Overview

Confluence is an enterprise-grade documentation platform with many, many features. This documentation covers the essential subset of features used by the Ed-Fi Academy team, along with links to helpful documentation and online resources.

Access & Permissions

Confluence hosts the documentation you're reading, the Academy Production site. Most roles on the Academy Production team have permission to edit at least some content in this site.

New resources should check with their manager or one of the Academy team members. They'll work with the Dell Foundation tech team to get you access and will make sure you have permissions to edit any content to which you're expected to contribute.

Training

New team members typically receive basic Confluence training as part of their onboarding. There are also many useful online learning resources (linked below) for self-guided study.

If you have any questions or desire more in-depth training, contact your manager or one of the Academy Team members. They'll get you hooked up. 

Support

The Academy Team can help with user-facing questions, how-to tips, and similar. Technical issues should be reported to the Dell Foundation Help Desk (currently helpdesk@dell.org).

Basic Confluence Terminology

We have adopted some of Confluence's terms to refer to this site's features. Viewers may find these definitions helpful for navigating this documentation.

• Space. This shared workspace that we use. The Academy Production site is a Confluence "space."
• Page. A living document dedicated to a topic. Links can be accessed and comments can be left on each page. We also refer to pages as articles.
• Child Page. A subpage that contains related details and additional information.
• Page Tree. Also known as the page hierarchy, this is the order in which pages are organized. It can be found in the right sidebar. Pages with an arrow symbol (>) to the right of their titles in the left-hand page tree sidebar can be clicked to reveal their child pages.
• Section. This is a grouping of similar pages that are often used together. Note that these are also have an arrow symbol (>) to indicate that more pages are nested underneath. You can click on the arrow to see the order of the related pages.

Core Knowledge

Every Academy team member with permission to update content should be familiar with the following knowledge areas.

• Core Confluence concepts, including:
  
  • Pages
  • Labels
  • Attachments
  • Confluence user interface elements
• Basic information consumption features, including:
  • Navigation
  • Simple and advanced search
  • Listing content by Confluence Label
• Basic content update features, including:
  • Entering edit mode, saving (i.e., "publishing") changes
  • Adding and removing Confluence Labels
  • Creating, editing, and removing links to other pages, websites
  • Updating attached content

Advanced Knowledge

In addition to the Core Knowledge above, Senior Editors are expected to have a familiarity with the following knowledge areas.

• Adding and deleting pages
• Viewing the Page History, restoring a previous version from Page History
• Assigning View and Edit restrictions to sections and pages
• Viewing and changing the Page Hierarchy
• Page Layout features
• Confluence Macros, particularly:
  • Table of Contents Macro
  • Child Pages Macro
  • Images Macro
  • Link Macro
• Importing Images
• Inserting Special Characters

External Documentation & Resources 

The following links provide a good overview of the knowledge essentials:

• Confluence documentation home. Lots of great content, from everything you'd ever want to know about editing content to the details on page restrictions and permissions. If you're browsing the Atlassian site for documentation, note that (as June 2024) we are using the Cloud version. 
• Confluence user guides. These introductory overviews and quick start tutorials provide an accessible orientation to key features.
• Confluence YouTube playlist. Atlassian publishes a wealth of training videos to YouTube (along with a fair amount of marketing material). They have a playlist for Confluence-specific content. Some of the content is from years ago — but don't let that throw you off. The UI has changed and there are many new features, but the core concepts are still relevant.