And not just themes and styles. We say go a step further and personalize Confluence intranets around employee needs. That means picking and choosing what you want users to see based on their role, location, seniority, or otherwise, to create more manageable, efficient experiences for your users. Cutting out the unnecessary information means everyone’s happier, more productive, and, let’s be honest, a lot more engaged. 

Achieving that level of personalization might seem like a daunting task. How do you start tailoring the experience to meet the diverse needs of different employees and teams? 

One way to go about it: Start with common intranet pain points that are easily solved with some thoughtful personalization. Here are three to consider.

1. Engagement: Get more eyeballs on HR & company announcements

Too often, important announcements from HR or leadership go unseen on the intranet. 

The reason? They were lost amid the sea of other updates, or they simply didn’t catch readers’ attention.

Here’s a fix.

Add the Refined Sites News module to your intranet homepage. It’s a feed that shows users recently published blogs in a visually appealing format, with the option to display photos anchoring each post. You can use real-life images tied to the announcement, or brand-approved stock imagery for a cohesive look and feel relative to other corporate properties. Or whatever image you’d like.

You can configure the News module’s appearance in one of four ways depending on which suits your intranet’s design and your personal preference:

• Image feed shows the blog’s image, title and publishing date.
• Content feed shows the blog’s image, title, description and publishing date.
• List shows the blog’s publishing date and title.
• Slideshow shows the blog’s one by one. It includes the blog posts' image, title and publishing date.

Another, similar fix: publish updates via Activity Stream modules tied to Confluence pages (instead of blogs). 

Both ensure that users are enticed to click into an attractive link featured prominently on the page — and all but guarantee better readership on your most important company announcements and updates.

Explore more ways to boost engagement in Confluence with landing pages in Refined Sites for Confluence.

How to personalize news modules and activity feeds on Confluence intranets

Both News and Activity Stream modules on Refined sites allow you to apply filters to narrow down which posts show up in the module. For example, HR can filter a stream to show only updates from content labeled “urgent”— or even to limit the number of items shown on the stream to avoid overwhelming users with content.

In addition to filtering based on the Confluence label applied to the page, you can filter content according to spaces and authors, or apply advanced filtering with CQL.

Managers of larger intranets may even want to create a number of separate News or Activity Stream modules, and target each one to a different user group based on their needs. For example, the product organization sees the Chief Product Officer’s weekly insights blog, while sales folks get the CRO’s blog reporting on progress against sales targets. 

You can do this by applying view permissions to the modules, and opt to show the module to certain Confluence user groups. This ensures employees see only what’s relevant to them — or what management needs them to see.

2. Missed information, redundant asks: Encourage users to help themselves

Everyone hates receiving endless questions about information that's readily available on the intranet. But when you consider that some employees spend up to 3.6 hours a day searching for information, it’s unsurprising.

Try using Refined Sites to optimize your intranet’s layout so that everyone can easily find and access the most in-demand knowledge. For example, you could encourage managers of different functions to compile FAQ sections on their team landing pages, and highlight links to the most important documents with can’t-miss Navigation modules.

Just like News and Activity Stream modules, you can apply view permissions to Navigation nodules to display them to the relevant groups of users.

Improve the search function on your Confluence intranet

Alternatively, you could beef up your intranet’s search capabilities by promoting search results, which allows you to surface your choice of Confluence pages when users search for certain keywords. That way, if users search for “connect to Wi-Fi”, you can easily steer them to the appropriate self-help documentation and, hopefully, prevent unnecessary outreach.

You can also drop search modules onto the homepages of different spaces or sites using the Page Builder, giving users more places to search for the information they need. 

The end game? Fewer unnecessary questions, easier access to information for employees, and fewer disturbances for knowledge workers.

3. Emailed requests: Collect JSM requests via your Confluence intranet instead

Is your company’s IT Service Management system running on Jira Service Management? 

If it is, great. But are employees actually using it as they should be, or are IT agents receiving emails and messages from colleagues for system access, troubleshooting, equipment requests, repair asks, and other common IT issues?

If so, here’s something you can do for your IT team. Add service desks directly to your intranet via Refined Sites for JSM. Doing so allows you to build personalized service points that cater to common user needs, complete with all the JSM request types, ticket status information, and self-help documentation from Confluence that employees need throughout the course of their support journey.

The goal is to centralize support and self-help resources on the intranet, and at the same time, use personalization tools like View Permissions to guide users towards self-service options before they end up in the support queue. That can help you reduce ticket volumes and free up your IT team to focus on more complex issues.

Final thoughts and further reading

Customizing your Confluence intranet doesn’t have to be an overwhelming challenge. By diving into the intranet pain points above, you can start transforming a generic, one-size-fits-all environment into a helpful, user-centric hub.

The potential payoff is huge: happier, more productive employees and smoother, more efficient workflows.

Try out Refined Sites for Confluence for free on the Atlassian Marketplace and start your journey toward personalized intranets.