Using Atlassian Confluence for documentation and content management is very helpful for teams especially when working collaboratively on a project.  To effectively use Atlassian Confluence for collaborative team projects, however, teams have to create or find the best confluence page templates or blueprints that match their requirements.

In this blog post, we share tips to consider when selecting an Atlassian Confluence template/ blueprint and also share two free Atlassian confluence templates we use as a team.

A Confluence blueprint allows you to create pages based on predefined content.

Here are tips you should consider when selecting a Confluence template/blueprint;

• Analyze your content needs: Know what you're trying to achieve, and have a rough idea of what the final result should look like. Understand your team's requirements and define the types of content and spaces needed to support your workflows effectively.

• Be ready to customize: The needs of a sales team would be different from the needs of a quality & compliance team. Tailor templates and blueprints to suit your specific needs. Modify page layouts, sections, and placeholders to capture the right information efficiently.

• Encourage adoption and training: Provide training and resources to help your team members understand how to utilize templates and blueprints effectively. Emphasize the benefits of using predefined structures to encourage widespread adoption.

• Regularly review and refine: Continuously assess the effectiveness of your content structure. Solicit feedback from users and make adjustments as needed to improve navigation and usability.

• Extra Tip: Ensure that every team has their own Confluence space, where they can import their templates to. This would help with maintaining an organised workspace.

At Move Work Foward, we have created/ adopted quite a number of Confluence blueprints for different purposes, we would like to share these two and hope they help with your processes as they have helped with ours.

1) Incident Reponse Template

For a company that works fully remotely and asynchronously, documentation is a key activity for our internal communication. On our journey to acquiring our SOC 2 Type II compliance, we needed to streamline the Security Incident Response and for this, we created a template.

We use this template to report security incidents internally. It saves time and makes the actions follow the process documented, repeatable and predictable.

You can find a free template for you here - Incident Response Template

2) Technical Specifications Template

As a company in the Atlassian Marketplace, our development team regularly gets feature/ product update requests from the product and marketing teams. A number of times these requests lacked clarity as to the end goal, functional requirements and use cases

To solve this problem, our development team created our technical specifications template as a key part of our internal development workflow. The development team uses it to collect product and feature requirements before starting a development sprint.

You can find a free template for you here - Technical Specifications Template

We hope you find these tips and templates helpful. Lastly, remember that the most important place to start when building a template or blueprint is understanding your team's processes and prioritising effective documentation. Happy creating!

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