Successful knowledge management with Atlassian Confluence

Efficient collaboration is critical to a company's success as it forms the basis for rapid decision-making and innovative solutions. The effective provision of critical company knowledge plays a central role. Ultimately, employees can only develop their full potential and achieve optimal results together if they have access to relevant information. Atlassian's Confluence is a comprehensive solution that helps teams address these challenges. Find out in this blog post how we successfully established Confluence as a central knowledge management platform for one of our largest customers in the service sector.

Table of contents

Initial situation & project goal

The initial impetus for the project was an on-premise application developed by CONET based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. For this purpose, our customer created training materials for a specific department with the support of the CONET project team.

It was very important for our customer that both internal and external employees would be able to access these documents in the future to quickly and easily familiarize yourself with the topic. At this time, our customer was using a department-specific wiki based on Microsoft SharePoint, which did not adequately fulfill its function as a knowledge management tool. It was far too time-consuming and complicated for employees to get the information they needed. Once the employees found them, time-consuming processes had to be initiated to obtain the necessary authorizations. This delayed the processing time – minutes turned into hours. In addition, no external employees should have access to SharePoint resources in the medium to long term. In addition, the employees in the teams also preferred to use local storage locations. This enabled them to work faster, but the knowledge was not available to all employees in the company.

The department head's desire was to access, provide, discover and share Dynamics-related Produce knowledge in a user-friendly and department-wide manner.

Reasons for the change

Our customer's SharePoint wiki was running on an outdated version of SharePoint. This did not comply with internal guidelines and had an inadequate access and security concept compared to a sophisticated knowledge management tool. It therefore did not meet the requirements for a suitable knowledge management solution for our customer. The CONET project team therefore recommended Confluence from Atlassian central platform for knowledge management to establish in the company.

A key argument for this was that Confluence offers an open, networked structure through which critical knowledge can be shared with all employees. The Atlassian solution is therefore ideal as a tool for this storage and sharing knowledge as well as for company-wide collaboration on projects.

The benefits of Confluence for our customers

• needs-based solution: Improve provision, discoverability, access and exchange of knowledge and collaboration
• user-friendly platform: Increasing the participation and motivation of employees in knowledge management
• more efficient processes: Reduction of processing times
• Data security: Simplifying access and protecting knowledge
• Scalability: Department-wide and company-wide rollout possible
• Data integration: Integration of all Microsoft Suite products possible

What were our tasks?

At the beginning of the project there was a shared one Creation of suitable training materials for the on-premise application based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. This was checked by the CONET project team for comprehensibility, clarity and completeness for users.

As part of the Evaluation and requirements gathering phase We analyzed and evaluated our customer's existing solution portfolio with regard to its relevance for optimal knowledge management. In addition, the requirements for the future knowledge management solution were compiled and documented in workshops.

As a result of this phase, the CONET project team created the Recommendation to use Confluence from Atlassian as a suitable knowledge management solution.

Die Implementation phase went like this:

• Creating a structure and page hierarchy in Confluence
• Transferring the training materials from the SharePoint Wiki to the new knowledge management platform to enable the desired access for all employees
• Centralize the specific knowledge of each team by transferring local storage to Confluence

The regular tasks included general ones Project management. In addition, daily, short meetings The current processing status such as successes and challenges to be solved are communicated to the customer. Solutions were sought together to address these tasks.

A very important aspect during the project was the topic Change Management. From the perspective of the CONET project team and our customer, the success of the project did not only depend on the successful technical implementation. It was just as important, if not even more important, to take the future users along and get them excited about the new solution.

For this reason, the CONET project team presented Confluence as the ideal knowledge management solution to users at a special meeting. In addition, all questions were answered in detail in order to resolve any possible reservations and fears about the new application. In addition, the CONET project team was available after the appointment to answer questions and concerns related to Confluence as a knowledge management solution.

In regular consultation appointments The CONET project team supported certain user groups in the effective use of Confluence. Users repeatedly asked questions about topics such as useful search functions or keyword assignment. The development of page structures and hierarchies as well as links to other areas were also topics where we contributed our expertise.

To complete the project The users were trained in a training session to work independently in Confluence.

Conclusion

By establishing Confluence as a central knowledge management platform, not only were internal work processes optimized, but also collaboration and knowledge transfer within the department was sustainably improved. Our customer was able to fully achieve its goals with regard to user-friendly and department-wide access and exchange of department-specific knowledge. In addition, he found the collaboration with the CONET project team to be extremely profitable and positive.
In this way, we were able to make a significant contribution to mastering the challenges of the modern working world for our customer and ensuring the long-term success of the department in question.

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Peggy Frömmel works at CONET as a consultant in the Microsoft Business Applications area. There she deals with the digitization and automation of business processes based on the range of solutions from the Microsoft Power Platform. She also supports the Microsoft Business Applications department internally with sales issues.