Name: Atlassian Confluence
Brand: Atlassian
Rating: 4.1 (108 reviews)

it_user204948

Senior IT Operations Manager at a recreational facilities/services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 11, 2015

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Ease at which employees can curate content and people can discover meaningful and important info are valuable features.

What is most valuable?

The ease at which any employee can curate content and the ease in which people can discover meaningful and important information to get their job done.

How has it helped my organization?

We are hard core users so there are a lot of examples: At HomeAway we have product development teams for our sites, they use confluence both to document product roadmaps, and for the integration with JIRA to relay to stakeholders the updated status. It is the only place people go at HomeAway to get information.

What needs improvement?

The ability to delegate administrative roles, very difficult to give someone delegated administrative ability – almost all or nothing.

For how long have I used the solution?

My company has been working with Atlassian for 6 years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Not really, I wasn’t there when it was originally deployed but I have been thru major upgrades.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not really, I wasn’t there when it was originally deployed but I have been thru major upgrades.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No. We were having issues but that was because we hadn’t configured properly.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

Very high – responsive and very thorough.

Technical Support:

Very high – responsive and very thorough.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Formerly used Sharepoint – we like that Confluence has higher usability for the user so we can democratize content creation.

How was the initial setup?

I was not here for the initial setup, but the upgrades setup is complex for us mainly because cloning the environment for testing is complex.

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely not just purchase and install – engage with an expert, there is a lot of power in using Confluence and you need expert guidance to use it all properly.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user265575

VP, Enterprise PMO at a wireless company with 51-200 employees

Jul 8, 2015

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We've been able to implement a 'control center' in Confluence using JIRA integration, but reporting on content usage info and patterns is completely missing.

What is most valuable?

Easy to use
Flexible
Smooth integration with JIRA

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

It's an on-demand service.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's an on-demand service.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

It was done in-house.

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user211962

Head of Central Applications at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 23, 2015

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Far fewer office files are now sent around - the availability of information has helped our organization function better

What is most valuable?

Configurability, modern web application, and the large community.

How has it helped my organization?

Thorough tracking and logging of actions (Nothing gets lost), far fewer office files sent around by collaborating online, instant availability of information.

What needs improvement?

A lot of bugs already reported to Atlassian are not addressed.
Avatars must be square.
Status lozenges must offer more than three colors.

For how long have I used the solution?

5 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Yes. Both applications do not recover from loss of database server connection. Even if DB server is back online, applications need a restart.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Up to now it performs ok. We are at 300,000 issues. Getting the impression that it will get tight now.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

As an Enterprise Customer the service is not sufficient. Our concerns are not being addressed. Active visits at our site would be appreciated to explain our issues.

Technical Support:

Did not need it yet.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We switched because it was the better product for a lesser price.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

In-house team.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

At the time it was $8000 one off and $4000 yearly maintenance. Atlassian forced to switch to Enterprise licenses which doubled the cost.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Mantis.

What other advice do I have?

Be prepared that functionality of today might be changed or removed or charged separately without being asked. Bugs can be reported but are often not addressed for years. Atlassian may make major design decisions not considering their customers needs and requirements.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

it_user201597

SVP Information Services at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Feb 28, 2015

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DocOps is a leading edge approach to technical content. We could not have done this without Confluence.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

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.

Technical Support:

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What was our ROI?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

it_user174663

Systems/Applications Specialist with 201-500 employees

Feb 19, 2015

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I like that we don't need to wait until a document is 100% ready, we can start with a draft and develop in progress.

What is most valuable?

Easy import and creation of new documents
Notifications of the updated content
Version history changes
Cross team changing

How has it helped my organization?

Before using Confluence we have had the documentation spread across multiple shared drives and emails. Confluence gave us a chance to re-arrange the documents into a single repository and group the information logically in home page(s). I have called our home page a one-stop-shop for all team related links. Furthermore, other teams have created their own home pages and we are able to access each other spaces, sharing knowledge and know-how. When we do project work we can share the progress and develop documentation on the go while everyone has access to the latest version in real time. Talking about this, the thing I love about Confluence is that every document becomes a living document and we don't need to wait until it is 100% ready, but start with a draft and develop in progress.

What needs improvement?

Surprisingly enough the text editor is very limited in its functionality and given the fact that so many forum platforms and web sites have mastered this tool I believe Atlassian have no excuse to keep it this way. It lacks basics such as text highlighting, and adjusting the text size and working with tables is a nightmare. Text formatting and working with numbers and bullet points is time consuming. I would like to see more plugins and additional functionality such as embedding of other pages, drop down menus, insert buttons, and page templates.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for over two years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues faced with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The software has been running as expected. We have faced an issue where the hard disk ran out of space and the application continued working, putting all the changes in the memory. We have identified this fact after a server restart and as a result the changes made in the last few weeks were lost (the current RAM setups are huge enough to store plenty of text based information). I believe a simple space utilisations could be implemented in the app to warn or stop it from working if there is no space. In my opinion, the impact of losing the work is bigger than having the app down until fixed.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

As above plus the available users are based on license.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

I find the customer sevice limited.

Technical Support:

Technically speaking they have just enough resources to confirm bugs and lack of functionality but no people to follow on fixing and improving.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

First of its kind in this environment.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward install and setup.

What about the implementation team?

Implemented in-house. Quick and painless.

What was our ROI?

Confluence has saved time in finding information, reduced the on-boarding time, improved provisioning of repeatable scripted operational process, provided a central point for knowledge sharing and supplied better retention of Intellectual Property.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Not sure about the initial cost but the application itself needs little computing and some disk space.

What other advice do I have?

Go fast, cheap and dirty when creating new documents and improve in progress - this tool concentrates on the sharing, arranging and collaboration part but doesn't aim too high about how the content looks like. If you are after some serious functionality such as a table of contents, body styles and track changes I would recommend using Word and attach as a doc file. Index your content in home pages and sub-home pages for better logical arrangement of the information and fast navigation. Research additional modules like Confluence Questions. You can use the spaces for team building management like having a section for photos from events, out of work activities or sharing industry related links.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user165711

CEO with 51-200 employees

Nov 30, 2014

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Reduces redundant communication. Working with 3rd party content can be improved.

What is most valuable?

Content creation and sharing, collaboration

How has it helped my organization?

Reduced redundant communication and overall better communication among knowledge workers

What needs improvement?

Working with 3rd party content i.e. MS office, PDF files, email integration

For how long have I used the solution?

6 years

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Social adoption - it is always tricky to change current way-of-doing things you are bringing a new culture of collaboration and working with information.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Haven't had any issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Haven't had any issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

9/10

Technical Support:

9/10

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Filesystem and email, we switched because it was not a effective way of collaborating in teams.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward

What about the implementation team?

In-house

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Initial 50K USD, cloud-based infrastructure cost + maintenance = 30k / year

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes - all wiki and collaboration platforms available

What other advice do I have?

Just do it, it will give you quick benefits and will change the overall atmosphere when doing things together in one place. Here's an example of ours:

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. We're an Atlassian Confluence expert partner

it_user11370

Director of Operations at a cloud solution provider with 51-200 employees

Oct 27, 2013

Confluence 5 brings a fresh UI

Only just recently did I share our experience with migrating our internal custom KB system to Atlassian Confluence. We’ve been using it for a significant period of time, and our team are making good use of the Confluence wiki. Our team is using it for project planning, documentation, setup guides, known issues, bug tracking, reports and more.

I also personally run my own starter edition wiki for my own personal use, plus I can generally trial new plugins and new releases quicker on my own personal wiki.

I also recently wrote an article about the Evernote plugin and during my research I was aware that Confluence 5 was close to being released. Then just recently I got an email from Atlassian announcing the release of Confluence 5, I quickly added a task to get my personal wiki upgraded to Confluence 5 ASAP, so I could check out the new features.

The email Atlassian sent out made it clear that a new user interface had been rolled in to this release, so I was interested to see what had changed.

Today I am just going to take you through a quick introduction to some of the new features in Confluence 5.

UI Improvements

One of the main focus’s of this upgrade was an overhaul of the user interface (the look and feel). On first login after the upgrade you can not miss that changes. I was greeted with the new ui and a welcome message with a link to a video about the new confluence ui.

blog-conf-1

There is always going to be some issues when changing that UI mainly for the end users. I think the video is a great touch to bring people up to speed.

Worth noting is if you read through the Upgrade Notes for this release, Atlassian have taken the time to create a whole section on how to prepare your end users. This is a great touch. As with all new things, sometimes change can be scary.

Atlassian have provided video’s and notes on these big changes. Giving you (the person in charge of upgrading / training) the content necessary to educate your team. Planning for Confluence 5 - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Planning+for+Confluence+5

Create Button

Previously with prior releases of Confluence if you wanted to add a new page, blog post etc, you browsed to the particular space, then selected the Add button and chose your options.

This has now been replace with a single “Create” button in the top banner. From here you can create a new blank page, page from template, blog post etc and choose what space / page to put it under.

blog-conf-2

I think this is a great idea. A one stop location for getting your creating content. Simpler and more efficient.

New Side Bar

Confluence 5 has introduced a side bar when you are browsing spaces or pages. The side bar can be customized to include shortcuts to your favorite or frequently used space’s or page.

It also provide a navigation for child pages depending on what space / page you are viewing.

blog-conf-3

So when I am browsing my setup notes space, you can see that it provides quick access to some of the pages that are available.

They have moved the space options to the side bar as well instead of cluttering up the top bar, this is a positive move to reduce the clutter in the top bar. This side bar has replaced the older “Browse” men option.

Editor Improvements

Although I have not heavily tested this yet, when editing a page I noticed the load time once you hit “Edit” has improve dramatically.

Atlassian have got some serious speed improvements for the Editor in Confluence 5. The editor has also experienced some UI changes to maximise screen space.

Conclusion

Though this is early days getting familiar with Confluence 5, I have no major complaints just yet. The new UI is fresh and so far easy to use. The speed improvements are noticeable and my current favorite plugin (Evernote Plugin) still works in Confluence 5.

I have one little gripe so far though, Confluence 5 introduces “round” space logos. So if you are upgrading an existing Confluence install, you may need to review your logo’s for spaces, as they may get a little ruined or look a bit funny after they have been “rounded”. Not sure why Atlassian chose the round logo approach, it is a minor issue though, but some logos do not fit in a round shape, so would of been good to “choose” the shape.

From reading through the Confluence 5 release notes, there are a large number of other changes. If you are curious to see them all here are some useful links,

Planning for Confluence 5 - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Planning+for+Confluence+5
Confluence 5 Release Notes - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+5.0+Release+Notes
Confluence 5 Upgrade Notes - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+5.0+Upgrade+Notes
Confluence Whats New Page - https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/confluence/whats-new/confluence-50

Now I have to start planning the upgrade of our Crucial Confluence Wiki, so the team can benefit from this new release.

I would love to hear from anyone who has upgraded already. Feel free to share your thoughts on the new release.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Jan 11, 2014

I used Confluence 5 and I enjoyed its new features. From my point of view, the best feature is the intuitive space sidebar, which appears on every page and is intended to display the most likely content users want to access. The aim is to reduce the need for searching and to help orientate users. I also like the real-time updates, which are pulled into the page automatically rather than requiring a page refresh, and the responsive design, which adjusts to the size of the browser. Let's not forget about the new global header, which provides speedy access to other Atlassian apps, spaces, calendars ans settings.

it_user11370

Director of Operations at a cloud solution provider with 51-200 employees

Oct 14, 2013

Our shift to Confluence

For a long, long, long, long, long time Crucial has operated a custom made web based internal knowledge base / documentation area which has fallen well out of date. Though web based and coded in PHP we have since out grown its simplicity.

Our team regularly felt the pain of trying to locate, update or add information.

Finally we hit a point where we had to take action, so we put the word out to our team to come up with some possible third party options to replace our internal kb area.

We received replies with a number of suitable options.

At this point we realized that we really needed to sit down and come up with our requirements. We could then use the requirements to help compare the solutions and make a final decision.

The team bumped heads and came up with a relativity straight forward list of features and requirements.

Our replacement wiki needed,

Excellent search functionality.
Permissions at a per page basis.
Easy to use layout.
To be easy to find information in.
Search uploaded documents (nice to have)
Ability to upload files such as PDF, Images, Zips.
Ability to move pages, articles around and change names.
Ability set descriptive titles / names.
WSIWYG editor for creating pages / documents.
Version Control for a document / page.
Able to structure information and modify layout of system.
Local install (not a hosted solution)

Some of those options were quite basic, but essential to how we wanted to run our wiki.

We then went through the process of comparing all the viable Wiki solutions against our list of requirements.

Tiki Wiki

TikiWiki ticked a lot of the boxes that made up our criteria. Good search, permissions, upload files, version control, and the expected WSIWYG editor. However what turned us off this solution was the look and feel.We strongly believe the wiki should be easy on the eyes, and the layout should be a breeze to work with. Many of our testers did not find it met those needs.

KBPublisher

KB Publisher was another great option. It met most of our needs, with a great search function, positive comments about how easy it was to use and all the usual features you would expect from a wiki solution.

BrainKeeper

Straight away we ruled this out because brain keeper was not able to be locally installed, you had to use it hosted on their infrastructure. While this is not necessarily a bad thing depending on your budget, we prefer to keep our wiki locally run.We still went through the testing process however, and found this solution to be very feature rich. One disappointing note was it had a page version control, but you couldn’t revert to a previous version, just see the changes.

MindTouch

MindTouch was an interesting offering. From a feature set perspective it had a large list of features, a good portion we had no use for. We considered this a disadvantage as it meant there was a lot of bloat or unnecessary functionality.We came to the decision that this was not a suitable option as the layout was not user friendly which we believe was as a result of the large list of features.

We then got on with testing Atlassian Confluence. Immediately the feedback from our testers was very positive. Great layout, easy to use, ticked all our feature requirements and a search function that was exactly what we were after!

Confluence had all the bits we needed plus more! A recurring comment was on the WSIWYG editor used when creating pages / documents, the editor in Confluence is amazing. With drag and drop ability for adding images and documents, as well as easy to use shortcuts.

Further to our decision Confluence has an excellent documentation area for users and admins alike. Along with that Atlassian offer an interactive and video based training area called Atlassian University.

Personally I have worked with Confluence in previous roles, and already had made my mind up, but to avoid to much bias we still let the team vote and give feedback.

Confluence was chosen as our new wiki replacement!

6 months later…..

We’ve been running Confluence now for about 6 months. We are on the end part of a migration to migrate all our old articles from our legacy system and could not be happier! We took our time moving the articles across because we wanted to verify each article and make sure it was worth moving!

Since going live with Confluence we have started using it quite heavily for our project documentation, internal tech support documentation and a large number of our team members are making great use of the persona spaces for their own notes, documents and general shenanigans.

At the time of deployment we went live with Confluence 4.1 and it was great, since then Confluence has now gone to Confluence 4.3 which has added a couple of features worth noting, including a WSIWYG editor for the Global Templates area.

We are looking forward to Confluence 5 and some of the new UI changes they are bringing in!

If you have any questions about why we moved to Confluence, or wondering about our experience in using Confluence so far, please feel free to leave a comment.

Disclaimer: The company I work for is partners with several vendors

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.