Confluence

Opmerkingen: 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.

Pluspunten: 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).

Minpunten: 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.

Opmerkingen: We document everything in Confluence. I run a digital marketing team of around 20 people and have a total of 40 users in the tool (a few other teams besides mine use it). It's been a fantastic tool to get everyone on the same page and keep track of our how-tos, meeting notes, plans, goals, features/specs, etc.

Pluspunten: Real-time simultaneous editing
Ease of finding and organizing what I've written
Constantly adding new features
Integration with Jira and Trello is great, but also works as lightweight project management by itself

Minpunten: Honestly, they've fixed my biggest cons, like storage space (now you can buy a bigger plan) and they keep adding more things.
I think my colleagues would say there's still a learning curve, which is understandable, and I think Confluence has been changing the interface with more tips and features for new users (which is sometimes confusing for long-time users like me, LOL)
One big con is still the limited integration with MS Office. Confluence fully replaces the need for Word in most cases, so that's not a big deal, but I wish the Excel integration and/or the table functionality was better.
Also, printing is pretty tough when you have tables.

Opmerkingen: Overall Confluence is a good platform to store your documentation and make it searchable for later usage. Although it doesn't solve the issue that most companies have, which is that often you'll find outdated pages or incomplete ones. This doesn't mean it's a Confluence issue, but it will definitely not help in solving this.

Pluspunten: Confluence is a very good documentation platform, with its easy to use GUI and markup syntax ( although not compatible with Markdown, unless a plugin is installed ), will offer you a good way to organize your documentation based on projects and Page trees. You can also tag those pages and have a full search that will help you finding what you're searching for. Last but least, the platform offers extensibility through a plugin system which will get you covered.

Minpunten: When it comes to documentation, no software is doing their best. Often you will find out that creating pages, tagging them and giving them nice titles, will definitely not help you in finding what you search for. Although Confluence tries to help a lot in this, definitely is not a bulletproof solution. So if you suffer from documentation graveyard, unfortunately Confluence will not help your situation to make it better.
Also, although Plugins are available, as Jira they are very expensive even for super simple features ( like Markdown integration ).

Opmerkingen: This is amazing software with close to zero disadvantages. It corresponds with Jira which is great, also provides documentation, you can create pages, see notes related to a specific theme, besides pages you can create tables, images, etc. I would recommend this software to anyone who needs a program that creates documentation. Also, they are looking to improve their software by making a lot of updates.

Pluspunten: Confluence has a lot of advantages and here are some of them. Confluence is part of Atlassian Suite which is connected with Jira and you can easily integrate them. This software provides a documentation platform for your projects. You can create links to other pages, see other documents that are related to some specific project, also it provides you with different kind of images and charts to make your document more powerful. This software supports everything starting from images, tables, diagrams, charts, whatever you need Confluence has it. Also, another thing that is worth mentioning is that you can see if anyone has made any change to the document and if it has you will get notified.

Minpunten: There are not so many disadvantages, to be honest, this is great software, maybe a bit hard for some beginners, but not too hard and you will have to spend some time on this software to know how it works. Another thing that I don’t like is that they are changing Confluence non-stop. They are doing updates most of the time and changing the software. I understand that they need to make changes for better but that can sometimes be annoying because you know something where is it and then they change it and add something else and you have to learn again.

Opmerkingen: Overall, Confluence has served our company well, as we subscribe to a number of Atlassian products. The immediate integration with these other products makes the Confluence application very desirable for our business model, and offers us a much needed solution without much additional effort or thought. If you are already using Atlassian products, Confluence is a great solution for centralizing and organizing all of your assets. If you have more advances needs and do not already use Atlassian products, you may want to explore alternative options.

Pluspunten: Confluence offers my company a unique solution for creating and organizing documentation and assets that need to be share amongst an entire team. In addition, it offers us a means to share some of those same documents and assets with our customers without any additional effort. Its advance permissions schemes allow you to dictate which users have access to which files, and its ease of use allows for quick publication and instant distribution. As we also use JIRA for project management, Confluence is a great complement for linking supplemental, more detailed files to ongoing projects.

Minpunten: Confluence word processing features are a bit rudimentary. While the application itself is easy to use, its feature limitations only allow for a certain level of detail and imagination when creating new documents. While it links seamless into the JIRA project management platform, it does come with an additional cost per user, which quick racks up your monthly Atlassian bill. For more advanced needs, an alternative platform may be a better fit.