We have created a DITA to Confluence converter that allows us to export our document set to Confluence. Though far from perfect, the converter has allowed us to export our entire document set to Confluence. We can work outside of Confluence to update and maintain our doc set and we can then export these changes to Confluence. One stumbling block we would like discussed is the unique page name per space limitation.

Basically, our doc set is currently divided into several documents with children pages. Because of our DITA environment, we have setup several common pages that are referenced across all documents (for instance, we have a common copyright page that is used across all of the documents). This works fine when the information in the referenced page is the same across all documents, but this does not work when we have pages that are specific to just one document or set of documents. For instance, we'll have an introduction page for a Windows-related document that is not compatible with the Unix-related document. Currently, the first uploaded introduction page is the one that is used across all document sets so we end up say having the Windows introduction page in the Unix document.

Our current proposed workaround is to have a convoluted page naming system (Introduction to Windows, Introduction to UNIX, etc), though, because of the size of our documentation set, we already see maintenance issues not to mention the creation of pedantic system that would have no benefit to our users (think Confluence Dewey decimal system for page names). Also, because we want to be able to order the pages in a logical order, we will have to add numbers to each page name as it seems the page ordering is still not possible in Confluence (see http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-1031).

Perhaps another workaround would be to have each document be a separate space? However, this will defeat our efforts at having one "documentation space." We can add unique page ids to each page outside of Confluence so that this can be cancelled at the beginning of DITA to confluence conversion process, however, our hands our tied if we can't have multiple versions of the same page name in the same space. Is there any way to enforce or add unique page id metadata that would allow us to create a workaround?

Note: I have looked at several other Page-related issues and other Confluence issues, so hopefully I'm no duplicating this issue.