A lot of our documentation for both the products and internal way of working is setup there. We've at a certain point made it the place where business logic was defined so developers could access it.
Pros
Ties directly with Jira
You can reference someone in the organization
Has some nice formating on the warnings and other widgets
Cons
Layout of the pages are a bit restrictive and they could look nicer
Working with other colleagues at the same time
Having more dynamic spaces that are more seemless integrated
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're connected with Atlassian and you are working on things that don't change too much. It helps to keep track of documents.
We use Atlassian Confluence for a number of different things, ranging from knowledge sharing, product documentation, documentation on processes and procedures, links to outside resources, and things of that nature.
Pros
Structure of spaces
Space permissions
Formatting options
Cons
Space permissions can be more clear and easy to find
Likelihood to Recommend
I really like how Atlassian Confluence works for teams and being able to have more concise permissions on different spaces, and pages inside those spaces. I find it most appropriate for documentation and sharing the information with specific people.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (E-Learning company, 201-500 employees)
It's used as a wiki of shared knowledge amongst team members of the same department. It is used as a handbook for new hires and a refresher for those who need to take over a colleague's task if they're out of the office.
Pros
Search function.
Editing capabilities.
Nesting pages.
Cons
Have search results sorted by something like page views or accuracy to search terms.
Images within a page size automatically without its own scroll bar.
Same with tables, have it able to size automatically (responsive) without its own scroll bar.
Likelihood to Recommend
Confluence is well suited to share knowledge on specific processes for new hires and for colleagues within the same department. It may not be suitable for interdepartmental information sharing since it can be overwhelming for those unfamiliar with certain applications. It's more suited for those with basic prior knowledge of most things.
Confluence is the WGU wiki system for documentation across the entire company. It is encouraged as the 1 stop shop for most departments with a few that choose to use SharePoint or Service Now instead. This is a helpful place for meeting notes, collaborate on tutorials and a handy storage for management tool links.
Pros
Great support out there since its widely used.
Very customizable with themes and color combinations.
Collaborative editing options.
A plethora of add-ons to customize your experience.
Cons
Migrations of data can be difficult.
Backup service breaks so you're better off manually backing up.
The log-analyzer can sometimes treat symptoms, but may not see the root cause to a problem with the system.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking for a scalable solution for confidential notes, knowledge, or for a place to throw a general memo, then Confluence is a great system. This system carries quite a cost to it, so if you aren't willing to fork out the funding or if you don't have a large enough user base (I'd recommend at least 500 active users), then there are alternative solutions that are rather effective such as Sharepoint or a Gsuite equivalent.
We use Confluence company-wide. It allows for the entire company to have access to important documents easily. Since our company is spread throughout different buildings, things like office maps and org charts are easy to find and live on Confluence. You are able to look up anyone in the company with ease, which is important when dealing with 200+ employees.
Pros
The ability to personalize for your company.
Access to important documents is streamlined.
It keeps communication flowing and frees up time for HR because important basic info is there, so there are fewer questions.
Cons
It's a bit difficult to navigate.
Having to create one on one forms weekly gets messy in my "personal space" portion of the site.
Better integration of different software.
Likelihood to Recommend
Large companies would do well with Confluence. Small companies who don't need broad communication would be wasting money. It's hard to get important info easily accessed with larger companies, and Confluence allows that information to be readily available to anyone who needs it, regardless of position.
Confluence is primarily used for our Information Technology staff, along with non-IT users that are heavily involved in our programming, development, and design processes. We use it for a few major categories:
Internal IT documentation and notes
Project/meeting notes, agendas
Collaboration between IT and many non-IT areas
A number of staff use the "Personal Space" feature for their less formalized notes, plans, etc.
We use it instead of Sharepoint or some other technologies we have access to as it provides a great and easy to use place to collaborate, keep notes, and keep organized.
Note: we did not use or attempt to use any integrations with Outlook, Google Hangouts, Gotomeeting/webex/etc., so any questions I answer saying Confluence does not have them isn't necessarily accurate (there is just no option on Trust Radius to say "don't know").
Pros
Confluence is incredibly easy to use - and is simple for both technical and non-technical staff to use. It is easy to create content, and edit existing content.
The template system makes it easy for people to keep to a consistent format for some tasks, and creating new templates is pretty easy.
The system is easy to update and administer. It requires very little time and resources, especially since the 4.x/5.x versions.
It integrates well with our multifactor authentication system (Duo).
Cons
It is still very annoying that Atlassian does not support MariaDB, the default MySQL database that is used by all major Linux distributions now. This is even more of an annoyance since there has been a case open since 2013 that they have given little or no response to: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-29060
The mobile site, at least on android isn't that great. Our staff uses it to get info while away from their computers, but never to edit/update content.
Some users have issues with navigating the system, primarily when they are more used to a lack of organization (i.e. files dumped in a single network share directory). A tutorial about how to organize content couldn't hurt - though it isn't a major issue.
Some functionality which should be (in my opinion) part of the core application is supplied by third-party commercial plugins (like Creately).
Likelihood to Recommend
There really needs to be someone with a good sense for how content should be laid out and named working in each space. Without an initial content organizer of sorts, things get a bit chaotic.
It isn't just a replacement for a traditional network drive or Dropbox though - and users seeking something like that may have issues shifting culture in that direction.
It is used by the whole organization as a documentation resource. We create all design docs and specification documents in Confluence. Only people within the company can view the documents. For others to see, we would have to export the Confluence page. But Confluence exporting does not format great.
Pros
Sharing documents within the company.
Automatically saving work.
Linking to JIRA.
Cons
The editing capabilities need to be improved. While formatting text, the options are very limited.
The "tables" feature needs to be enhanced and should work more like Excel.
The text fields should work more like Word.
Likelihood to Recommend
Atlassian Confluence is more suited for companies that need to constantly share docs.
Initially Confluence was adopted by my department to facilitate collaboration, document storage, and have everything centralized. I was rapidly adopted by the department and then other departments were coming to me asking how they could get access. Since I rolled it out to my team, we have had other departments and teams use it. It has really helped us all share information, document meetings, and keep us centralized.
Pros
It is very intuitive and easy to use and get started. Very little training is needed to support basic usage.
Great simple task assignments with dates and tagging people. It also creates tasks reports, so you can see all you have.
Great for creating information with multiple people adding content. It tracks versions and you can always roll back if needed.
Cons
I believe it is coming soon, but the real time editing and seeing what others are doing like in a Google doc, is an area of improvement.
Have more control over the table column and row sizes. Sometimes information isn't presented well and you can't adjust it.
Make the "Notify Watchers" on an edited page unchecked by default. This can reduce a lot of spamming that happens. More personalization on notifications.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it can help all teams in all types of environments or situations where coordination, collaboration, and sharing of information is necessary.
Atlassian Confluence has been selected and used first by the University's IT department. Other services of the University started to used it as well and the Advancement group started using it about a year ago. We first used it a central repository for shared documents with the desire to replace our shared drive. Then, each sub-group has created its own page to share information to the rest of the Advancement staff. We are now using it a s a project and event management tool.
Pros
Everybody can be trained using Confluence in one hour, start editing pages right away and contribute in sharing information.
The version management is automatic and reduces the risk of lost data. It is easy to go back to an older version.
The extensive library of macros helps be creative and efficient in building pages and doing cross-references.
Editing and viewing rights are easy to manage and allow to separate public views from internal works.
Cons
As we are using Confluence more and more to manage projects, it is lacking some key functions related to project management, such as a visual Gantt chart. It has made progress though with the Page Properties macro and related report to identify projects.
It would be nice to edit a spreadsheet within Confluence and use the basic functions of Excel (sum, ...)
Links to PDF files are a 3-step process with an automatic download; a option to preview the file (like an image) would be useful (specially on mobile devices)
Email reminder/notifications for task due in a day or two could be useful for some users.
Likelihood to Recommend
Confluence is a great collaborative tool that is easier and more effective than documents shared on a shared drive. Every user becomes a collaborator, and the more it is being used, the more one creates contents. It's a live environment, continuously updated, and easily shared with others. It is not a project management tool nor a repository space to store every file.
Atlassian Confluence is being used by some departments of our University to be able to consolidate our documentations and procedures at one place in one environment. Before we found Confluence, each department or team were using their own way of storing and documenting things that are critical for the core business. Its easy to see which problem could occur when the responsible person for a certain service is away from work for a while and the service goes down. It was a logical decision to get a tool that would allow us to gather everyone under a simple documentation infrastructure that would be simple to use and not costly. Now that everyone is gathered in a single tool, the knowledge sharing is way more easier that browsing on server folders for docs or on some other random tools people could find.
Pros
Confluence search engine is really good! It searched through pages and attachments kind of like Google would do.
Ease of use of the tool is really great for bringing reluctant people to use it
The community aspect is really great for people being used to social networks like Facebook. Its really a cool feature that helps people from remote locations to work together on a common problem or installation procedure for example.
Import / Export features is another option that helps to bring more people in and also eases the migration process.
Cons
I wrote that import / export options are great with Confluence, but they still have some work to do. MS Word importation is getting messy with the layout if its more than regular text. Also, we would need more options available like Visio or MS project for example.
The search engine is great BUT you need to train people to write docs as a web page. Which means that you need to help them understand how a web search engin works (Title 1 > Title 2, etc.) so they can find their pages when the work is done.
Updates can be hard on users to follow all the moving of buttons and menu in the UI. It would be great to integrate in the UI a "What has changed since you last went online" or something like that.
Likelihood to Recommend
To be honest, I do recommend Confluence for all sorts of documentation needs! Cost is low, learning curve ain't scary and it adds features to a regular knowledge database (community blog, likes, commenting feature, etc.). There is still work to be done after you pick the Confluence tool though (writing standards, storage structure and such).
