In today’s digital workspace, inline comments have emerged as a crucial tool for team collaboration. For team leaders, it’s vital to stay on top of all discussions in a company to address employee queries and handle incoming tasks. However, the features of native inline comments in Confluence don’t quite cut it when managing project-related inline discussions. In this article, we look closely at four key features of Talk Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence Data Center that can empower managers and team leaders to plan more effectively and speed up project execution.
Assign Tasks in Comments
When a team discusses a project, certain conversations result in specific tasks or actions. Inline comments often substitute Confluence tasks as they are a faster way to add action items without constantly switching to edit mode.
Indicating responsibility: assigning tasks ensures that your team addresses them. It’s especially helpful when many people collaborate on a document, which leads to confusion over who’s responsible for what tasks.
Ensuring task completion:tasks won’t get lost in lengthy discussion threads. When you spot and track a task, it brings you closer to completing your project.
Prioritize Tasks
Prioritizing tasks in the management world is more than simply organizing your work. With it, leaders ensure that the team’s efforts align with broader objectives and that the team allocates resources effectively.
The Talk Priority feature greatly complements Talk Tasks since it helps to:
Set expectations: by assigning priority levels, managers can underline the highest value-adding tasks, important strategic tasks, or urgent tasks that can have a negative impact if not addressed soon.
Boost employee productivity: prioritizing tasks helps employees manage their time effectively. At its core, productivity isn’t just about ticking off tasks on a to-do list. It’s all about focusing on tasks that bring the most value.
Control Task Resolution
While delegating and prioritizing tasks is a significant component of any project or operation, the execution of these assignments is what truly delivers the impact.
The Talk Report feature empowers team leaders by allowing them to easily identify open tasks in discussions and engage with those responsible for completing them. Equipped with control over task resolution, team leaders can influence a project’s evolution.
Manage Workload and Productivity
A comprehensive overview of tasks and responsibilities is crucial for efficient management of your team’s workload. In combination with Confluence tasks, Talk Tasks can provide you with a holistic view of your team’s workload. You can create customized reports and visualize task distribution among teammates by leveraging the Table Filter and Charts for Confluence app. It helps you to:
Balance workload: by considering each team member’s to-dos, you can maintain a fair workload as a leader.
Measure productivity:monitoring and assessing completed tasks aids in better resource distribution and pinpointing potential bottlenecks in your team’s workflow.
SQL for Table Transformer to join tables with tasks
Team workload with TF, Talk, and Tasks skeleton
Team workload with TF, Talk, and Tasks
If you also track project-related tasks in Jira, you can go further and consider them along with Talk and Confluence tasks. By incorporating another Pivot Table with a Jira issue macro in Table Transformer in the example above and making a minor tweak to the SQL, you can get a complete overview of your team’s workload and distribute new tasks more evenly.
SQL for Workload Jira tasks, Confluence tasks, Talk tasks
Workload Jira tasks, Confluence tasks, Talk tasks
Likewise, you can measure team productivity by filtering Talk and Task reports by resolved tasks and applying Table Filter to define the task completion period.
Use the following JQL in the Jira issue macro to find completed tasks over a certain period.
Project = “Your_project_name” AND status changed FROM “In Progress” to Done DURING (“year/month/day”,”year/month/day”).
Then, join all three tables with resolved tasks in Talk Report, Task Report, and Jira Issues macro in Table Transformer using the same approach described above and slightly modifying SQL, turning Total Open tasks into Total Resolved Tasks.
Conclusion
Effective collaboration is the cornerstone of successful projects. With the advanced features offered by Talk Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence, managers and team leads can conveniently work on project-related discussions. By applyingTalk Tasks, Talk Priority, and Talk Report features with the Table Filter and Charts app, you can streamline task assignments, prioritize work, and analyze employee’s performance and workload.
Start utilizing these features today and experience a new level of project collaboration!
Contact our team to help you adopt the cases mentioned in this article in your Confluence.
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The information provided is relevant to Confluence Data Center.
Technical writing is so much more than just writing. Everything matters, starting with content clarity, structure, strategy, localization, and consistency. In this case, the software you use must meet the requirements of technical writers and their teams.
In this blog post, we talk about Confluence as a single source of truth for technical documentation. Moreover, we share some first-hand tips and tricks to organize your content and simplify formatting.
We gathered insightful answers from more than 20 technical writers in this article and would like to share them with you.
Some tips to start with when you use Confluence as a documentation site
Confluence is a powerful platform where you can create and manage technical documentation. It is designed to simplify the collaboration on documents, store files, and organize information, and it’s more visual than just a file repository.
To get the best out of Confluence, define a list of dos and dont’s for your team to follow to ensure you are on the same page when working with content.
Content accuracy
Make someone responsible for the content in Confluence to ensure it is relevant and searchable; otherwise, your spaces become unvisited with the content no longer used . Failure to find this kind of person can also result in poorly titled content in the wrong place.
Structure
Keep the page layout simple and organized. Use headings, lists, and tables to make the page easy to read and navigate. Use the page tree feature to organize related pages under the same parent page and make it easier for users to find the necessary information.
Pay attention to a consistent look and feel and organize pages in relevant sections with links to other related content or external sources. This way, you will help readers find additional information and resources.
On longer pages, use anchors that readers can click and navigate to particular places on the page.
Use page templates to create consistent and standardized pages. This technique saves you time and effort and provides easy-to-update pages with the same structure, increasing the documentation flexibility.
Formatting
Use meaningful headings and subheadings to help readers scan the content. Technical writers should also use images, diagrams, and illustrations to explain complex concepts.
Formatting makes the content more readable. Using bold, italics, and underlining will help draw attention to important points. Break up long text blocks with lists and tables to make content more digestible.
Additionally, use macros to embed videos, images, and other media into your Confluence pages to engage readers.
Content formatting in Confluence after
Content formatting in Confluence before
Confluence tips and tricks from experienced technical writers
And let’s move on to the tips and tricks that help our respondents create high-quality technical documentation in Confluence in no time.
Labels
Labels categorize your pages, especially when you have a lot of documents across spaces. You can organize content into topics, quickly access the required information, and track the progress of different projects and tasks.
Develop your system of labels and add relevant ones to your Confluence pages.
The Content by Label macro comes in handy in this case. It collects references to existing documents by labels on one page in the form of a list.
When a page has a few labels, the Label field browses pages that contain one of them.
As a life hack to narrow down searches, you can use one label in the Label field and one – as a filter. This approach shows the pages with both macros at once.
Code Block
Technical writers can benefit from using the Code Block macro to display code examples with syntax highlighting. With the help of this macro, you can add code snippets directly to Confluence pages.
It’s useful when you need to provide readers with log files. Just put the log file into a code block to retain its formatting.
The comparison between a log file in the Code Block Macro and without it
Note that the coding part is not automatically updated. So you need to check it or have a planned review.
Confluence Source Editor
Confluence Source Editor is a free tool to dig into the HTML of Confluence pages and fix minor issues that can be hard to find in edit mode. This editor has syntax highlighting, a handy search, and replace function.
So when you turn to code, you can change or delete some obstinate formatting and unify the color of your text. You can use it when you copy information from different sources to Confluence, and your final text in Confluence has different shades of black. With the help of this tool, you can search for RGB and delete unnecessary color codes. Or you can set your brand colors for certain elements of your content that are absent in Confluence.
In Confluence edit mode, sometimes you can’t edit a broken link. The source editor will enable you to oversee the link and either change or edit it.
Moreover, it’s better to use the pageId URL format typing [] instead of the page title format or external links to Confluence pages when working with links. If the page is moved or renamed, the page reference will automatically be shown with the new name or location because it’s not static.
Graphics tools
Another nice Confluence feature is that it supports lightweight graphics tools with intuitive interfaces like Gliffy Diagrams and Lucidchart Diagrams.
Gliffy Diagrams is a tool that allows you to produce effective visual aids such as process and procedural flowcharts, interconnect diagrams, etc. Moreover, you can create visually-appealing graphs, charts, and other graphics, either as standalone apps or within Confluence itself.
With Lucidchart Diagrams connector, you can share diagrams like workflows and collaborate on docs through chat and comment on features. When you need to show documentation readers how different components work together to deliver the desired output and help them understand a product better , diagrams in Confluence come to the rescue.
An example of the Confluence page with the Lucidchart app
Reusing content
Another tip is to reuse content with the help of Confluence macros. Of course, copy-pasting also sometimes works. However, when you use the macros created to help you reuse content, you can be sure that when you update it on the source page, the information will change automatically on the other 53 pages with it.
Check out these three macros that save your time when you want to use any piece of content repeatedly on multiple pages in Confluence:
To create a section that can be reused on different pages, use the Excerpt macro by adding content within it.
Another option is to use the Excerpt Include macro to include the contents of an excerpt from another page.
Alternatively, try the Include Page macro to include the entire content in another page.
Our respondents’ nice-to-haves
We also asked our respondents who work on technical documentation in Confluence to complete the sentence “As a technical writer, I would like to …”. Here are the most popular answers we got.
Talk – Advanced Inline Comments is an app that meets all the above-mentioned requirements and can level up and facilitate the daily routine of technical writers who use Confluence.
Suggestions in Confluence
One of the most popular wishes of our respondents is to have the suggestion mode, like in Google Docs, when you can make edits while proofreading the text to speed up the process of reviewing a document. In this mode, content creators can either accept or decline suggestions.
With Talk – Advanced Inline Comments, you can add suggestions to propose changes to any piece of content both in page view and edit modes. And content creators can accept suggestions without switching to edit mode. Moreover, the changes will be automatically applied in one click without typing anything.
Suggestions refine documentation because reviewers can add their notes to a particular place. This eliminates the risk that the page owner will misunderstand the review and make changes by accepting suggestions.
Comments in edit mode
Another nice-to-have when it comes to working with content in Confluence is asking for clarifications from colleagues while editing documents. In this case, you save time searching a context for adding a comment after saving a huge document.
Talk – Advanced Inline Comments helps users rapidly сomment, ask questions, or add personal notes and insights right in page edit mode, not to forget to check details after saving a document.
This feature also eliminates the risk of forgetting anything that came to mind when reviewing a document in edit mode. Moreover, you can set viewing restrictions to comments if you add some personal notes only for yourself or want only specific users to view your comments.
You can also edit a place where a comment was made without deleting it not to lose a task in a comment for review.
Comments as tasks and to-dos
Some technical writers wish to observe their to-dos from colleagues in one place not to miss their tasks and remember the context for changing a document.
Talk Report gathers all tasks set as comments (talks) across different spaces in one place. This features provides you with a bird’s-eye view of all discussions, including the information about who assigned the task, task priority, and task content. You can click any task and jump to the page where you need to make changes.
When page owners resolve native inline comments in Confluence, they can not restore them to refresh the context or check the whole comment thread. The Talk Archive feature allows you to check resolved discussions at any time. With the help of this functionality, you can quickly explain to any stakeholders (customers, management, external reviewers) why certain changes were made. Another use case is double-checking the edits after review. This feature also helps restore removed talk discussions to get back important information if you accidentally deleted them.
Confluence for technical writers: Things to keep in mind
By following these best practices, technical writers can ensure their content is explicit, organized, and easy to navigate.
Find a person responsible for content accuracy in Confluence.
Mind the structure of your technical documentation, taking advantage of macros and content elements available in Confluence.
Check templates for technical documentation suggested by the Confluence team
Build Talk Report to see either the open or processed comments
Resolve all the comments and suggestions before publishing a document
Who is logi.cals
logi.cals creates automation toolchains for industrial automation solutions. The automation toolchain applies to complex systems such as hydroelectric power plants, buildings, ships, buses, machines, etc. The core technologies include runtimes, an engineering toolkit with a wide range of programming languages, and engineering bus architecture.
logi.cals operates in a highly-regulated industry that involves endless paperwork. They use Confluence as a hub for storing documentation. The team of logi.cals shared with us how they established a review procedure to control the document’s lifecycle from the draft version to the published (final) state in Confluence.
Feel free to watch our interview with Harald Nistelberger, who is an Atlassian admin at logi.cals. He demonstrates how they’ve set up their review procedure we describe in this blog post.
The document review in Confluence by logi.cals
The review process at logi.cals is under the control ofComala Document Management. The app allows to define the state of a document at each step of a review workflow and assign approvers. logi.cals uses the following statuses to establish the review pipeline in Confluence:
Draft
Ready
Reviewed
Rejected
Published
A document starts with a draft. This state indicates that only users with edit or admin permissions can access the document.When the document is ready for review, the author switches its status to Ready with Comala Document Management and assigns team members to review it.
At the next step, Talk – Advanced Inline Comments comes into play. While checking a document, the reviewer captures all the findings in the Talk comments. Often, it’s not only the document’s author who needs to address issues. The Mention feature allows adding other stakeholders to contribute.
After the review, the reviewer changes the state of the document to Rejected for further improvements.
Once the author and all the contributors get notifications about the Talk comments, they can start editing the document. With the Talk app, the team can do it in edit mode right away.
After making changes, an employee who made the required edits states that the Talk comment was processed, marking it in green with the Talk Color feature. As a rule of thumb, they add the Medium priority to them that signals the same.
After that, the document switches back to the Ready stage.
Manage tasks in Confluence with Talk Report
When the document gets dotted with comments, finding the comments assigned to you takes time. Moreover, project documentation can have hundreds of pages, which makes it hard to find the tasks that need to be fixed by you. In this situation, the author and contributors can use the Talk Report feature to see the tasks in the document, their resolution, and who they are assigned to. Besides, they can upload the report both for a space and a specific document.
How to insert Talk Report
To make it easier to find the Talk comments, logi.cals uses Talk Report along with the Table Filter and Charts app. For example, a document editor needs to find unanswered comments assigned to them. In this case, they add Talk Report in their personal space and apply the Status and Mentions filters.
A reviewer uses Talk Report with Table Filter and Charts to check the comments that are already processed and need review.
As you see, you can’t filter the Talk comments by color. But you can distinguish them by priority. The medium priority makes it easier for logi.cals to find already processed talks. When a talk has a Low priority set by default, it says the comment still needs a reply.
After completing all the review cycles, logi.cals compiles a review protocol and sends it to the certification body. In the report, all the comments must be marked as resolved.
When the certification body gives the review protocol back, logi.cals documents its findings in the Talk comments. After stakeholders’ approval, the page moves to the Reviewed step of the workflow and then can be Published. It means the page can be visible to all Confluence users who can see the space with this document.
Suggest edits in Confluence
It’s not only the Talk comments that logi.cals uses for adding changes to a document. Another handy feature in the Talk app is Suggestions. It helps them to automate the process of making changes to the content on a page. Generally, they use it in the following situations:
The reviewer corrects spelling mistakes
The reviewer suggests paraphrasing a sentence
The reviewer adds more details to the content
If the author of a document agrees on the changes that need to be implemented, they accept the replacement. Once accepted, changes automatically apply to the text.
If the author of a document doesn’t want to apply changes at once, they can:
discuss with a reviewer why this fix doesn’t work
agree on win-win corrections
reject changes
use the Suggestion feature to apply the negotiated edits
At logi.cals, it also might be the case when the page is in the Release state, and the author wants to change something. Talk Suggestion can help automatically document the changes in Talk Report. The author adds the suggestion to the place that needs to be updated and accepts it. It helps all the stakeholders track changes.
Using a bundle of Talk and Comala for document review
Many business processes require formalized procedures for creating, approving, and publishing documents. While Сomalaadds a level of control over the document, Talk ensures the accuracy of changes. Every employee involved in the review process should know what, where, and how fast to make required edits. In the Talk comments, you can capture requirements and then report on the addressed changes to the review body.
Using both tools in a review process helps you speed up the publishing of a document and encourage adherence to the procedures a company must comply with.
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What to Choose for Team Collaboration: Atlassian Confluence or Google Docs?
November 15, 2022
#Confluence#Collaboration
9 min
Any team needs a convenient way to organize and discuss their work. Suitable team collaboration software is a big help when you need to create a knowledge base, share files, plan projects, collaborate on tasks, and store or distribute documentation.
If you’re choosing between Atlassian Confluence or Google Docs, this comparison can help you decide which tool is the right solution for your team.
What’s being compared in this blog post:
Structure
Visibility and discoverability
Collaborating on documents
Creating and formatting documents
Analytics
Hosting, devices supported
Pricing
Structure
Confluence organizes content in spaces and pages, while Google Docs keeps all assets in folders and sub-folders in Google Drive, a Cloud storage system. Let’s see the main differences between such approaches.
Confluence has a three-level permission scheme that defines who has access to what in Confluence. In Google Drive, content visibility primarily depends on where the file is stored: in My drive or Shared drives.
Collaborating on documents
In its nature, both Confluence and Google Docs help teams share and collaborate on content. At first sight, the collaboration feature set seems quite similar, but one tool may be a much better fit for your team than the other.
You can boost your collaboration in Confluence with the Google Docs-like feature Talk Suggestions. Highlight the required text fragment and choose this icon to propose text edits and set up a priority for comments and monitor their status with Talk Report.
Click here to check this app on the Atlassian Marketplace!
Creating and formatting documents
Confluence does not have such extensive formatting features as Google Docs. However, its tailored feature set works especially well for writing technical documentation. At the same time, Google Docs makes it easy to create fully custom documents.
Hosting options determine where companies can store their data. Due to company policy, some organizations keep their data only inside their own infrastructure. For that reason, they prefer Server and DC to Cloud technologies. Let’s see what hosting options are available in both tools.
This game has no “winner” since Confluence and Google Docs were designed for different purposes. You need to take into account your team’s specific requirements to determine the right solution.
Confluence covers a variety of specialized use cases. Larger companies and software development teams prefer Confluence since it allows them to keep all work assets and communication in one place. You can set up your Confluence as a knowledge base and intranet, organize your project and technical documentation, and more.
Google Docs is a multipurpose document collaboration tool used by anyone from students to large corporations.
Each of these solutions offers a unique experience and powerful capabilities. Some companies combine both tools and use them in different cases.
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Best Practices of External Collaboration in Confluence
September 29, 2022
#How To#Confluence#Collaboration
11 min
The information provided is relevant to Server and DC deployments.
External collaboration is a neverending story in the Atlassian Community. The Confluence users keep bombarding the community with questions on how to share content externally securely and cost-effectively.
Indeed, Confluence is a well-known tool for internal communication. But what if you need to share content with someone without access to your Confluence? This might be a partner, user, auditor, or any freelancer you work with.
In this article, we’re going to address the real use cases of Confluence users about external collaboration and uncover the traps of this process.
How to share a Confluence space
Use case: I run a partnership that is not an Atlassian customer. Is it possible for them to view and/or edit an individual Confluence Space? In doing so, I also want to make sure we are not giving them access to the rest of our Confluence database.
Let’s see approaches to implement this.
Anonymous access
You can collaborate with an external organization by enabling anonymous access in Confluence. Before going any further, let’s figure out who an anonymous user is.
An anonymous user is anyone on the internet who isn’t logged in your Confluence instance. Users that have profiles in Confluence can log in to it and see the Confluence content. For your clients that are missing profiles in your Confluence instance, access to Confluence is closed. It means they are anonymous users as well.
To let anonymous users see your Confluence pages, ask a space admin to enable anonymous access in the space settings. They can do it in the following way.
This approach doesn’t require any licenses for end users. However, by giving access to a space this way, you grant it to all content within a space to anyone on the internet. The information shared can be confidential to both sides. This is where another approach comes in.
License a user
Another way of sharing the Confluence spaces is to create profiles for external users in your Confluence. A better option is to make these external users a part of a specific group in user management.
After that, allow this group to at least view that single space.
However, in this case the maintenance of users can become chaotic. The Confluence admin needs to make sure that these users are not members of any other group in user management.
We advise testing whether other spaces uncover sensitive data because of the incorrect permission setup. You can create a test user, add them to a relevant group, log in, and verify that the only space you see is the one you want external users to access.
Another limitation of this approach is that when you add customers to Confluence, you may reach a user number threshold for the next pricing tier for your Confluence instance. This consequently increases the price of the apps you’ve subscribed to.
💡 Tip from our team
When you give access to anonymous users in Confluence, they will see all inline comments made internally on the page. It’s often the case that these discussions contain confidential information.
Our Talk – Advanced Inline Comments for Confluence app prevents this security gap. These’re only Talk inline comments that allow setting up visibility restrictions. Define a group of teammates or specific colleagues to share your talks with in Talk Permissions on a space level. This helps you protect your private data from exposure.
1 Settings for Talk for users and groups
2 Talk viewing restriction for specific discussion
How to share a single page
User story: I want to share a page with a customer, where I provide current information on the production process.
To tackle this dilemma, we can suggest the following recipe.
Give access to your space to anonymous users.
Grant them view permissions in the space settings.
Go to the page restrictions by selecting the lock icon on a page.
Add any licensed users and groups that you want to view and edit the page.
Share the link to a page with users outside Confluence
Using the page restrictions, you limit external users from seeing other pages in the space with anonymous access.
When a space has a complex page structure, it can take much time to apply this scheme. To make life easier, we have some painkillers for you.
Instead of restricting all pages, you can apply viewing and editing restrictions only to parent pages. In this case, child pages inherit parent viewing restrictions.
Group all your company users in one team. Now, you need to add 1 group to the page restrictions instead of 15 users separately.
Keep in mind that if you share a parent page with an external user, they will also get access to referenced child pages. Thus, before sharing content with anyone outside your Confluence, ensure that you’ve set up page permissions for internal teams to view and edit for the child pages, as mentioned earlier.
Instead of confusion with permission management for your existing space and pages in it, you can use this method:
Lock all your spaces from Anonymous access.
Create a new space that Anonymous users can view.
Make a copy of a page you want them to see and move it into this new space.
Once your client makes changes, you can take the content of this page and put it into the original page.
If after reading these instructions you feel like this:
Good news! The next part helps you bypass this tricky solution.
Apps for page sharing
Another way to share a single page is to add your customers to a licensed users list. But is that really reasonable if someone needs to view a Confluence page occasionally?
This way of content sharing generates secure and unique links to your Confluence pages. The most significant benefit comes from using these apps to work with infrequent collaborators. There’s no point to let them consume a whole license and increase your Confluence and apps price. With the apps you pay for the number of users in your Confluence, but you can share pages with any number of external collaborators.
External sharing in Confluence is worth it
It’s a good idea to share knowledge and work externally with Confluence. It ensures that you always give access to an up-to-date online content repository. But, you need to juggle a lot of things in this process. We recommend saving this article and getting back to it every time you need a hand in this subtle art of external sharing in Confluence.
How to Organize Documentation for ISO Certification in Confluence
April 29, 2022
#Collaboration#How To#Case Study
14 min
Those companies that have passed ISO certification know what a challenge it is. A company goes through intensive audits to get it. But it’s worth it. Achieving ISO certification unlocks new opportunities. It demonstrates that your products, services, or systems are safe and efficient.
When it comes to preparing documentation for ISO certification, Confluence is a go-to. It’s essential to build the process to provide easy navigation and streamlined content. Without organized documentation, you reduce your chances of getting the desired paper.
We talked to our trusted client Kinarm about their experience building ISO documentation in Confluence. In this article, you will find some feasible ideas to prepare for ISO certification.
ISO certification in Confluence at Kinarm
Kinarm produces scientific equipment and software that allows neuroscientists to take a closer look at brain functions. Kinarm Labs and Kinarm Standard Tests address the lack of objective assessment in the management of brain injury and disease. Virtual reality, computer programs along with robotic mechanisms in Kinarm Labs help to study such brain diseases as stroke, cardiac arrest, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, and Parkinson’s disease.
Any appliance needs to adhere to the requirements of ISO standards to register it as a medical device. Kinarm works with the following ISO standards:
ISO 13485 that outlines the requirements for organizations that design, produce, and service medical devices and related services.
ISO 14971 that describes the process of risk management of medical devices.
Being a veteran of this process for more than ten years, Kinarm shared their insights on one of the main challenges during ISO certification.
“For us, as a small company, there are a few challenges. First, the standards are often large and complex documents themselves. Just making sure that we’ve covered all of the “shalls” in the document is very time-consuming. Once we have developed procedures and forms to cover all the “shalls”, the next major task is making sure we stay on top of creating all the required documents and sign-offs. It’s unfortunately easy to drop the ball and forget to fill out a document that’s required, fill it out incorrectly, or forget to sign it off when completed.”
The typical workflow for passing ISO certification at Kinarm goes like this:
Review the standard
Build a document that lists all the actions and documents the standard mandates
Create procedures, instructions, and forms to meet the standard
Train staff to use the procedures for creating the required quality records. It demonstrates that they are following procedures as prescribed
Apply the procedures and forms
Do an internal audit to make sure they are using the system as designed
If they are not using their own system properly, then either re-train or modify a system
Pass annual audits
How to structure information in Confluence spaces
ISO standards require documenting different types of information. However, it’s your company that develops the forms and types of documents according to the requirements. But this flexibility has some pitfalls.
“Of course, every company is different, so there is unlikely the “best” way to document something, but even having some suggestions would be helpful.”
Once you determine the information to document, structure it in accordance with the requirements of your organization. Kinarm uses this approach to organize documents in Confluence:
They create a single space called Quality Management System with links to all controlled documents in other spaces.
Every functional area has a separate space, for example, Software, Hardware, Manufacturing, Accounting, etc. with the relevant documents for ISO procedure.
The procedures and blank forms in the QMS space are linked to the spaces they apply to.
Some organizations may opt for collecting documents connected with ISO in one space. On the one hand, this approach enhances document management. On the other, it can lead to duplicating the relevant content by departments involved in the process and thus flood searches. Your “Single Point of Truth” is no longer ‘Single’. The way Kinarm arranges spaces for ISO certification is suitable for small organizations with a lower volume of documents and a plain organizational structure.
Technique for better search results in Confluence
A common practice for better searchability of documents in Confluence is to use keywords in the title of the page. Title-based search helps Kinarm navigate through ISO documentation as well. Any form that relates to the space has a title with the document ID in it.
“For example, our backup audit form is 63BT01. So any time we audit back-ups, we copy the form, fill it in, and name the new page “63BT01 – Backup audit results, March 2022.”
The basic idea of the keyword is [number to describe ISO section number]BT[paragraph number in the relevant section]. For example,
63 – ISO 13485 section number (infrastructure)
BT – abbreviation of the official company name (BKIN Technologies)
01 – ISO paragraph number in the relevant section
Developing a naming convention based on important elements of the project helps you get the relevant content faster. Also, it provides a clear and immediate indication of content.
ISO audit tips in Confluence
Before the official audit, Kinarm passes a documentation ‘health check’ using Comala Document Management.
In the first draft state of the workflow, no one can use an incomplete document. After revision, it goes into the pending approval state. At this point, it’s assigned to a specific document reviewer who has the authority to create official documents. The document must be approved using a password. It guarantees that only the person responsible for this process approves it. The person who approves the document also needs to train staff. Employees must understand the standard and do their job according to it.
After receiving ISO certificate, you need to continuously refine your processes. It’s a central theme of ISO. Talk – Advanced Inline comments for Confluence can be very handy in this regard.
“The talk comments allow us to show an auditor that we’re working on a document and discussing changes. Having the comments allows an auditor to see that we are working on new ideas and improvements to procedures. We will normally leave the talk comments in, but mark them resolved even after the changes have been integrated and approved – this is important for the traceability of why we made changes.”
It’s the Talk Archive feature that Kinarm describes. It helps to have resolved comments at hand and get back to them when you need to see the context for improvements made.
A helpful tip from Stiltsoft:if you keep all the QMS documentation in one space, the Talk Permissions feature can help you in the following situation. You can set up Space restrictions so that only your team and the external auditors can see the Talk inline comments in this space.
It might be necessary when your partners or clients request access to your ISO documentation. The Talk visibility permissions ensure that you don’t expose private information contained in talks and keep the official version of the document ‘clean’ for the Anonymous users.
This is how your page looks for the groups mentioned in Talk Permissions:
This is how exactly the same page looks for the Anonymous users:
Check the difference between native inline comments in Confluence and Talk – Advanced Inline Comments.
ISO certification takeaways
Documentation is the heart of ISO. Confluence is a key to it. Proper documentation management creates a standardized way of doing things in your company and consequently enhances the quality of your product.
The formula that Kinarm follows to organize documentation in Confluence may not be perfectly suitable for your organization. However, these ideas can be applied to organizations of any domain getting into ISO:
identify what processes must be documented
group the documents for ISO based on size, industry, and complexity of interactions in your company
use a unified approach to name documents to keep them consistent
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Pro Tip 
to propose text edits and 
