Likelihood to Recommend It has a comment option on the page, where you can tag other teammates tagging them. it sends the mail notification. Comment at the page end is pretty good for referring to other stakeholders and future references of the topic on the page. Creating the highlights of the discussions, and meeting held points with highlighted tagging. Easy shortcuts such as to add a date just type "//". The interface is cool and has easy shortcuts for quick page making.
Read full review It is best suited for an MSP but it is also best not suited for an MSP. It is well suited for folks with a minimal knowledge of a client and are attempting to learn what they can. Perhaps just bumbling about and can find the same thing consistently. At my particular work, we pay somebody full time to manage the system. I feel this is unnecessary.
Read full review Pros QUICK How-to Guides that can be generated and share instantly One can subscribe to the pages and spaces and receive updates in the feed on their home page Automatic Email notifications of new updates in the Confluence area The platform integrates easily with other Atlassian platforms including third-party apps thus improving its reliability Read full review The UI has been set up perfectly, there is a sub-menu for every possible bit of information you wish to store. There are a number of excellent features such as the autohiding passwords and quick searching from anywhere on the page. The recent addition of the IT Glue is also an excellent feature, it features online self-guided courses to become a certified IT Glue user. You can create and group custom documents together. IT Glue can be integrated with a number of platforms such as Autotask. IT Glue also integrates well with N-Central to automatically populate the configurations tab with all the relevant Workstation, Printer, and Server information making client on-boarding a breeze. Read full review Cons Navigation. Similar to other Atlassian products, users have complained that aspects of Confluence are difficult to learn right away[.] An issue that users can face when using Confluence is attempting to edit a document while someone else is editing. Although users can access the document and save it, they are unable to see the changes happening in [real-time] that other users are implementing until they refresh their page. Some users have also noted that this can result in loss of edits. Another drawback of using Confluence is its specific organizational structure. All information is stored within one page or project, although the page is able to be broken up into sections, some users do not prefer this style. Users can use the ‘page tree’ on each page to organize the different elements of each project. Read full review Like many other MSPs we had the majority of our SOPs and KBs in Word docs. The best case scenario would be to simply drop those files directly into ITG without having to import them into the ITG documentation format. The import function is so broken as to not be an option because it completely ruins formatting and tends to drop images. Thus we have to manually copy/paste text and individually upload each image. They marketed the product as having true branding but that is stretching the truth. SSL is not an option so client-facing documents will give security errors in browsers. ITG does not appear to be concerned about this even though security is a major concern for all MSPs. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.
Read full review Usability Confluence can - and in my personal opinion, it will - be a bit hard to use in the first moment.
Atlassian is a great company and is eager to help you with any question you have, though. The interface seems to be a bit clumsy at first but the customization options are enough to make it easier and simpler. In general, Confluence is easy to use when you understand what each section does, but this can take a while.
Read full review Easy to train and use. Everything is in the same place. Multi factor authentication and access from anywhere make secure and convenient. Can do my job with out it. It also has a free read and paid write option for the client. We up sell this option making it a money maker as well.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.
Read full review Performance Pages load very quickly, which makes it useful for quickly obtaining information. The search functionality is also very quick and is able to parse through all of the documents to provide the most relevant results for the query. Other information based software gets bogged down, but so far
Atlassian Confluence maintains its performance.
Read full review Other than a few access outages, ITGlue is always up and available to us. Their ability to export Playbook, that contain our customers data, and securely send those over to them is amazing and are produced pretty fast. We have IT Glue linked with several other services and software and we have not found that it slows anything down.
Read full review Support Rating This rating is specifically for
Atlassian 's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from
Atlassian . Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.
Read full review No problems with support when needed it. Their answers on how to handle DR/BC situations when ITG is down are not stellar. They don't seem to get the business risks of their suggestions to just give the xls backup to engineers (aka give all passwords of ALL clients to engineers in an unencrypted flat-file where it is easy to copy, print, etc.)
Read full review Implementation Rating Overall, I am very satisfied with the initial implementation (and the subsequent upgrades and implementations made over the years).
This product has never rose to the level of being an major issue at an executive level. It has quietly and valiantly done it's job for our company!
Read full review Alternatives Considered We used to use
Google Drive to store all of our documentation, but it is disconnected from our every day working environment and it was easy to lose documents and become disorganized within the broad drive environment. [
Atlassian ] Confluence has kept us more organized and its tight coupling with
Jira has made documents more accessible and more likely to be kept up to date.
Read full review We chose IT Glue particularly because it's tailored to IT documentation. As a managed IT service provider, it's perfectly in line with what we were looking for. The flexibility and tagging in particular were the kind of features we were looking for.
Confluence is very good, and can be used for a number of things, not just IT documentation, but IT Glue shines for that.
Read full review Scalability This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.
Read full review Return on Investment We've gone from folders and folders of Word documents and PDFs into a single system with a search feature to bring all of our data together and trackable While onboarding took a bit longer for the company (to switch from a Word document centric mindset - to a web-based one), overall the company has embraced the features and power of Confluence within the working stack However, as costs continue to climb for the Atlassian product, we are forced to continue our evaluation of the product - with replacing it a remote possibility if it begins to outprice its usefulness to us. Read full review We regret the purchase and have received little, if any, ROI. [In my expereience], the main feature we hoped to get ROI from (MyGlue) was so terrible we were embarrassed to roll it out to our clients. Because [I feel] it is slow and clunky, staff find quicker ways to access needed data so this is not used as much as we would have liked. Read full review ScreenShots