Have you ever come across one of the following scenarios in Confluence?
- You’re visiting page and you wonder: “Is this page still up to date?”
- You’re finding an outdated page but don’t know who’s the responsible person (page owner) for the content?
- You’re referring to an old information because the content has not been updated?
- You couldn’t find what your were looking for because important and current information are lost in the flood of pages?
Whether you're part of a smaller or larger company, the key with Confluence is that, once you start creating vast volumes of content, you will inevitably need someone who helps you with lifecycle management.
It is within this context that, we would like to introduce Breeze by B1NARY, which is a content management app for Confluence that helps with all of the above challenges. Breeze automates the identification of outdated content and keeps your content relevance high and your Confluence free of clutter.
What is Content Management Lifecycle and where does Breeze come in?
Content Management is the process for collection, delivery, retrieval, governance and overall management of information in any format. The term is typically used in reference to administration of the digital content lifecycle, from creation to permanent storage or deletion.
Before we start let’s take a quick look at the content management lifecycle to fully understand where Breeze comes into play.
In theory, there are up to seven stages through which a page or a document passes (depending on the requirements)
- Planning
- Creation
- Storing and Organizing
- Editing and Approving
- Publishing and Distributing
- Reporting, and
- Preserving (Removing, Archiving, Updating)
Breeze focusses on the last two stages “Reporting” and “Preserving”. For that, the app offers three key function:
Automated identification of outdated content: Breeze analyzes the Confluence instance at regular intervals and automatically identifies outdated content. This makes worrying about outdated information obsolete.
Customized workflows and rules: With Breeze, customized workflows and rules can be defined to adapt the content lifecycle precisely to your company's needs. From reporting to archiving, full control is maintained.
Notifications and reporting: The app automatically generates reports and notifies those responsible about the status of their pages. This means that decision-makers always have an overview and can act proactively.
With the results, content owners, page creators or collaborators are then empowered to take a look at the different Confluence pages from the report. The automation tags pages as “up to date”, “in need of a review” or as “could possibly be archived”. Because different spaces have different needs, the settings behind this functionality can be assigned individually per space.
Breeze is the right hand of your Wiki Gardeners
The number one key assignment that always needs to taken care of when you want an up-to-date Confluence instance, is to ensure that the pages in Confluence are current. Breeze skims each defined space and has an overview of every page. Therefore you could say, that the app is the right hand of your Wiki Gardeners and Page Owners.
How does Breeze work?
Let’s see an example of how Breeze works.
The following image shows a screenshot of a demo workflow. We have decided to set 90 days without update as a condition for marking a page as "Review required". In addition, we have defined that the Page Owner and Last Contributor of the identified pages will be notified of the pending review.
However, pages that have not been updated for one year, i.e. 365 days, should be marked as "archivable". For all these pages, Breeze notifies the respective owner (page owner) as well as the user "Martin", who in our example could be the only user with archiving rights and should therefore be informed about every page to be archived.
Afterwards, we assigned the workflow to a space. After executing the workflow, the space looks as follows, for example.
In addition to this page overview of a space, after each workflow execution, Breeze generates an analysis report. This report includes various metrics, such as the distribution of pages based on their status and the resulting quality score of the space. Below, the pages to be reviewed are listed along with the responsible individuals for each.
Breeze utilizes Confluence's mention feature, where a '@' is prefixed to the username, notifying the user through Confluence's native notification system. Depending on the configuration, the user can be notified via email or Slack. Importantly, Breeze does not send user data externally and provides a high level of data privacy by leveraging Confluence's built-in notification system!
In addition to the reports, Breeze also provides additional features to assist responsible individuals in regularly reviewing and keeping pages up to date. For example, at the top of each page, you can quickly see its latest status, indicating whether it is still current or requires a review. This makes it immediately apparent upon visiting a page whether it is still current or should be reviewed.
Conveniently, after reviewing the content, the page can be directly reset to the 'Up to Date' status. Alternatively, if the review indicates that the page is no longer needed, it can be marked as 'Archivable'.
To make the review of pages even easier, Breeze also provides overviews of all pages to be reviewed or archived within a space. Using a filter, all pages to be reviewed, falling under the responsibility of a specific person, can be quickly displayed.
The view of archivable pages also displays comments, allowing individuals responsible for archiving pages to better understand why they are no longer needed. With just a few clicks, these pages can then be archived collectively (bulk archiving) or deleted (bulk deletion).
Interestingly, bulk archiving of pages is typically only available with Confluence Premium. However, Breeze provides this feature even for Confluence Standard.
To understand how maintenance measures impact over time, Breeze provides a dedicated analytics component that graphically represents the quality of a space.
Additionally, there is a global overview of all spaces, where all key metrics can be captured at a glance. This allows spaces that require a bit more attention to be quickly identified, and appropriate measures can be initiated accordingly.
The key to effectiveness in content management
Breeze is a true game-changer for the requirements of the content lifecycle in Confluence. Those responsible for keeping content current and relevant know how cluttered and outdated Confluence content can be. Breeze becomes their right hand by providing them with the tools to manage the content lifecycle efficiently: the app analyzes your Confluence instance in appointed periodic intervals. The app automatically identifies outdated content based on established rules and custom workflows. Based on this, it creates reports and notifies the responsible persons of the results.
Ready to take your Confluence content management to a new level and focus on the essentials - up-to-date and relevant content?
