Atlassian Confluence Reviews

The following features are valuable:

• The Wiki nature of the product: Collaborative creation of content with version history and easy change tracking.
• Knowledge sharing: Captures and provides visibility on decisions and conversations, enables early feedback, fosters situational awareness (watchers, notifications, comments, dashboard, etc.).
• Connects people through content and fosters a collaboration culture.
• Easy learning curve and powerful search through content.
• The cloud version accelerates the adoption of product improvements.

This has helped our organization in the following ways:

• Enables conversations and meeting outcomes to be visible and evolve faster.
• Opens collaboration and empowers everybody to contribute in knowledge construction.
• Accelerates the learning curve of new hires by giving them a platform for self-learning and understanding conversation dynamics.
• Helps groups do asynchronous work, reducing meetings overload, and improving productivity.
• Enables distributed teams to have a common virtual place for knowledge sharing and history.

I would like to see the solution do the following:

• Provide analytics on content usage to help foster adoption. Currently, the statistics have to be requested and are very basic in the cloud version.
• Help in the organization of the content (i.e., help identify "dead nodes", build different perspectives and categorization automatically with a type of page mapping and navigation other than a hierarchical tree.)
• Improve concurrent collaborative editing. (A relatively new feature has already been proven and is evolving in other products such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office Online.)
• Help in the consumption of updates according to personalized interest.

I have been using this solution since 2012 in different implementations, settings, and versions. I have been using it with the cloud version since 2015.

In the past maintenance windows could create some availability issues if overlapping with activity periods, but they have been consistently improving performance. You can experience slow response times, images not updated properly, sometimes unavailability messages. A status page is provided to monitor ondemand server ( http://bit.ly/ondemand-status ). Additionally setting the server time zone properly can also help avoid interference with your peak hours of activity ( http://bit.ly/ondemand-mainten... )

We have not had any scalability issues.

The technical support is very good.

I have used MediaWiki and SharePoint before.

In comparison with MediaWiki, Confluence is easy to use, more user-friendly, and is rich with social/collaboration features. It has a relatively low cost, and integrates better with other Atlassian tools such as JIRA, Bitbucket, and Bamboo.

In comparison with SharePoint, Confluence has a Wiki native design and social features, so it’s easy to collaborate on content creation. I like to compare it to a "whiteboard", whereas SharePoint feels more like a "library". Although SharePoint has improved a lot in the last few years, its pattern of use are still more like a "repository", rather than "collaborative editing".

Google Docs is the king of collaborative editing, but Confluence enables better structure for a team, with knowledge-centered design.

The installation was straightforward. It was easy to start, easy to setup with low administration involvement, as long as you have an "open by default" policy around content.

Complexity comes into play to drive evolution, content curation, usage, and adoption analytics. When you don’t have enough information on usage easily available, setting up some guidelines can help drive consistent patterns of usage. You need people to help guide that process and keep the organization of the content coherent.

Pricing and licensing are also straightforward. Keep an eye on plugins and additions that should be balanced with the benefits and usage patterns they provide.

We looked into MediaWiki, SharePoint, and Jive.

Think about your needs and goals. Test-drive it with a team of people in a real scenario.

• Easy to use
• Flexible
• Smooth integration with JIRA

This is our corporate wiki, all departments use it for process and knowledge management. We implemented a 'control center' in Confluence using the JIRA integration for both Change Control and Incident Management.

Reporting on content usage info and patterns is completely missing and would be a great addition. On-demand is especially limited due to the significantly reduced number of plug ins available. Reassignment of content ownership would also be a nice feature.

I've used it for three years.

It's an on-demand service.

There's been a few outages, but nothing significant.

It's an on-demand service.

It's not needed often, but they are responsive when issues are reported.

It's not needed often, and when they are, there's a good integration of reported issues to the backlog.

At a previous job we were beginning to use SharePoint, I am not an expert.

Confluence setup is very straightforward, but an absence of formal training availability caused it to take longer than it should have to become productive.

It was done in-house.

I don't have a specific number for it, but I consider it to be extensive, given the low cost and widespread use of this tool.

We are using the on-demand version and our pricing is fixed.

I would recommend you consider a managed hosting arrangement instead of on-demand, because of the limitations. I would also recommend a clear plan be developed for content structure and ownership.

We are able to add 3^rd party plugins and overall collaborative abilities. Keep in mind that DocOps moves the technical content industry from heavy duty doc apps to a crowdsourced approach which requires extensive collaboration. The plugins enabled basic doc properties such as version control from K15t.

DocOps is a leading edge approach to technical content. We could not have done this without Confluence. Other companies are looking to duplicate.

The search ability (using Lucene) is less than optimal and has known bugs that are slow in getting addressed. Search is key on any content platform.

We have had Confluence used casually inside R&D for several years, but then built DocOps using confluence at its core about 18 months ago. This rating is based on that instance (which is hosted at Contegix).

We use the latest release of Confluence.

No issues with deployment.

Yes, but because we stressed it with an integration to Lingotek which enables real-time cloud translation and a few plugins.

We are constantly watching scalability and are a bit worried but believe the costs of the new Data Center version cost prohibitive.

They seem to struggle a bit. We were having some concerns with CPU usage and heap memory. Support seemed to struggle with solving. I also felt like I really had to purchase support for $35k to get the level I really needed.

They seem to struggle a bit. We were having some concerns with CPU usage and heap memory. Support seemed to struggle with solving. I also felt like I really had to purchase support for $35k to get the level I really needed.

No. This was a different direction from a documentation systems to confluence. Not a switch of wiki products.

We had help from hired services help such as K16T and others. I also think our installation was much more complex than most from what I am told.

This is a complex answer given we created an industry leading platform and way of using confluence unlike any other user.

Due to our experience using it internally and based on a review of a few free wiki’s, we decided to go with Confluence so as to have only 1 product at CA.

Spend time figuring out the best way to maintain. Hosted vs On Premise. Also, you may need to develop new skills to install and manage the plugins.

The sharing of information and simple formatting are valuable features. That is, there are no templates, and everything uses one format. This means that people don't need to worry about formatting.

When we have a project that we don't want to share with everybody but want people to know that it exists, there is no way to do this in Confluence. When a project is not shared, people cannot see that it exits.

I've been working with Confluence for eight years. It was initially on-premises, but we moved to the cloud four years ago.

It's stable, and we haven't had any issues at all.

We haven't had any problems with scalability. We have about 300 users.

Some technical support staff are very helpful, but some just send documentation that is not very helpful. I would say that technical support needs improvement.

I didn't do the initial setup, but I think it's pretty easy. When I had to configure a new site, it was very easy.

SharePoint is very confusing, but Atlassian Confluence is very simple. After a couple of days, most people understand how it works, and it's quite simple.

I recommend Confluence to any company that wants to share information inside the company. Confluence is great; it's like a wiki. I would give it an eight out of ten.

We use Confluence to share weekly project information. Everyone in the company uses it daily from project managers down. 

It's easy to search for information.

I'd like to see some improved reporting on usage. 

We have been using Confluence for more than five years.

Confluence is stable. 

Confluence is scalable. Our company has 1,000 employees, and we're growing. It has kept pace with our growth. 

I rate Confluence eight out of 10. I won't rate it nine because my company didn't develop it. If my company had developed it, it would be much better. 

We are a remote company at this point. We use it to collaborate on different initiatives within our interior and marketing teams. It's kind of our one-stop-shop to house our collateral and sales information. It covers pretty much anything and everything we need and everything our marketing teams would need as well.

We really like how it organizes everything. I don't know if it's because of the ability to create different pages or not, however, everything is very organized. It's easy to differentiate different materials based on the project and navigate to them. The solution makes it so it's very easy to navigate and very easy to search. 

It's extremely intuitive.

The solution is great for non-technical users. You don't have to have a big technological background to work with it effectively. I myself am not very technical and I can get around it without much difficulty.

The UI is good but bland. It could be updated a bit to make it more modern and interesting to look at.

I've only been using the solution since January of 2020, so it's been about six months now.

The stability of the solution is great. There are no issues whatsoever there. I haven't found that it crashes or freezes. There aren't bugs or glitches that affect the way it functions. I would say that it is very consistent and reliable.

I assume the scalability of the solution is good. My company has used it for several years now. We've been growing in that time and we haven't had any kind of stability issues and we've never felt like the solution has gotten too small to meet our needs. It grows with us. We've been able to utilize it as we've needed, as we've grown. It seems to scale nicely.

I've never had a need to reach out to technical support, so I can't speak to the quality of its services.

We also use Salesforce as a project management tool. They aren't really the same, however, we do use the two in tandem.

I don't know what the licensing costs for the solution are at this time.

We're Atlassian customers. I'm just the customer success manager, so I'm not on the technical or the testing side.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are on, however, I believe it to be the most up to date version that is currently available.

I'd advise other organizations, if they decide to implement the solution, to really utilize it. If you plan to use it as a really strong collaborative tool, ensure that everyone using it has access to the required documents and that they utilize it on a consistent basis. I've found the most benefits from using it when I'm consistent with it. You really need to update it as often as you update your Salesforce. That might mean daily updating, depending on how you use it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it had better UI, I might rate it a bit higher.

• Search: It is simple to search for documentation throughout Confluence from the search bar.
• Audit History: Collaboration is brilliant with a full audit history on the changes made by the users involved, as well as the ability to visually compare the differences.
• Simple Navigation: It is simple to create or edit a page with a similar look and feel to any word processor-type app.
• Templates: Used for standardizing and guiding users regarding what type of information should be captured within different spaces or page structures.
• Action Items: Makes it quick to set reminders for yourself or another user, with a due date for the required activity.

• It has improved collaboration, transparency, and documentation quality among teams.
• It has started us on the journey of knowledge management, not leaving valuable IP in peoples’ heads.
• It has enabled us to publish ubiquitous language and link standard definitions to words used in documents.
• It has enabled us to link templates to JIRA workflows in the management of our business processes.
• It has drastically improved the discipline around meetings and arising actions.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• When comparing page changes, you are only able to select 2 pages. While this is useful, it has proven to be a slight limitation when many people are editing a document. Having said this, we work around it by selecting the last “approved version” and the latest version. The downside is that we are unable to then see who made the change and when they made it without going to that specific history version are comparing it to the version just prior to it.
• Page approval: there is a feature whereby you are able to require page approval, but it can only be applied at a space level (with the ability to apply certain exclusions). The exclusion capability is not intuitive and therefore does not always work as expected. In addition, there is usually a specific parent and child set within a space that we would want to set approval requirements on. The approval plugin also keeps adding “Unapproved” blocks to the top of the page whenever an edit occurs. These continue to build up despite the fact that there has not been a status change (i.e. the page has not yet been approved, so one “Unapproved” block would be sufficient).

I have used Confluence for approximately three years.

We had an issue where the activity feed stopped working due to a locked cache file. This has not repeated itself.

We currently have approximately 200 users and have not experienced any difference in performance from when we had 10 users.

We haven’t used technical support.

Our previous solution was a combination of our file system, local hard drives, and an internally developed document management system.

We implemented Confluence because we needed a place to collaborate around software design and design specifications that was integrated with JIRA.

• Setup was fairly straightforward
• Some configuration is required to integrate with LDAP for authentication, if that is your chosen route
• Some configuration is required if you integrate with other Atlassian products
• The installation guide covers everything

Make use of the evaluation option if you are unsure. Another option is to start small and test whether Confluence is for you.

A 10-user license is only $10. Be aware of the costs if you plan on rolling it out to your organization, as it does start to add up.

Try to do license changes on your anniversary month, as there is no pro-rata benefit.

We didn’t evaluate alternatives. The implementation was driven by our Java development team and their requirement for a place to collaborate and plan development work.

Employ lean thinking and learn by doing! Have a rough idea of what you need to achieve and get a working framework in place. Experiment and see what works for you. It is simple to move pages after the fact, so don’t worry about being too pedantic in the beginning. Keep permissions simple and use groups as much as possible.

Built in revision history and document management makes this ideal for companies without a dedicated document controller, and makes life significantly easier for document controllers who are using paper-based systems.

I've used Confluence as a Quality Management System at several companies; traditional QMS’s need pretty dedicated management by a document controller to make sure revision history is maintained, changes go through an adequate approval process, and only the latest approved versions of documents are being used. Confluence essentially handles all of that, which means companies without the means for a dedicated document controller can still implement a QMS, and/or companies with a document controller benefit from the added efficiencies.

Really speeds up creation and approval of policies and procedures and provides a centralized area for users to access current versions of documents.

Sometimes has issues with cron jobs crashing - need to check more recent versions to see if this has been resolved.

I'd also love to see integrated project management with Gantt charts, but I'm a sucker for Gantt charts.