Atlassian offers many tools for successful project management. In this tutorial we would like to introduce you to Confluence, Atlassian tool for the open and shared workplace. There are many ways in which we can use it. Like creating a blog post, managing the meeting notes or creating the report from your project. We will show you how you can create your own digital workplace in Confluence. Also, you will learn what Confluence features you can use in your everyday work.
Your digital workspace
Log into your account and click the dots in the left corner of your page. You will get a view of all your projects and spaces. Choose Confluence.
Now, you have to create your own space.
What are the “spaces” and why do you need them? Thanks to them, you can create digital workspaces for various projects. All of your notes, documents and databases will be in one place. Also, you can choose the team for each one of them. Not everything is for the eyes of everyone in the company. Of course, if you want to create a space that can be used by everyone, you can also do that. For example, we have space for all the training materials for new employees. New people in our organization can easily read all the information they need. Thanks to this they can start working on their own tasks and issues immediately.
While creating a new space, you can choose from different templates:
Manage knowledge of your organization
Some of the spaces templates are created for the typical work in the IT industry, like creating documentation for a software projects. We will focus on the ones that can be used in a non-profit organization. At the start, the best choice for you will be just “Blank Space”. This is the most flexible workspace from all of them. Later you can think also about the “Knowledge Base”. It could be useful for NGOs. It’s a place where you can create your own tutorials and sources of information for your organization.
After choosing the name for your space, you will something like this:
You should start from setting the rules of restriction, to make sure that the space can be accessed only by the users that you want there.
On the upper-right corner, you can see the three-dot icon. Click it to access the dropdown menu. There are many options there. For now, we are interested only in the “Restrictions”. Here you can choose who will have access to the information in this space. You can give it to everyone, only chosen people from your team, or even just you. Here you can also choose who can edit documents and who can only just see them.
Create your content
For now, there is not much to see in your space. So we have to change it! Let’s create some content. Confluence is used for all kind of notes, documentation and other tools for open and shared workspace. Click the highlighted “Create” button that can be found in the upper menu.
As you can see, there are a lot of templates that you can choose from. But don’t get intimidated: we are going to show you the most useful ones, especially for the NGOs.
Blog post
Blog posts are one of the most popular forms of creating content for the Internet. Confluence gives you a template for them that is very useful. If you ever used Google Documents or the Microsoft Word, you will see right away, what your editing options are, and how to use them. Everything is very intuitive.
If you’re creating the blog post in Confluence and share it with your team members, they can help you with it. They can comment on your work or edit some spelling mistakes. Integration with Jira makes the writing process a structured and an efficient task. Create an issue in marketing project for writing a blog post and then write it down in Confluence. Everyone in your team will know exactly how much you’ve written. Or how much time more you need. And even eventually help you, if you have a writers-block.
File list
File list makes sharing the most important documents as easy as ever. Very often the Excel spreadsheet we need is hidden in hundreds of emails. Or maybe in the forgotten folder on your computer or a cloud. File list clearly shows everything you need for a project, so you can’t ever lose it. Organizing everything will not only help you but also your team. Later, when you want something from the
How-to articles
This template is going to be an amazing help for every new member of your organization. Every institution has its own culture, a way of doing things. Sometimes it can be really hard for people from the outside to adapt to all of the company habits. That is why “How-to” articles can make this objective much, much easier. Write down instruction for the task once, and you will never have to repeat yourself again. Attach some related articles, distinguish the most important parts and allow others to learn from your experience.
Marketing plan
All of the NGOs have to use marketing for purposes of their projects, but not all of them have experts from these fields. But not to worry: Confluence can also help you with this task. Write down your objectives, do a SWOT and competitive analysis, see the timeline for the whole project, plan budget, and do so much more. Be ready for everything and make sure that your marketing goals will be achieved.
Meeting notes
Meetings are one of the most important parts of working in a modern organization. Sharing information, doing brainstorms, presenting the new ideas – there are a lot of things that can happen during a meeting. So it is always a good idea to create notes from them. Thanks to this you can be sure that no information or conclusion from
Project plan
Earlier we showed you how to create a marketing plan. But what about projects? Confluence also allows you to plan out all of the activities in your organization. Write down your objectives, decide when you want to complete them, see the timeline or write down other things, you think are needed. A good project plan will make everything focused and people from your team will know exactly what they have to do, in order to get things done.
We hope this tutorial was helpful! If you want to know more about Atlassian products, check out our other articles.
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