Guide on how to use confluence to build your knowledge base

More and more working processes are moving to the cloud, so companies need to use tools that allow teams to quickly and easily share information and feedback, update tasks, communicate, and collaborate.

Confluence allows your team to bring together all the information about the projects and create a unique documental portal that can be used as an intranet or corporate blog, knowledge base, and self-service resource.

What is Confluence?

It’s a wiki-based tool from Atlassian designed for Agile knowledge management. Confluence gives your team one space to share all the information about the projects, news, work together on the tasks, and get instant updates.

Confluence is great for both working from the physical office and remotely, letting distributed teams work together no matter what time zones they have.

Why do you need a Knowledge Base?

Answers to all questions. A robust knowledge base provides users with ready solutions for their issues. You just search for the question or word in the search bar, and instantly get all articles related to your issue. Knowledge base structures all the experience ever gained during the work and simplifies work.

Single source of truth. Whether you have any controversial issues, you can always refer to the single source of truth represented by the corporate knowledge base.

Accessible knowledge. By this, your employees won’t depend on specialists from other spheres and be able to find an appropriate solution in a second.

Pros and Cons for Using Confluence for Knowledge Base

Confluence is good at knowledge and project management, providing users with sole space for collaboration and communication.

Core benefits of Confluence:

Integrates Jira, Trello, Slack and other tools and addons.
Tracks most viewed, accessed, liked pages and allows to actualize content when needed
Easy to use self-service resource for customers to look up information on their issues, any news or updates.

Any minuses?

Limited functions. Confluence out-of-the-box has a limited set of functions and plain design. So to update Confluence according to your company’s demands, it should be integrated with additional plugins (there are plenty at Atlassian marketplace).
Pricing. Although the price is based on the number of users, it does not gradually increase with each user. The price rises when you reach several users, and it can be unexpected for your budget. Yet, it isn’t a problem when you pay attention to license management.

Steps to Build Your Knowledge Base Using Confluence

At Polontech, we create Knowledge Base that gives maximum profit to your business:

Install Confluence to create your knowledge base.
Migrate all the data and teams from previous tools and software, from server to cloud or vice versa.
Integrate Confluence with your software to work seamlessly with each other and create one business environment.

What To Avoid When Building Your Confluence Knowledge Base

It is important to understand that it is not enough just to create a knowledge base and start adding information to it. Lately, there has been a real overabundance of information in various areas, and the same problem exists in business.

If a company is large enough, soon the knowledge base will grow significantly, new articles will continue to appear, making it difficult to navigate. So while planning the structure of knowledge think about how the hierarchy of content, filters and tags to simplify the search in future.

While working on articles for a knowledge base, try to make them as simple as possible, and avoid complex technical terms – explain the notions in simple words. If possible, add relevant screenshots – users will surely appreciate it.

Don’t forget about old content and actualize it when needed. If you get any feedback or reports of the knowledge base, don’t ignore them and tailor the content to meet users needs.

If you want to have open knowledge base portal for your customers, make sure customers won’t get unwanted access to your inner documentation

Conclusion

Confluence is perfect for organizing your content management, collaboration, file sharing, and creating an inner corporate portal. Knowledge base based on Confluence will save you and your customers tons of time and resources: having a well-performed self-service portal, employees don’t search – customers don’t wait. With KB, you make all knowledge accessible, and all lessons learned and used to quick onboard new employees.