Blog Posts•Navitabs - Navigation Macros for Confluence
Comparison of different tab solutions in Confluence Cloud and Data Center
See our comparison of tab solutions, including Composition Tabs, Tabs+ Pro, and Navitabs.
Jan 13, 2025What makes a workspace truly effective isn’t just the tools you use, but how well your team can navigate, share, and build on each other’s work. Confluence Cloud is often chosen as the foundation for digital collaboration and teamwork. Still, the experience can quickly unravel if content becomes scattered, ownership is unclear, or users feel lost in a maze of pages.
Setting up a Confluence workspace that works for your team requires more than creating a few spaces and pages. It means building a structure that reflects how your team thinks, introducing the right level of organization, and choosing the right Marketplace apps to support long-term usability.
In this article, we explore what it takes to build a truly efficient team workspace in Confluence Cloud — one that fosters clarity, encourages contribution, and evolves with your team. You’ll also discover key Atlassian Marketplace apps (including one from Bitvoodoo) that can take your Confluence setup from functional to exceptional.
1. Start With a Clear Structure
A good workspace begins with a solid foundation. Before you dive into creating pages, take time to define a logical structure that reflects your team’s workflows and information needs.
Define Your Space Hierarchy
- Spaces act as containers for content. Create one space per team, department, or project.
- Within each space, organize content using parent and child pages. Aim for clarity: fewer, broader top-level pages with nested subpages make navigation easier.
- Use templates for consistency. Confluence offers a range of built-in templates for project plans, meeting notes, and decision logs.
Use Navigation Tools
Navitabs – Navigation Macros for Confluence enables you to arrange pages using tabs and cards, creating a visually appealing and intuitive layout. It effectively guides users through intricate content structures, helping them navigate the page hierarchy with ease. This functionality is particularly beneficial for knowledge bases and team wikis.
2. Create a Unified Knowledge Hub
An efficient workspace isn’t just about storing documents; it’s about making information discoverable and useful.
Tagging and Labeling
Encourage your team to use labels consistently. Labels facilitate content categorization and can be utilized to create dynamic content lists and filtered views.
Highlight Your Team Structure Visually
Beyond organizing documents, it’s helpful to make your team structure visible within the space. This adds clarity to ownership and fosters a stronger sense of connection, especially in remote or hybrid environments.
With User Profiles for Confluence (Microsoft Attribute Sync), you can enrich user information and visualize team relationships directly in your Confluence pages, thanks to its team member cards that show roles, departments, locations, and contact info
For example, on your team’s space homepage, you might include a grid of team cards showing each member. This makes it easier for team members — especially new hires — to understand who’s who and who to reach out to for what. User Profiles for Confluence transforms static directories into interactive components that accurately reflect your team’s structure, facilitating collaboration in a more human and accessible way.
3. Encourage Collaboration and Engagement
The value of a digital workspace depends on how actively it’s used. Encourage team members to contribute, discuss, and keep information up to date.
Inline Comments and Mentions
Use inline comments for contextual feedback and @mentions to involve teammates directly.
Page Statuses and Workflows
Use page statuses to signal whether content is in draft, under review, or final. For more formal documentation or regulated industries, workflows can ensure content follows a specific approval path.
Comala Document Management lets you define custom workflows for Confluence pages. You can assign reviewers, set approvals, and automate publishing. It’s a powerful way to bring governance to your team’s content without relying on manual checks.
4. Automate and Integrate Where It Matters
Efficiency is about reducing repetitive work. Automation and integrations help teams focus on value-added tasks.
Task Management
Use Confluence in combination with Jira for task tracking. Pages can include Jira issues and dynamic status reports, keeping your content tied to live project data.
Elements Publish (Confluence pages created from Jira issues) connects Jira and Confluence, letting you automatically generate Confluence pages from Jira issues. Ideal for reporting or publishing customer-facing documentation.
5. Maintain and Evolve the Workspace
An efficient workspace needs care and attention.
- Review outdated content regularly and archive what’s no longer useful.
- Assign content owners to maintain the current pages.
- Gather feedback from your team about what’s working and what’s not.
Scroll Documents for Confluence helps you manage structured content over time, with features for versioning, document trees, and release management. Ideal for comprehensive documentation that evolves alongside your projects.
Final Thoughts
Confluence Cloud offers a strong platform for digital collaboration, but its power lies in how you shape and maintain your team workspace. With a clear structure, collaboration-friendly design, and a few well-chosen apps, you can build a workspace that supports your team’s goals, fosters knowledge sharing, and scales as your needs grow.
Remember: the most efficient workspace is one that evolves with your team, not just a place to store content, but a hub for ideas, decisions, and shared progress.
