Avantages
It is extremely easy to create a large number of documents, it is possible to reference other documents within them to facilitate ease of research, and documents can all be put into sub-folders to contain them within separate trees to aid with organisation.
The mobile app is extremely useful for reading documentation whilst on the go - an example would be that we keep Video Conference details on one page that I have favorited, as such when I set up a VC from any location I am able to rapidly find the correct details to dial.
The search functionality allows for extremely quick location of relevant documents. On many occasions I have not been able to find what I need looking through the lists, only to immediately find it on the first search. Indeed I no longer look through the list as the search is so efficient.
When changes are made to documents it is possible to set it up to notify other members of the team so that they are able to see what has been done.
Inconvénients
The only minor issue I have discovered with confluence is that when creating new documents setting the location is not as smooth as I would like.
Specifically I need to begin creating the document, then select "Move" and finally put it into the desired place. This does not really cause issues as it is still a quick process, however a one click setup would be appreciated.
Overall I would recommend using Confluence, but would caution people on how they rollout the new platform to their company. Ensuring that the expectations are communicated clearly for how the platform will be used, by whom and the frequency, are very helpful things to communicate when preparing your team to switch.
Avantages
The interactive features of Confluence serves as the best feature and function of this platform! Our organization is relatively small (20-30 employees) and is a Foundation that interacts with other nonprofits in the area. As a result we had many touch points in the community through various teams and often time what we were doing would get lost. In an effort to improve our internal communication our organization adopted Confluence as a means of servicing our company. We used the blog feature heavily which proved to be the best method of communication internally and cut down on the amount of emails adding to the clutter in our inboxes. It also allowed discussions to happen seamlessly and served as a point of reference for folks to easily access when needed.
Inconvénients
It wasn't always very user friendly. Our organization consists of a variety of ages, so the way that people have engaged with technology is also varied. There are times that adding spaces or pages have proved to be a challenge for those who don't consider themselves as "technologically savvy". There was a bit of a learning curve for me in learning to how to use the software, but the customer support team was helpful in walking me through difficulties. The mobile function also wasn't the best depending on how users have different spaces setup.
As with other Atlassien products Confluence is just a charm to use. It is a great Wiki and it continues to be the gift that keeps on giving the more atlassian products you combine with it. I would absolutely chose Confluence again in the past and in the future. If you manage it smart (by setting up well conceptualized wiki spaces and making people patreons of certain areas in order to avoid cluttering) I could not imagine any solution better suited to Knowledge management and business documentation than Confluence.
Avantages
We use Confluence for serval years now, together with Jira (Ticket Management) and Bamboo (Build Server). It has proven its value time and again for us and provided us with clear, easy to navigate and edit business documentation for almost all areas of business. The Editor is esy to use, there are Plugins for all imaginable use cases (for example specific PDF exports) and a great FAQ and very helpful community. The Editor for content is fantastically in terms of ease of use and results to be generated. Also all Articles are stored versioned, so you can easyly go back a version, or check what has been changed in case you have to get back up to speed on a topic you left checking a while ago. You can follow authors, topics or wiki Spaces so Confluence keeps you in the loop about what is happening. In case you work on confidential material the user access management is just a dream to use, simple, powerful and without any ruged edges. Additional Features are added and when they are they are well thought through and perfectly conceptualized. I never have found a feature which did not deliver what it promised and more. Some are not for me but the ones that were introduced and sounded interesting generally were. This is THE tool for anyone who wants to document all kinds ok business knowledge from simple things like HowTo or FAQ Article to complex branches of deccsion documentations connected to development progress (by Jira ticket integration).
Inconvénients
Confluence has a lot of great features. The main Issue with Wiki Systems often is they work great in teh beginning and later become bogged down with badly maintained content or just forgotten structures. The search for the wiki still is not perfect. It has improved and is fine to use but I have seen better. There are also not a lot of features that support administrators in decluttering a large or huge Wiki and sometimes we had issues for complex, nested user rights. Also as always the case when you have an ecosystem of plugins, you have to make sure anything is compatible with a new version before you update, especially if it is a third party extension. Don't get me wrong, there is not much to complain here, you have to really look hard in order to find anything bad about Confluence.
I absolutely love the product. It is awesome. When your con list is made up of feature requests, you know the product is intensely used and you are looking for "more" or adjusting how things are done to help enable you to do your task, plus add functionality that would provide value for the product. This product is a 10 of 10 if you are using it right.
Avantages
The widgets. I love the team calendars, the roadmap functionality for time lines, decision tracking and criteria, tasks/action items and the ease of defining them, status bars, and the flexibility for meeting notes, how to articles, blogs, file lists, product requirements, retrospectives, task reports, and troubleshooting articles from one source. It has really improved our interaction with customers for projects and documentation.
Inconvénients
From time to time I see issues with editing pages. It does not make the bold or color changes to changes even though the toolbar indicates it is made, it does not display correctly. I also see this display issue with tasks, where the tool bar indicates a task is inserted, but it is not displaying correctly. And also see this issue with bullets. It will display no bullet, or even worse, it displays additional bullets that I don't want.
I would also love to be able to sync widgets between pages (ie a status bar on one page to a parent of that page for a summary. And also be able to sync components/pieces of a page between two Confluence instances. For an example of the use case, we have a time line that we maintain on an internal instance, and I want to sync parts of that timeline to an external instance that we share with customers. This would allow me to have internal only deliverables mapped, but provide a customer facing doc without maintaining two versions
My overall business experience is great. Earlier team was sharing project content via emails that is a clumsy way to mamage and store the information, but as more and more people are using confluence it has become a repository and one stop shop to put knowledge at one palce which can be referred as and when needed. This is a great tool and a game changer for how we manage our collaboration within team for the project under Agile way
Avantages
The best part about this software is the close integration with JIRA software. This is in real competition with Sharepoint as far as my understanding goes and I am an admin user for multiple scrum teams in my organization. Confluence in its own way is by far the easiest user-friendly software that I introduced in my team that was new to the agile world and now all our collaboration and communication on the process and tech document standpoint happens on Confluence.
The comment section and different macros that can be added for adding content on a page and tree structure for pages created give this tool the edge and flexibility for teams to create the format that best suits to specific scrum team needs
The technical document and usage of code snippet macro are very useful add-ons that have been given for formatting the content.
from the project management standpoint, the product backlog and release planning can be done simply by adding JIRA tickets and their specific status that automatically is being fetched by confluence every time page is opened.
The other most important feature is the ability to create JIRA tickets directly from the confluence page just select the text and then Confluence will give an option to create JIRA ticket and gets linked
The reporting macros for JIRA tickets is a good way to track progress of projects
Inconvénients
At an enterprise level, there are few web designing that is required to be done so that content that is already there can be structured in a much more web design format like links to confluence pages to be embedded in an image. That option is available but to central Admin and not to the page admin that makes confluence little crunched to admin users within a project. But this negative point is a very small piece in comparison to positives with this application.
As I mentioned before, I use it as a company wide manual where all employees have to leaf through it whenever they have a question on a certain procedure and if they have any changes they'd like to make to any old methods then they are encouraged to make the edits to keep the company knowledge up to speed.
Avantages
Confluence is great for creating company manuals or documenting company procedures. Think of it as a formal business blog or a wiki where you can keep a record of anything from basic tables outlining company info to company policies which can then be shared with the rest of the employees so that they can in turn, learn and input their own observations and knowledge. It organizes the pages for you and it makes it easy for anyone to search, edit and add new pages to keep the knowledge growing. At my company, we use it as a manual and all new employees have to read through it as part of their training. It allows you to add photos or videos to document special past events or to just simply make the page more interesting. The formatting ribbon looks similar to Microsoft word's so if you have experience with using a Word document then it should be no problem using the different types of formating options and if you have no experience then you'll get the hang of it pretty soon as it's fairly easy to deduce what each button does. I love how it is able to save any edits you make to a page and it doesn't publish it until you are ready so you are able to make new pages and edit old ones at your own pace and once you are done you can click on "publish". It alows you to restrict what other people can and cannot edit, it sends notifications to those who have a user in your account. I would recommend it.
Inconvénients
The interface could use more color or some pizzazz as it looks pretty dull and it reminds me of an electric appliance manual: gray and boring to the point that you feel like throwing it away but then you are too afraid to do so because you may never know when you might need it. But then again, I use it as a company manual so I can't do much there, I'm guessing if you want something prettier then go get a blogging account but Confluence gets straight to the point and it should be taken seriously.
Avantages
A great collaboration tool where all project documents (from major project plan to reports to release cycle to simple meeting notes) can be organized and shared in one centralized location.
The confluence editor feature makes it easier for me to create documents, review and share feedback and changes can be tracked thru page histories.
Spaces are well organized and structured. There are page shortcuts, page trees, breadcrumb trails that aid users to navigate between pages and information.
It is easy to build links within pages by adding an anchor. You don't need to remember which part of the page you have read a certain information and do page scroll.
I like the gliffy plugin. Whenever I need to embed a workflow diagram, adding gliffy makes it easier to attach flowchart, it's dynamic as changes in the diagram is reflected in the page.
I can highlight people in my reports or meeting notes by tagging them
Documenting a test report is easier with the JIRA integration - JIRA issues highlighted and linked and JIRA issue filters can be embedded and since these two (JIRA and Confluence) work hand in hand, it makes delivering software in agile approach a lot easier.
Inconvénients
To beautify your confluence page, you need to know which macros and plugins you need to add but by doing these, one needs to have very basic knowledge in html or programming which could be a learning curve to most people. But lots of how to videos are shared by Atlassian and lots of documented procedures are out there shared by experienced users. One just need to be resourceful. The challenges in embedding spreadsheet with macros and formatting tables are not a challenge anymore if you know what macro or plugin to use.
Another issue is sometimes finding the information you are seeking is not successful and sometimes the information search for spans to multiple pages - but information actually can be managed by adding labels which again boils down to the user having the knowledge that this feature exists.
The best wiki/collaboration/documentation software I've used professionally.
Avantages
- Lots of visual tools for organizing information, as well as molding communications: gliffy diagrams, code blocks, cells, spreadsheets.
- Permissions model for segmenting information is greatly useful for organizations that create lots of documents and require some controls on searching and access to documents based on role.
- Web-based interface for administrators of Confluence is convenient for managing content, delegation and authorization work.
- There are many free software solutions in this sector of software, but generally require significant development to provide the value and features offered by confluence out of the box.
- Development and improvements continue to be deployed, Confluence has not been static
- Add-ons available through Atlassian marketplace to allow for further feature-adds for organization needs. I work in an IT environment, and diagrams for networks, software, process flows are invaluable for documentation purposes.
- Shortcut commands for savvy power users saves lots of time inserting tools and setting up formatting with ease, once you are aware them.
Inconvénients
- Having used confluence for over 6 years, I have seen Confluence become more reliable with every update. At times, when something would go wrong with text formatting (bullet point indentation, for example), a power user could go to a tab of the document page you were working on, and edit the markup language of the page to correct the quirky formatting issue. This feature was removed. To the credit of Confluence, fixing such issues is less and less necessary, but power users like myself still miss it.
- The permissions models can be confusing at times, even for highly technical people supporting the software. I do not think this is an issue with Confluence, but rather, a caution to administrators who approach permissions from different eco-systems.
Company: Midsize
Industry: Legal
Documentation is my bread & butter and I have never used a better solution than Confluence. I also use JIRA and JIRA Service Desk, which taken all together amount to a mostly-seamless solution for all of my documentation needs!
Avantages
With Confluence we have an environment that is very efficient to work in to add new content, very easy to update articles and manage file attachments. The keyboard shortcuts are second to none. It is an absolute pleasure to work in Confluence all day. Setting up spaces for various audiences, including a "personal space" allows me to draft documents privately and then move the document over into a space with an audience. Effectively I can "publish" content to employees with a couple of mouse clicks.
Permissions are very well thought out. The permission scheme is based on spaces, individuals and groups, with flexibility from super-locked-down to wide open on the public internet. It allows control of various actions per person or per group, and affords us maximum utility of the product. People within the business are dreaming up different ways to use it faster than we can implement them.
As with any full-featured system that allows you total control as an administrator, successful use of the product requires that you lay out your business requirements clearly first so that there are no unexpected outcomes. Establishing best practices for content creators within the system is also advisable.
I have used other systems in the past, notably MediaWiki and SharePoint, and while I enjoyed them at the time, Confluence blows everything else out of the water. The control and flexibility is unparalleled and the product has obviously been designed for use in environments where project priorities, staff hierarchies, etc can experience rapid significant change.
I also highly recommend the Atlassian sister product JIRA and add-on JIRA Service Desk for task based work management. It is incredibly useful.
Inconvénients
With great power comes great responsibility and great potential to make an absolute mess of things. Deployment of this tool to a large user base would require some serious preparation to establish access schemes, permissions for user groups, best practices for editing and creating new content, and organizing content within the spaces. End user training is critical to cement those rules and establish a culture around using it effectively. I would not recommend deploying this tool in a slapdash hurry (Although, given it's innate flexibility, it would be easier to correct it later with Confluence than some of its competitors!)
When WikiSpaces recently reported that they were closing their service right after I purchased an annual membership, both myself and my employer was quite disappointing. AS a result I lost funding for our internal knowledge database (it was a pet project to improve my value to the company).
As a result, I experimented with many different alternatives, and finally settled with Confluence. I have been so happy with it that I also use it for my own small businesses knowledge base. it is efficient, has a dedicated mobile app, full of features and integrations, and carries a very modern look.
Avantages
An incredible amount of features and integrations. Confluence is able to easily communicate with Google apps, Microsoft Office programs, etc. It even includes it's own widgets for creating Gantt charts!
The presentation is quite modern, and though I haven't dig into it yet, I've seen that there's also a theme system in place to change the appearance of the environment.
Embedding pictures and diagrams are really easy and have enough options to get it to look the way you want.
Confluence frequently has both minor and major updates, it can be kinda exciting to login on a Monday morning and see something new!
Inconvénients
It would be nice to have some level of image editor native to the app, similar to what one has in WordPress.
It seems to have everything but a proper footnote widget, something that I really favor in both my research and my workplace.
With the frequent updates, also comes the chance that not everyone will appreciate the changes; I had been using the blog feature for a few months quite happily, but recently they changed a few of the features in the blog function to make it more mobile friendly. As a result I lost a few features that I favored. It did however improve over time and I got over the lost of those features.
If you are an organization that is planning to utilize Confluence and other Atlassian products, I would recommend introducing an administrator to this product. As the use of the product grows, not properly managing it can become more cumbersome than useful. This powerful tool can get out of control when not managed due to its enormous customization features and lack of understanding its features and functionalities across the enterprise.
Avantages
Confluence is an Atlassian product that provides a very powerful Wiki platform for documentation. More than just a Wiki or Blog, Confluence is a collaborative tool with extensive customization features. You can control every aspect of Confluence, from its overall design and layout to permissions and properties. Confluence offers an online as well as a local server version, with minimal differences between their functionalities. Confluence has an extensive library of add-ons and integrations that expand the product's capabilities.
Confluence provides shared work spaces as well as personal spaces and pages that allow users to manage content.
Inconvénients
Not necessarily a con, but Confluence's extensive customization capabilities can often create a slight to challenging learning curve. This is why many organizations who rely heavily on this and other Atlassian products, often have administrators who tend specifically to the Atlassian suite.
Avantages
Confluence on the cloud is really easy to use. Non-technical people and technical people can easily figure it out. What I love about it is that it kinda of has a social media feel and but has all of the functionality to manage a Lean Agile project. The integration into the Google Suite of tools has brought some other key features like single sign on via Google Accounts which is kind of nice. Anything to battle security fatigue is a plus in my book. The cost is also really affordable for new businesses and start-ups and even personal projects. Why did I not use Confluence to plan my wedding?! Anyways,I digress..this is definitely one of my favorite collaboration tools out there and if you think you need to work together on a team doing MULTIPLE projects, Confluence is a must have.
Inconvénients
I feel like every time I go in there, there is a new widget to use. There are so many of them that I don't have time to go through them all to find out if it is worth getting! Atlassian should consider sending "recommender" notifications of tools that might fit our needs based on our usage pattern. I'm not overly concerned about privacy here, but if there is a new widget that I don't know about I'd like at least a small tickler or notification to check it out.
Widespread adoption. A wiki is only as good as the content you have in it and having an easy to use tool made people want to use it and create documentation.
Avantages
I love the ease of use of the editor and the content management features. I fell in love as soon as I saw I could copy/paste screen shots directly in the editor - it's such a time saver for me. You can also re-organize your documents in a snap, drag-and-dropping through the hierarchical view or using the Move feature. Content reports let you create page lists on the fly with the information you want in them. Templates are awesome - you can use theirs, customize them and even create your own so that your content stays consistent even when multiple users are creating documents.
Inconvénients
Most of the advanced features you need are available through paid-for add-ons. And still, I can't find a decent image management add-on. Also, when we had a few licences, the cost was negligible, but as the usage is growing, even though some of these add-ons are only used by a few users, we have to pay for the whole company. Finally, managing these add-ons as we upgrade Confluence versions is not always seamless. Some add-ons just stop working and aren't updated by the vendors, leaving us without the feature we've come to appreciate.
Easy project tracking, effective documentation and the ability to have integration with other tools are some of the good features that I like in Confluence.
Avantages
It is designed well and is helpful is storing team tracking and information documentation. Confluence acts as our central repository and acts as the wiki for projects across various departments to document a project starting from design to implementation and maintenance. Any document/task could be properly managed to editing features for the team and a history of changes that are made to keep track of the iterative updates that are made on a document. Also, integration with other Atlassian tools like JIRA is very useful to tracking a feature from difference perspectives and keeping everyone aligned within the team on the current status and next steps.
Inconvénients
Organization of the pages can be improved as it is sometimes not straightforward to find content related to a particular project or task. Also, the inline editing tools for a document could be enhanced as you end up relying on macros and other tools very often to be able to properly structure and format a confluence page. Searching the documents is not very easy and it is sometimes difficult to find the right content when needed.
Our project team had a need for a collaborative environment where members could share information to help educate one another. One key benefit I have come to realize is the ability to define permissions for which team members could access each page.
Avantages
From the set up of a pages to creating the structure of a Confluence space, I have found Confluence to be incredibly easy to use. As part of the Atlassian suite, the integration with Jira is a great added bonus. The control panel makes for quickly formatting the rich text.
One of my favorite parts is the customization of templates. The feature I have used most often is the recurring use of the customized Meeting Notes template. It has proved to be an effective means for presenting to meeting attendees what was discussed and decided upon. Relating to that is what I like to consider as a hidden gem of Confluence - the consolidation of the action items from different meetings.
Inconvénients
There really isn't much. I guess one thing to call out would be around creating tables. It is very difficult to see the borders of the columns and rows. I find that I can struggle to know where to be entering the text within a cell. It was be nice if there were options to select the thickness of the lines.
Avantages
This product is great for documentation and sharing information. I do a lot of training documentation and Confluence is a great place to store the information. Anyone in our company can easily access the information through a link.
Because it is online the information in the training materials is always up to date; we don't have to worry about someone having an outdated version of the document.
In addition, Confluence allows for screenshots to be easily added, which is awesome, and it automatically resizes them, which is amazing. You can also add grids (which isn't Confluence's strong suit but still a nice feature) and Table of Contents and many more features.
In addition, you do get to keep Revision History in Confluence so if you change something and need to reference an old version of the document you still can.
And, you can change the access different people have so some people can edit the document and others can only view, or some can't view at all.
Inconvénients
The software was a little confusing to learn to use. Now that I know how to use it, it is easy, but we did have to have some training. While others are learning it they aren't using it much because it is kind of foreign to them but if we could get past adoption issues the software would be a great help to us.
Overall, I highly recommend Confluence for any organization that is looking for collaborative software. It is extremely useful and easy to learn.
Avantages
Confluence is incredibly easy to use. It is designed to be a collaborative tool, to share information (wiki-style), documents, photos, etc. Our organization has been stuck on SharePoint for so long that there are documents for days upon years stacked up in unused libraries. Confluence has been a lifesaver for us by allowing us to rid the libraries of these outdated documents and placing the content we need access to right there on the page. If a template is needed, we can add that template to the page for download. We can link to other Confluence pages for additional or related information and build child pages to help dive deeper into a topic. We also utilize JIRA for our ticketing system and since Confluence and JIRA are both owned by Atlassian, we can integrate metrics, reporting, dashboards, and other information from JIRA in a way that is consumable within Confluence. We also can add Tableau reports, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Adobe PDFs, etc. It works extremely well with other applications.
Inconvénients
My least favorite part about Confluence is its limited page customization from a font and color perspective. It will also only allow up to three columns and other formatting limitations. There might be macros to overcome this, but that is also frustrating. Macros have been built to "fix" things within Confluence by hundreds (if not thousands) of other individuals and companies. Many sell those macros and varying costs. It has forced us as an organization to maintain a dev environment just to ensure that a macro that we bring in isn't malicious. Confluence's base macros are extremely basic and sometimes not very useful.
Confluence is great for presenting data and information for other users on the team to see, but can be a struggle to customize or format in the way you want.
Avantages
Confluence is very easy to use. Within the company, we use Confluence for creating guides, work instructions, and capturing other forms of data in spaces that we can organize. Everyone on the team has the ability to modify pages, adding their own inputs, or making comments. The tool supports a few useful methods of formatting information: tables, images, code snippets, and the usual rich text formatting styles. There are various addons that expand Confluence's basic functions. Confluence and JIRA can work together and you are able to add JIRA links or view JIRA field data directly from Confluence. It is easy to draft pages without publishing them until ready. The tool also has many other features for customizing your spaces, from page layouts to color schemes, but my company has these options limited to admin users only.
Inconvénients
As much as it is great to enter information on pages in a very presentable manner, text formatting can be very frustrating. When you are on a bulletted list and want to remove the bullet from the next text line, it often also affects the previous line. It is the same thing for bolding or indentations, text isn't often treated as per line but sort of in groups of lines that I haven't been able to figure out. It is certainly not as easy as writing things out within a Word document or other word formatting tool.
Confluence is a more than capable page for generating support documentation.
Avantages
I liked that Confluence is really easy-to-use. A GUI editor means that you can just write things down even if you don't have any background in markdown. Inserting screen captures into your documentation pages is also easy, as all you have to do is copy, then drop the captures into the page, without needing to save them beforehand. Confluence has everything my team needs for coming up with comprehensive support documents. There are also many third-party plugins you can use for your documents, e.g. for generating PDF copies and formatting print-friendly pages.
Inconvénients
Although the GUI editor is cool, at times, particularly when I want to customize a page, it's also its biggest drawback. You can't customize the page at all. Moreover, there are times when Confluence takes too long a time to load. Lastly, although documentation is comprehensive, at times, you have to do a lot of digging before you can find the appropriate support page for a feature. This might be because of the software's broad list of features. Many of the third-party plugins are also quite expensive.
We solved myriad of business problems with Confluence, but chief among them was categorizing and organizing tasks and results for not only our group, but for other groups and our teams to see. For us, it was a place to digitally house relevant documentation of everything from the start and progress of projects to meeting agendas and meetings. It served as an online hub for our documents and activities, freeing up room from our servers and local drives.
Avantages
What I like most about Confluence is the transparency and visibility it gives to other members of your team so they can keep track of what's going on. I like that we can post information to Confluence, have ownership and have accountability applied to the user. Everything is documented and it's an easy-to-use format.
Inconvénients
What I liked least about Confluence is that it takes a while to figure out how to use it effectively. And there isn't a lot of support for user's to find solutions. It usually helps if someone on your team or in your workplace is familiar with Confluence and can walk you through it. Designating groups, uploading and categorizing information and tagging the right people for the right context was a struggle for me at first, but I figured it out.
If you are looking for a way to collaborate better, Confluence will provide you with all the necessary features for this. Definitely, Confluence deserves to be recommended thanks to its high level of productivity, multifunctionality, and ease of use.
Avantages
The abilities provided by Confluence to work with documents and other content are incredible. It is a pretty simple action to attach various types of documents, as well as track, look them through, and search the necessary ones. The latter is available due to the possibilities of the advanced program’s search system as well. Apart from this mentioned functionality, our company also likes the security level of Confluence, its administrative and management features, and powerful configuration capabilities.
Inconvénients
We like how powerful Confluence is as a wiki system. However, this product is not a storage repository at all. That is why our employees and clients of our services are sometimes confused because of the constant need to switch between different platforms. It may be really hard to figure out which solution should be preferred in every particular case (for instance, SharePoint or Atlassian Confluence). Otherwise, we do not have any other serious drawbacks we have found about Confluence to share with potential users of the solution.
I have prepared lot of documents related to my project and placed those at Confluence. Shared the link to those documents within my team. Anyone who need it simply download it from that location. Also downloaded lot of documents from confluence which helped me to understand the project. No need to approach different people for the documents.
Avantages
1. It is a centralized location to store documents at organization or personal level which can be easily available around the globe.
2. Simple and user friendly interface. No special training is required to understand the tool.
3. Use to track your daily activities like meetings, scrums happening at organization level which can be easily monitor by higher authority through this tool.
4. Easily can be linked with Jira.
5. Notification functionality is one of the strong feature present in the tool. Team will get notification through mail if some update the page.
Inconvénients
1. Searching the document is bit difficult if someone forget the name of the document.
2. Don't have the option to chat with colleagues at organization level .
3. It's not free. User has to pay to get the license.
Confluence is our documentation heavy-hitter. And we don't just use it as a system of record, but we also use it to share information cross-company. In almost all instances it has replaced the need for emails, shared drives, and online documents! It's nice having everything (securely) in one place, right at your fingertips.
Avantages
In the hectic world we live in today, it seems like a bigger challenge to take a few beats to write things down. My team has become a champion of documentation, but often the larger issue is overlooked: where will this documentation live so that it is accessible and can continue to evolve?! Confluence was the perfect solution!! We have paved the way on the documentation frontier and the rest of the organization has finally jumped on board. Confluence not only allows for cross-team collaboration, but it's a magnificent way to organize and share documentation.
Inconvénients
You really need a game plan when organizing your documentation in how Confluence sets up the hierarchies and the rich text editor format may take a little to get used to if you are coming from other documentation products.
I have created and managed years-long projects in Confluence, involving over 100 users. I have trained users on how to use Confluence.
People that are not so savvy with technology might struggle a little bit with Confluence. Confluence does have amazing documentation on the tool, as well as a very helpful community. What I also suggest is, if you are the administrator of the tool, is to do "Confluence 101" webinars to the users and record it as well. You can then upload that recording into confluence itself, on a "how to" section, where you can also small short videos on where to find certain things in Confluence, or do certain tasks, and when you send users the invite to join Confluence you can simply ask then to check those videos as a first step.
Avantages
Most complete collaboration software out there. It does 99% of want you might want to do. The other 1% are still achieved but slightly different than you might expect.
Inconvénients
No red flags in this product. The learning curve is a little but step. But I guess that comes with any software that is so complete and powerful. I think that based on all the capabilities of this tool, it's relatively easy to use after you have spent a couple of days going through it.
There are quite a few business problems that we solve using Confluence, the most important one is team collaboration. with confluence our team can collaborate and share information and documents with ease. We can archive information, we can add information to confluence and every stakeholder will be notified about any updates etc which is quite useful in a high-demand scenario as ours. Another business problem that we solve using confluence is progress tracking and reporting by integrating it with Jira.
Avantages
The way we can organize the information and the complete knowledge repository is pretty good. Here we can manage all the data with ease and in properly organized manner. The searching of any information is quite easy. Another good factor is its various integrated tools like I can manage a team calendar here, make various add-ons and integrate it with Jira etc which is quite useful for us.
Inconvénients
Some of the things which I dislike is its Page-Tracking. Sometimes we have seen that the page tracking doesn't work pretty well. Another thing which makes me uneasy is its formatting of pages which is trivial at times and I cannot add much graphics
My coworker and I use confluence extensively to document all of the work that we perform. As IT staff many issues that we come across will be repeated ad-infinitum. As such to simply be able to look up the fix from any location with internet access increases efficiency many times over. The notification ability helps all users to see what has been changed, when, and by whom providing an excellent level of accountability.