Atlassian Confluence Reviews

Confluence works as a trunk for our documentations and instructions, and a help centre for our telephone contact centre.

One and a half years.

No, Atlassian's documentation is very good.

No, the product works stably.

No, the product has scalability up to 2000 users.

Atlassian's service desk is very friendly.

They quickly resolve all of our problems.

We used IBM Connections. It is a very interesting solution, but Confluence is more flexible (maybe because it has many add-ons in its ecosystem).

Some of our installation work was "from the box", when the business requirement was standard. If the business requirement wasn't standard, we customized Confluence and added add-ons to it.

Atlassian has powerful documentation, and even a weak sysadmin could implement Confluence.

Pricing and licensing is friendly, but every year the price increases 5-10%.

The flexibility, well-rounded features, and capabilities to support the different needs of the organization.

JIRA has allowed my organization to aggregate our entire portfolio into one system and to eliminate five other disparate solutions.

The addition of Confluence allowed us to take the aggregation a big step forward by adding project and support documentation into one central holistic repository.

There are certain features, like AD FS and workflows, that don't appear to be mature enough for Enterprise use.

JIRA and Confluence (latest): Two years.

We started on cloud and moved to server. This caused some big errors with database issues and macros not working due to leftover items from the cloud. I recommend the server version overall. It is more fully-featured and scalable.

We ostensibly moved from cloud to server, because of functionality not being available on cloud, but also because there are storage limits that don't support enterprise level usage on the cloud.

Atlassian technical support is responsive in terms of communication, but is slow to address issues. You often have to constantly advocate for your needs to get them addressed or triaged.

Our organization had many different solutions for PPM. We switched to Atlassian to consolidate our PPM as well as to support the introduction of Agile into the organization.

You should initially use consulting to make good decisions about architecting this product. Also, designating at least two SMEs to be dedicated to the setup and enhancements is key.

Make sure to have passion for solving problems. Atlassian has solutions, you just need to figure out which ones to apply. Also, try to keep your admin group small, don't open it up to more than a few people. Finally, start with a pilot and get it working before rolling it out to everyone.

Availability of documents hosted in confluence very easily. You only need a browser, so even on a smartphone it is available.

Centralisation of knowledge, easily searchable.

Being robust when dealing with complex pages, eating too much CPU, badly designed plugins.

Nine years.

Yes, if users upload/convert from complex Office documents or upload too many attachments.

Not yet.

It depends on the issue and the support agent handling the case. Sometimes it is super good, sometimes super lame.

No previous wiki solution.

Initial setup is easy‎. The Atlassian documentation is good. Just make sure to read the requirements description.

No advice, pricing is publicly available.

• Do not install too many plugins, and choose them well, since some are heavy or broken.
• Do not allow attachment uploads that are too big.
• Install JavaMelody for easier monitoring‎.
• PostgreSQL is a good DB choice for all Atlassian products.
• Use fast HDD disk for faster search results.

One of the valuable features is Confluence and JIRA integration. The most valuable integration feature between JIRA and Confluence was being able to easily link Jira tickets to Confluence pages and vice-versa. They felt quite seamless. This reduced work friction, and prevented jumping between systems. It is simple, but very useful. The more integration the better, such as the integration with Slack.

The tool improved team collaboration around a usable source of truth.

I would like to see an improvement in licensing so I’m not paying for inactive users. Basically, I’d like the “system” to count unique active users for the past month and only charge me for those, rather than me manually assigning licenses to users. That user management/subscriptions management was a bit painful, especially in larger environments.

We have been using this solution on and off for five years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

We used SharePoint and Wikis. They were hard work and had poor integration.

The initial setup was easy. We used SaaS.

Slowly release to users and add subscriptions. Keep on top of subscribers and remove idle/inactive users.

We did not evaluate other options.

Just do it.

Editing is convenient. We often have to edit manuals for different projects of the same software. These projects have only small differences in features.

In the past, only documentation engineers could edit the software manuals. Now, both developers and documentation engineers can edit manuals and share opinions.

It is not as professional as FrameMaker. Confluence is light and very convenient, but it is difficult to reuse the same content and its format is not as flexible as FrameMaker.

We have been using the solution for three years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability but we have not been using it as often as FrameMaker.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We seldom used the technical support.

The setup is more complex and the developers helped to set up the environment.

Confluence is convenient and cheaper but not so professional. FrameMaker is for documentation departments in a large company and Confluence is for small teams or companies.

Ask the vendor to set up your environment if you buy Confluence.

The most valuable feature is the ability to create business collaboration solutions without having an army of IT professionals. We can create web-like interfaces without needing to be an expert in Java, Java scripts, or HTML.

We use the tool to establish a collaboration space across federal agencies, state agencies, and other public stakeholders. We are able to create a simple workflow and have an electronic record of those activities.

The basic improvement needed from my perspective (and it may be more to do with how Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has allowed certain features of Confluence to be used) is the ability to move multiple attachments at a time. I would like to be able to copy a set of pages in Confluence as a template. It would be nice to have better business collaboration examples.

We have used this product for five years.

We had stability issues sometimes, but I am not quite sure where those issues occurred. I don’t know if slowness is occurring on the OMB server end or on my organization's end in terms of network transfer of information. Sometimes the system does not respond as fast as a normal web interface. I am happy, overall, because I understand the power of the collaboration efforts being done. However, I think most people are used to one-way communication when it comes to the internet and they expect the same speed when collaborating from a two-way (or more )perspective.

The system has incredible scalability. I have not used all of the features that OMB provides, but we have an integrated system with:

• Collaboration & Information Sharing
• Data Collection
• Analysis
• Publications
• Specialized Applications
• PaaS
• Records Management
• Publishing
• Business Intelligence
• Workflow
• Web Frameworks
• Common Database
• Identity and Provisioning

I don’t interact with Atalssian directly, but rather through OMB who interacts with Atalssian. OMB is my technical contact and in terms of my use of the system they are fairly responsive. The system is a federal-wide system, in which participating federal agencies pay a fee ($50-200K) to be a member and use it as a shared service. When there are special initiatives, a federal agency may have to pay a little more. When I say a little more, I mean a little more, not huge amounts of money.
.

I used previous systems, such as email, common spaces, CDs, snail mail, and lately, SharePoint (we are still using this as well). These are all painful, unsecure systems and require an IT army.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated SharePoint.

If you want to solve complex problems with a simple solution, then use Confluence and use it to scale to more complicated things as you grow.

I like the macros (formatting, PDF, images, etc.), tags, tables (with autonumber), @user for citing another user, comments, and the access control in content using groups and users.

Meetings are registered in Confluence, allowing easy access on what had been discussed and the to-do lists. Information, knowledge and users of many areas are integrated in one place.

I would like to see the ability for each user to config his own home page,

We’ve been using Confluence for 3 years.

We rarely encountered issues with stability. But when it happens, generally Atlassian is pro-active and send infos about any issues encountered and how it's beeing handle by support team.

No issues with scalability.

I have never used technical support.

I never used a different solution.

Initial setup was kind of straightforward. We learned how to use it as the issues/necessities appeared.

In-house.

It´s affordable.

No.

I advise to start small, then go for the whole company. We started in IT and then expanded to the company using IT as an example.

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.