible, and easy to read. Visuals engage your readers and diagrams make complex processes and structures easier to understand at a glance, making them a valuable addition to your knowledge base.
With Gliffy, you can create diagrams directly in Confluence and even build them in real time with your team, eliminating the need to manage multiple tools to create and upload visuals. You don’t have to worry about keeping them updated, either — Gliffy diagrams automatically update wherever you place them in your Confluence space.
Text contained in Gliffy diagrams is fully searchable within Confluence, so someone searching for specific information in your knowledge base will be able to locate what they need quickly and easily, even if it’s part of a diagram.
If you’re creating diagrams for your Confluence knowledge base, try using Gliffy’s layer linking feature to make your diagrams interactive. This allows the reader to toggle different parts of the diagram on and off, providing a more engaging user experience and making it easy to focus on the level of information they need. Our interactive diagrams demo walks you through how to use this feature to bring your Confluence pages to life.
Back to topOther Confluence Resources
Ready to make an awesome knowledge base? Here’s where you can get started — and don’t forget to add Gliffy, and the rest of these apps, once you’re all set up.
Here are some other resources to check out if you’re interested in learning more about how to make the most out of Confluence: