Confluence is very intuitive knowledge system. Probably when you first go into the system you will not have any problems with finding what you need. In this quick terms overview I will present some top used parts of Confluence. This you will be using every day in your daily routine.

Default Dashboard

Every time you log into the system you start from the dashboard. This is the place where you are informed about all activities cross all spaces you have access in. Below I put list of possible activities you can see in the dashboard:

• created article
• updated article
• uploaded a file
• attached a file
• and more

Later in the course of Confluence I will show you how to create your own defined spaces and how to assign your default space to be loaded when you log in.

Spaces

Spaces in Confluence are a kind of area of interests. We can group articles (knowledge) into spaces. You can think about spaces like about categories. So the role of spaces is to group your articles.

Another thing we need to know is that we can create permissions to every space for different users or group of users. We can also create our own private spaces to handle information only for internal use.

Space Directory

All space that we have granted permissions to them are available in the Space Directory. From this place we can do some actions:

1. We can create new space by clicking on Create Space button.
2. We can view Personal Spaces of other people only if someone granted the correct permission to do this.
3. We can manage our own space – My Spaces.
4. We can also archive spaces in Archived Spaces.

Probably you will be more interested All Spaces view in your daily work.

Example space

Another option you will be using very often is lastly used spaces that are available under the Spaces tab in the main top horizontal menu in Confluence.

Let’s get into sample space named here Demonstration Space that was created in the previous article. What we can see here is the default page (article) that runs every time you get into the space.

Pages in the space

Every space consists of the set of pages. We can manage pages from the sidebar in the left side of the window. This view is accessable by clicking arrow Collapse sidebar (left bottom side). When we will be talking about creating new pages we will get back to this view to present more options available here.

People

People in Confluence are just something like users in many other systems. In People Directory we can easily find any user in the systems and see his activities. We can also find people that uses personal spaces. If you have correct privileges you can also invite other users to the systems.

Create Page (Article)

Creating page is the action you will do very often in Confluence system. This is why I prepared dedicated article about Page creation.

What we can do here is creating blank page without any layout proposal.

We can also create page using lots of different templates. This is very usefull option. I usually use the templates as a starting layout to be modified into a new one.

Search

Without good search we cannot use effectively any knowledge system. For me this is the core of good management system. We need to have a possibility to find very quickly any information. This is very strong point in Confluence. What is worth to say is that we can use regular expressions in Confluence to search pages by different criteria. Everything is possible.

Help

In the Help we have such possitions like:

• Online Help
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Feed Builder
• What’s new
• Available Gadgets
• About Confluence

All this points are very well prepared and you can easily navigate to online helpe created for supporting any users in Confluence.

Administration

In Administration menu we can navigate to very important part of the Confluence like:

• General configuration
• User management
• Add-ons

All this options are available only for system administrators.

Notifications

This place you will be using very ofthe to see if:

• someone shared you any article
• your article was modified by another user

It’s a kind of feed in Facebook.

Profile settings

In Profile settings menu we have many options connected with the user like:

• Add Personal Space
• Recently Viewed
• Profile
• Tasks
• Save for later
• Watches
• Drafts
• Network
• Settings
• Atlassian Marketplace.

Normally you will not use this place very often.