I have just installed Confluence and my biggest problem is Where Do I Start? I want to create a new site for Sarbanes Oxley within our company. I am not sure how to start it. I've read several documentation and guides but still I can't seem to "start it". Any help with this is greatly appreciated.

The key with a wiki is to provide a central platform where people can easily create and share content and store files. With all wikis we recommend imposing minimum structure or rules. The best approach is to start something and evolve it over time.

In general I'd recommend:

- educating your users about the capabilities of Confluence;
- being as liberal as possible with permissions;
- creating a space for each project and team/department; and finally
- staying away from page templates, especially in the early days of the products use;
- ensure you users are aware of the Confluence docs:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/8hIC

- leave the rest up to them.

If you are looking for consistency, I'd evolve that over time as well. I highly recommend not attempting to over-engineer the wiki in the first 3 months. Find your best practices over time. By combining your own thoughts on best practices and by letting your users show you what their best practices you will be much further down the road to having an operating and functioning knowledge management product that is highly valuable than if you were to try to craft something from scratch and try to empose these practices on users from the outset. The more comfortable your users are with the system and their own use cases the more likely they are to participate in the development of best practices.

One of Confluence's main features is that it is highly flexible and that you don't have to get it right the first time. Once you have Confluence up and running, you can fine tune how Confluence is structured. If you wish to segregate your existing space, you can create a new space and move an existing page and all its child pages in a single operation
to a new space. All existing links will be automatically updated within Confluence.

There is an interesting page outlining the various wiki adoption patterns that have been observed amongst our users which you can see here:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/PAT/Patterns+of+Wiki+Adoption

If you need assistance with educating your users in regards to Confluence functionality then I'd recommend considering undertaking one of our Atlassian Training modules focussed on educating new users about Confluence. These modules cost $USD 1,500 and are delivered by a professional trainer at a mutually convenient time via teleconference and online presentation tools. If you are interested in formal training please do let us know. You can learn more about our training services here:

http://www.atlassian.com/support/training.jsp

Alternatively you may wish to engage one of our partners to assist with
design and implementation. We have a number of official Atlassian
Partners who are also able to assist with implementation and
customisation requirements. If you are interested in engaging an
official Atlassian Partner, please see the Atlassian Partners Space:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/APW/Partner+Wiki+Home

I'd recommend speaking either Adaptivist or Euan Semple both companies
are wiki experts.

http://www.adaptavist.com

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/EUAN/Euan%27s+Work+Wiki