Confluence is a perfect tool for online team collaboration. It makes it easy for everyone on the team to add information. Due to a lack of structure the team wiki may pretty fast become a place where it gets more and more difficult to add information so that it can be found in a reasonable amount of time. It also gets harder for team members to know where to add new content.

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In the last article, Finding without Searching, we examined the different ways of information seeking needs and behaviors. We came to the conclusion that categorizing information is the key to understanding and to support the users of an information system. In the context of a project the users are first and foremost the members of the teams and stakeholders with access to the project wiki.

Let's examine how to apply categories with tools provided by Confluence and projectdoc.

Once you have organized the documents in your space and labelled them, it is easy to render context-sensitive links with automatic lists.

You may define queries to list all documents with a set of properties bound to specific values. These automatic lists - automatic since new documents will be automatically matched and show up in the list - are a helpful tool to define context sensitive navigations.

The following projectdoc macros are rendering automatic lists:

The basic principle behind the combination of categorization and automatic list is the open/closed principle: Your documentation is open for extension, but each individual document is closed for modification. If you add a new document you extend your documentation. But you do not need to modify existing documents. This helps you creating and maintaining your documentation as a team.