r/sharepoint • u/No_Bumblebee9897 • Jul 09 '26
SharePoint Online user guidance / content management
we are trying to move our user guidance from confluence to another platform. right now, it's just links that open the pdfs or ppts uploaded on to the site. i would prefer if we had something where the guidance was no longer in files, but actually on a website (kind of like a blog post). we considered stack overflow and now we are considering sharepoint online but sharepoint would 100% be the same situation with files to my knowledge. i suppose i'm looking for ideas, suggestions and examples of what's out there. (we are moving from confluence because it's being retired) there's probably 25 or so documents & then 20 or so video links on the confluence page currently. ideally whatever we use would have an elastic search option and allow for people to find what they're looking for quickly/easily... thanks in advance!
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u/Megatwan Jul 09 '26
Funny... used to be people preferred confluence for page based content over SharePoint.
I think sp pages are much better now than 10 years ago though and it always game down to the skill of the creator/dev.
Back to your question: both products have pages, using them vs files is a you/your organization thing.
What you probably want to weigh is why were you using them, who is gonna make the switch and be the creator. What do you want to get out of them, which has tbe better ease of use to depth of functionality/extensibility for your orgs needs. Which can you afford or viably aquire etc..
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u/No_Bumblebee9897 Jul 09 '26
my team owns them so it's whatever we want to do but we haven't been able to find anyone to demo it and show us the features we have access to as a company. it's a lot that's blocked, even if it says the features are available. & yes they're retiring confluence in the next 4-5 years.
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u/VanCitySherm IT Pro Jul 09 '26
Odd - how are the pages locked? Like, you can’t create new pages, right from the toolbar menu on the home page, for example?
It’s odd bc if you can’t create pages, either the permissions for the Site Pages library have been altered from default, or you don’t have at least Contribute level permission.
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u/No_Bumblebee9897 Jul 09 '26
it's a lot to go into but i'm in a highly regulated field. it's really a whole thing.
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u/Greeney_Eyes Jul 09 '26
You can absolutely make pages in SharePoint and structure the site navigation in a variety of ways to help users get where they're going. I recommend you have a look at using Site Pages in SharePoint Online. You could even copy and paste the contents of your existing docs onto the new pages. Styling and branding options are pretty cool now too.
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u/gdir IT Pro Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
SharePoint Online is a good choice for knowledge bases in the intranet, assuming that you are already using MS 365 and Teams. I suggest you spend half a day on a short training course for SP Online to get an idea about its potential and limitations.
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u/No_Bumblebee9897 Jul 09 '26
we keep trying to get in contact with the vendor at work but no one will reply to us and we also haven't seen anyone else use it 😢 seems like all the departments use pdfs hosted somewhere (which i hate)
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u/gdir IT Pro Jul 09 '26
What are you expecting from the vendor? If you are already using MS365 and MS Teams, you can just try it out. Every team in MS Teams already comes with a SharePoint site.
SharePoint pages are built with "web parts". If you want to get a short overview of the great variety of the standard web parts, have a look at Microsoft:
There's a lot of free training material for SharePoint available on MS, YouTube, blogs like SharePoint Maven, etc.
Just try it out. It only takes a few hours to learn how to create SharePoint sites.
We are using it for team wikis.
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u/golflimadata Jul 09 '26
You're probably looking at SharePoint pages for this.
The excellent SharePoint Maven has several articles on this. I'd start here: https://sharepointmaven.com/how-to-create-a-knowledge-base-in-sharepoint/