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How Twitch (an Amazon company) made their Confluence leaner by automating the content review and archiving processes

Twitch.tv has become an ultimate destination for live streaming and not just for the gamer community. While the site focuses on video game live streaming, you can also find eSports competitions and music broadcasts as well among the live programs. Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014, has 2.2 million monthly broadcasters and 15 million daily active users.

Live streaming of an FPS game on Twitch

When the internal IT team at Twitch decided to move from Confluence Cloud to Server, they quickly realized just how much of their internal knowledge base content is not being used. It was obvious that if they keep creating Confluence content at the same pace as they have been or faster, it will soon become a burden on usability.

David Brown, Lead Technical Program Manager at Twitch explained how they avoided this and introduced Content Lifecycle Management to their Confluence and why did they choose Better Content Archiving for the job.

What's your story in a nutshell with Twitch?

I’ve been with Twitch a little over 1.5 years, leading our Technical Program Manager team for Internal Twitch IT. We support the different internal business units and manage both enterprise applications and smaller, business-specific applications, among a few other things.

Can you share what projects are you currently working on?

Too many projects to list across Enterprise, HR, Finance and other business units.

I helped my team roll-out Jira and Confluence Server and I still manage the Atlassian space within the company.

We are also planning to deploy Linchpin in the near future. Linchpin is a Confluence-based intranet solution from Seibert Media, a leading Atlassian Solution Partner. It will act as our new "landing page" to host both dynamic and static content. We are looking to leverage the enhanced blogging capability and enriched feature set as well.

You already deployed Better Content Archiving in your Confluence to manage the content lifecycle. What was the pain point that made you take this step?

When we started to look at moving to the server deployment of Confluence about a year ago, we quickly discovered how much obsolete, expired, and un-owned data existed in the wiki space.

As we started developing our Linchpin solution, it became a necessity to move forward with cleaning up the Confluence environment. Since Better Content Archiving is fully compatible with Linchpin, they together further help us to build a complete ECM system on Confluence.

Tell us a good example of your use cases! What are your favorite features and why?

After we ran Better Content Archiving, we saw just how many sites and spaces have never been reviewed, accessed or updated. So those were a slam-dunk to archive.

From that, we started looking at how many spaces had owners that were no longer employees. We used the app to alert team members that we needed to re-assign owners, or their spaces would be archived. I guess the best features I like are the Content Quality dashboard and the ability to retrieve an archived site or space if required.

Better Content Archiving calculates the quality of your Confluence spaces

What benefits did Twitch gain from using Better Content Archiving?

We benefit from using the app in several ways:

  1. We were able to reduce the number of unused or unmanaged spaces.
  2. We use the app to create automated notices to warn page owners that their content is about to go "stale" and urge them to keep their sites updated and relevant.
  3. We take advantage of the scheduled archiving capabilities, so if no one acts on these notifications or there is nothing to do, content is being archived without further attention.
  4. We also reduced or freed-up the number of Confluence license seats as we started to remove users who no longer worked at Twitch.

It made the content more relevant, reduced complexity and overhead, and automated the processes of having to review the sites in a manual way.

What's your message to anyone thinking about trying this app? What should they keep in mind to be as successful as you are with it?

The key element for me is having the visibility to the relevance and usage of each space.

Second, I would keep in mind how to do the settings (archive frequency and criteria) and notifications. In the beginning, we made a few mistakes and unfortunately alarmed folks unnecessarily when we were archiving spaces.

Also, it’s important to reassure users and page owners that their spaces and pages are still retrievable, even after they were archived.

For even more suggestions targeted towards enterprise users, read the practical deployment tips collected by the Technical Documentation Team at LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Managing the content lifecycle is not only important when you already have a large pool of content. Set some content rules early, make your team accustomed to them and assure that Confluence grows into your customized content management solution.

Avoid these 4 typical flaws of managing Confluence content!

 

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