Your Complete Guide to Confluence | Hands On | For Everyone

Before we dig into Confluence we'll take about general concepts that will help improve your experience using this tool.

Space admins are important folks to know as they can help you get access to things, figure out where information lives and more. Here we'll see how we can learn who the space admins are for a space.

Before you start adding content or using features it's always a good idea to plan out how you'll use the tool. Here we'll learn about how we can plan for success.

Many groups do a great job of planning out Confluence - but then fail to review how things are going later. Dig into why regular reviews are important in this lecture.

We can't expect everyone to just know how to use Confluence - this lecture explores the importance of training new team members on how to use the tool.

Finding content can be the most challenging part of using Confluence. Here we'll learn how to use the built in search features to find things.

Wrap up our discussion about general concepts you'll find useful.

This section digs into concepts and ideas specific to Confluence. These are important as we'll reference them in the course, but you'll also find them helpful in looking up information later.

The Atlassian Community is an online form and learning space maintained by Atlassian. It is definitely worth the time to make an account (with a personal email) to stay up to date, ask questions, and learn.

Keyboard shortcuts make it much quicker (and easier) to use Confluence. Here we'll learn how to find what those shortcuts are.

An instance is just a copy of Confluence. There are different types (Cloud and Data Center, or DC) and understanding their differences is important. Learn about it's importance here.

Learn how to navigate around Confluence's interface, including the various menus and how they change when you're in different spots.

Spaces are just sections or areas of Confluence that let us organize content. Typically this is done by team, project or process, but there's many ways to use them.

The content hierarchy (or page tree) is where all the content in your instance lives. Understanding where it is, and how to use it, is important to using Confluence successfully.

There are many types of content available in Confluence, including blogs, pages, whiteboards, dashboards and more. Here we'll explore what they are and the differences between them.

Pages are the basic building block of Confluence. Here we'll learn how to create them, what editing options there are, and how to make changes to existing pages.

Information needs to be maintained over time or it gets stale, and the people responsible for this are the page owners. This is clearly indicated on each page, and can be easily changed as needed.

Macros give us ways to expand our pages. This could be by automation a table of contents, pulling in information from somewhere else, or even adding more formatting options.

Macros let you get more out of pages and blogs. Here we'll explore how to find them, and how to edit them (plus see a few of my favorite!).

Creating content from scratch can be hard - especially if you're new to Confluence or don't use it much. Fortunately Confluence comes preloaded with over 140 templates, and lets us make our own. These are pre-formatted pages that help speed up our ability to create content.

Templates make it much easier to create engaging content by providing a framework to add to. Here we'll see how to explore existing templates, and how to use them to make new pages.

Blogs are similar to pages, but instead of appearing with other content they are listed chronologically. This lets you easily track point-in-time information.

Databases let you structure data by adding columns of different data types (drop downs, dates, links and the like). You can save views of specific data to share with team members and even copy the structure for other similar projects.

Smart links allow you to add links to other content within Confluence, Jira tickets or even web pages directly into the content hierarchy.

Whiteboards are a great way to visually collaborate on ideas, plan something out and review brainstorming sessions.

Eventually content will no longer be needed. It could be outdated, or maybe the team's just moved on. Regardless, Confluence offers two options for managing old content - archiving (which hides content but still lets you find it) and deletion (which permanently removes it).

Eventually content may become outdated or no longer needed. Archiving lets you keep the content (but hides it from the content hierarchy) and deletion lets you remove the content entirely.

Confluence is a collaboration platform, but sometimes you will need to secure information or limit access. Fortunately there's a number of features to help you do this including permissions and restrictions.

Restrictions let you prevent individuals from viewing or editing specific content. This is useful for ensuring sensitive information stays hidden, or that only specific people can edit things.

Folders are a relatively new Confluence feature that lets you more easily organize content.

Confluence keeps track of changes made to pages and blogs in the version history. This makes it easy to see how content has changed over time, and even revert back to an old version if you need to.

While content should generally stay in Confluence since it can change, you can export to various formats.

Confluence allows you to import existing documents from Microsoft Word and Google Docs makes it easy to convert existing knowledge.

Confluence is more than just a knowledge base - it's a collaboration platform. To help support this Confluence has several ways teams can collaborate, including live editing, comments and more.

Atlassian Intelligence is a relatively new feature in Confluence Cloud premium (and up) that adds some AI tools to help speed up finding data, creating content and using the system.

Atlassian Intelligence is included in whiteboards and will help you do things like organize ideas, brainstorm and summarize whiteboards into pages.

Atlassian Intelligence is built into search and lets you ask natural language questions instead of hunting for keywords.

Atlassian Intelligence is included in pages and helps out with things like ideation, changing the tone of something and defining acronyms.

Welcome to this section on being a space admin! Here you'll get an overview of everything a space admin can do.

See how a Confluence space is created. In many environments you may not have permission to do this, but its still important to see what it's like.

Space Admins manage access and permissions in a space. This includes individual users, groups, guests and anonymous access.

General settings covers a number of settings that impact your space, including its name, the home page, content statuses and more.

Content settings includes your archive, trash, and the ability to reorder content in the space.

Look and feel contains multiple options on how your space looks, including things like a space-wide header and footer.

Space admins can manage, create and edit templates. Learn how in this lecture.

The integrations menu controls how different systems can interact with your space. Depending on your environment you will have more or less items in here.

Mission Control gives you different important metrics on how your space is doing. It's a great spot to go when you need to determine what is going on in your space, how it's being used and more.

Keep tabs on everything in a space is hard - the content manager helps you make changes to multiple pieces of content at a time.

Wrap up our section on being a space admin.

Automations let the system take action on your behalf - get introduced to them here.

There's a lot of repetitive tasks in Confluence that are important. Unfortunately they're time consuming and generally boring! Luckily Confluence offers a way to automate tasks so the system handles them for us.

An overview of the menus and settings available in automations.

Triggers tell Confluence when a specific automation should begin. This includes things like when a button is clicked, a specific type of content is created, or even a scheduled date and time.

Conditions let you filter when an automation should take action. For example only if it is created by a specific user, or only if specific text appears in the title.

Branches let you setup automations to make action across a range of content - for example repeating an action for every page with a specific label. This lets you take bulk actions for a single trigger.

Actions are what the automation does. Examples include creating a page, changing labels and archiving content.

Let's build a simple automation together!

This wraps up our section on automations.

We'll wrap up our course together and review everything we've learned.