Setup an Intranet with Refined
- Genevieve Blanch (Deactivated)
Instructions - Reel Studios Intranet
Reel Studios is a fictional company. This company has set up a their Confluence using two Refined sites. One for the intranet and the other for documentation.
Follow the steps below to setup an intranet with Refined for Confluence Server and Data Center. We use a fictional company Reel Studios to walk you through the following steps.
See our demo site for an interactive view →
Learn how Arctic Rim built their intranet in 7 steps →
1. Theme
The theme used on Reel Studios intranet is a simple green theme. The simplest way to create this look is to copy a bundled theme, and simply change the colour to match the green of Reel Studios, or even better, match it to your own brand.
More tips on building the theme here.
2. Structure
The structure of your site’s content very much depends on your organization’s business structure and the purpose of the site. Reel Studios opted for a structure where departments could each have a category acting like a ‘home’ they could work from.
With Refined, Confluence spaces can be organized into categories that sit in the top navigation menu.
Create the Confluence spaces if you haven’t already. E.g., Company Values, Cultural Events etc.
Use the Site Builder to create categories and subcategories in your site (+ symbol).
Organize (drag and drop) your spaces into the respective subcategories and categories.
To get the column effect you see above, Reel Studios used ‘sub categories’. This is an excellent feature to use if you have a long list of spaces to navigate to in a category. Subcategories are labelled with green pipes in the site builder (admin section of Refined for Confluence).
For an intranet purpose it can be a great idea to include links to social media, your company or team blogs, or you can simply add a custom link. Below you can see we added social media links and a link to an office blog.
This site builder view is where the administrator manages permissions on your intranet. Activate “Manual Category Permissions” to control who can see what categories and the content within these. We explain working with permissions in more detail below under Personalization.
To understand how structure and organization in Refined works, here is an explainer: https://partners.refined.com/space/RFCS/222756891
We go into this the site structure in more depth on our documentation https://docs.refined.com/x/CA1sAw
3. Customization
Each page in Refined including site homes, category homes, space homes and pages are very easy to customize with Refined’s inbuilt layout editors. More on the inbuilt layout editors here.
Customizing the site home:
Reel Studios set up their site home as a dashboard with quick links, company news, recent activities, and “my work”.
Customizing a category home:
The category home’s are customized in exactly the same way as the site home, using our inbuilt layout editor.
Customizing a space home:
Note: Customization of a space and pages works differently in our Cloud app, Refined for Confluence. Curious to understand the difference? Go here.
Customize the space layout and save it as a template. Refined includes a space layout editor where you can customize the side bar on a space, the space home page and save it as a template. We recommend saving your commonly used space layouts as templates to save on maintenance. Click here for more info on space layout options.
Reel Studios have a Knowledge Base template, a team space template and a product space template.
Customizing Pages - Content Layout Macro:
Note: The content layout macro is not included in Refined for Confluence Cloud.
Each page including space homes can easily gain a Refined dashboard feeling by using the inbuilt page macro called the ‘Content Layout Macro’. This is a great way to add visual links, search, and html links from space homes and pages. Click here for more info on the Content Layout Macro.
Working with news and blogs:
A blog is a space that only shows blog posts. Blogs can be displayed on a Site or Category home using the News module. With Refined you can have a stand alone themed Blog Site. More on blogs here.
Reel Studios use the news module to display blog posts on their site homes and category homes. The global site shows blogs from their ‘office life’ blog space, located in the blog site.
4. Personalization
Use permissions in Refined to display only relevant and tailored content to the user. Permissions can be added to sites, categories, spaces (via Confluence) and in content sections in your customized page layouts.
Note: Right now Refined for Confluence Cloud permissions work differently. On Cloud you manage permissions on a page level, and it is not yet possible to add permissions to categories. However you can on a site level by sending users to different site custom domains. Understand how they work on Cloud here.
In Reel Studios Intranet, permissions have been added on a category level so that teams can only see the categories relevant to them. For example, only management can see the management category and its content.
Permissions on sites and categories (On-prem only for now)
Manage who can access which site using permissions. This is a great way of personalizing the content to the users accessing that site. More on managing view permissions here.
Note: Managing permissions works differently to ‘connecting’ users to a space or category. Connecting is simply attaching a user to a work space whereas permissions is about access. More on connecting users here.
Start sites for users
Set start sites for users. For example, If Reel Studios had a London office, the London users could start at their site. More information on start sites for users here.
CQL in modules
A really clever way to personalize your content is using CQL. For example you could show a users “favourite pages”. We have a bunch of examples at this link.
Text Variables.
Text variables are $labels in the admin layouts which automatically generate text for the end user. Reel Studios use it as a welcome message when entering the intranet. E.g., “Welcome $username”. More on text variables here.