Use Confluence as your Intranet
Your intranet is the hub of your organization. When choosing your intranet platform, you need to ensure that the system is simple enough for non-technical users, information and content can be shared easily, and access is restricted to those within your organization.
Confluence has a host of great out-of-the-box features that allow you to share and collaborate with your colleagues, while keeping your information secure. Share things like procedures, specifications and important files – or organize company events and functions – and get your teams working together. It's one place to share, find, and collaborate to get work done.
Create your community
It's quick and easy to add users to your Confluence site. Allow people to add themselves as users of the site; invite people to sign up by sending them an invitation link; add new users manually; or use an existing directory – like an LDAP directory – for authentication and to manage users and groups.
Whichever way you choose, you can quickly build a community of Confluence users and give them access to your intranet; you'll also have a ready-made people directory.
Match your company branding
Upload your company logo, and Confluence's auto look and feel will change the color scheme to match. It'll make your intranet feel more familiar to your colleagues, and help with adoption.
A space for everything, and everything in its space
A Confluence space is essentially a container for a group of pages and blog posts with related content.
When you're starting out with Confluence, the easiest way to organize things is to create a space for each team or department within your organization. Each team's space is then a place for them to create and share pages, blog posts, meeting notes, files, and much more – and becomes the place to go for team members to get the information they need.
Just choose Spaces > Create space from the header, and Confluence provides a list of space blueprints to help get you started.
Each space can have its own color scheme and has a customizable home page, which you can edit to suit your purpose – like displaying and tracking team goals and displaying a list of team members. Use the built-in 'Team Space' template to automatically add all members of the team to the homepage, to help everyone get to know each other.
You can set permissions for each space, so if there's sensitive information that should only been seen by certain users or groups, it's easy to secure it with Confluence.
Don't feel restricted to creating spaces for teams though; you can also create spaces for projects (large or small), events, and anything else where you want to collect information under a common heading or permissions structure.
Once you have some spaces set up, create some pages and blog posts to give your colleagues an example of how Confluence can be used, then invite them to create their own pages and blogs.
Add a personal space
Every Confluence user, including you, can also create their own personal space; it can be a place to keep your own work, add shortcuts to your most used content, and you even get your own blog for sharing your ideas and opinions with the rest of your organization (or just those that you want to see them).
Create pages, meeting notes and more
You can create pages for anything you want in Confluence - meeting notes, project plans, decisions, and more. Pages are editable so others can contribute and keep them up to date after you create them. Choose Create from the Confluence header and choose a blank page, or use a template to get you started.
Type your page, change its layout, add images and links, and do it all without any specialist skills or training. You can also attach files – allowing everyone in a team access to assets that are critical to the project – like mockups and requirements. You and your colleagues can like the page, and comment on it to start a conversation about the content.
Confluence also offers a series of useful built-in page blueprints, which help you with the content and formatting of the page. The meeting notes and decisions blueprints are two that can be really useful when others need to be in-the-know about what happened, and why it happened.
Avoid the reply-all and blog about it
Each space you create in Confluence has its own blog, where you and your teams can share news and events, discuss important projects and developments, or congratulate a teammate for a special effort; blogging is a great way to foster company culture and celebrate achievements across your organization.
You can watch any blog to make sure you get updated when there's a new post. Blog posts are automatically organized by date, and grouped by year and month, so they're also easy to find.
Share stuff that matters
If you need to be sure that the right people see a page or blog post, Confluence offers a range of ways to make sure you can get their attention. Type the @ symbol and the name of a Confluence user to mention them in a page, blog post, or comment. They'll get an email notification that you've mentioned them, with a link to the page, post or comment.
There's also a Share button at the top right of every page. Type the name or email address of a user or group and send them a short message with a link to the content you're sharing.
Watch and learn
Don't miss out on important updates. Watching spaces, pages, and blogs is a great way to stay up-to-date with what's happening in your own team, or any other team or person you need to keep up with. When you watch something, you'll get email updates when changes are made or a comment is added.
The Confluence dashboard also has a recent activity feed, which allows you and your team to see what's trending throughout the company or in your network.
Let team collaboration take on a life of its own
If you want to communicate in-the-moment, HipChat – our private service for chat, video, and screen sharing – is built for teams. Share ideas and files in persistent group chat rooms, or chat 1-1 for that personal touch. HipChat integrates with Confluence, so you can get real-time notifications in HipChat whenever new information is shared in Confluence pages and blogs.
Got a question (that's not rhetorical)? Why not ask your team? Questions for Confluence is an add–on for Confluence that gives you knowledge sharing with your own Q&A service. Run company-wide polls to gauge reaction to a new marketing initiative, or let people vote on the venue for the Christmas party. Ask questions, get answers, and identify experts.
You can also try Team Calendars for Confluence for organizing and sharing team events, leave, and other important appointments. Embed each team's calendar on their home page so that everyone knows what's happening, and when.
