Atlassian Confluence vs. DocLink vs. Vasion

I would recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies that want to have internal documentation and minimum governance processes to ensure documentation is useful and doesn't have a lot of duplicated and non-updated content. I wouldn't recommend Atlassian Confluence for companies with a low budget since this product might be a little costly (especially with add-ons).

Incentivized

It's a great tool that works well to automate processes and, once set up, reduce admin time on things like tracking the approval process. However, it can be challenging to initially set up because it requires an understanding of the process in the first place. We have a team of business analysts who work for us so one of them was assigned to understand our own internal processes and then set up the relevant workflows. I think without this we might have struggled. We also each use the expense receipt feature which is great. You can in a receipt and using OCR the expense forms are automatically populated. You do need to manually check it but this saves a lot of time in filling in forms. As we now have a workflow in place it is straightforward to submit your monthly expense report for approval straight afterward. The document tracking feature is good too - who has seen, worked on, or needs to see the document. It means we were able to stop using Slack.

Incentivized

The best case we've found for Vasion is the one that explains why we moved to Vasion in the first place. Our Windows print servers were extremely temperamental for our Azure devices and, in many cases, would take 20 minutes or more to just set up correctly. We would then have issues with printers not printing for long periods or with print jobs not showing up in the printer queue. It was also hard for the staff to install their own printers when the one they normally used went down. It was also very hard for staff to figure out how to navigate the printer list to install printers. Vasion made all of this very easy and gave the staff one easy web page to find the printer they want and install it.

Incentivized

• Cross product linking - If you use other Atlassian products then Atlassian Confluence is a no-brainer for your source of documentation, knowledge management etc. You can show previews of the linked asset natively E.g. showing a preview of a JIRA ticket in a Atlassian Confluence page.
• Simple editing - Though the features available may not be super complex right now, this does come with the benefit of making it easy to edit and create documents. Some documentation editors can be overwhelming, Atlassian Confluence is simple and intuitive.
• Native marketplace - If you want to install add-ons to your Atlassian Confluence space it's really easy. Admins can explore the Atlassian marketplace natively and install them to your instance in a few clicks. You can customise your Atlassian Confluence instance in many different ways using add-ons.

Incentivized

• Maintains all scanned and processed documents since we converted from paper files. 13 years and counting for our company.
• Able to create custom folders or "workflows" with specific permissions.
• Able to quickly search using a wide variety of search parameters.
• Allows the user to make notations, highlights, and digital stamps for future reference.
• Allows the user to scan or drag and drop documents into the program and will convert to the acceptable format (ie: PDF will convert to TIF).

Incentivized

• MaxxVault is a full-featured product at a cost significantly less than its competition.
• MaxxVault is end-user maintainable. I do not have to carry an IT staff to support this critical system.
• MaxxVault has the best customer service support of any vendor I've done business with in my 20 year career.

• UI Design is very simplistic and basic could make use of more visually interesting colour choices, layout choices, etc.
• Under the 'Content' menu, it defaults to having a landing page for all L1 and L2 category pages. Meaning as long as the broader content category has a sub-category, it still creates a separate landing page. In my team's case, this often creates blank pages, as we only fill out the page at the lowest sub-category (L3).
• Hyperlinks are traditionally shown as blue, however, this results into very monotonously blue pages in cases where a lot of information is being linked.

Incentivized

• Search engine can be enhanced to provide better results.
• The workflow module can be made simpler.
• Sometimes a little slow to load all the information.

Incentivized

• Learning curve is particularly steep.
• Some advanced features can be difficult to implement and test.
• Driver management is time consuming and could be streamlined.

Incentivized

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.

Great for organizing knowledge in a hierarchical format. Seamless for engineering and product teams managing software development. Helps in formatting pages effectively, reducing manual work. Tracks changes well and allows for easy rollbacks. Granular controls for who can view/edit pages. Search function is not great which needs improvement. Hire some google engineers

Incentivized

DocLink is VERY user-friendly! The daily functions are easily taught to non-financial individuals. It's easy to understand and easy to manipulate with a simple, functional layout. The Administrative module is not too complicated, but it would be more effective if there was a more thorough "help" section or an online forum for users. All of my knowledge is self-taught, trial and error, but it would be helpful for a new user to have an online resource to address questions or issues.

Incentivized

I would say its around 7. For us it was easy to do deploy, to use the centralised control, and not too complex compared to other printing services. However, some workflows became complicated depending on configuration. In our case, it was a bit complicated after a while. But its still user friendly.

Incentivized

I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.

Incentivized

We never worked against the tide while using Confluence. Everything loads considerably fast, even media components like videos (hosted on the platform or embed external videos from Youtube, for example). We are not using heavy media components a lot, but in the rare occasion we happen to use one we have no problems whatsoever.

Incentivized

DocLink is quite reliable and effective. Scanned documents are easy to read with very slight loss of integrity. Pages load quickly with occasional lag loading very large files. We use DocLink with MS Dynamics SL, and the two systems perform well together without much interruption or ambiguity in the process. One issue we have is in relation to the number of licenses and issues we have when a session will not close upon exit, thus suspending an available license rendering it unusable. Although very infrequent, IT has had to manually "end" a session to clear the license.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

We chose Atlassian Confluence over SharePoint because it's much more user-friendly and intuitive. Atlassian Confluence makes collaboration and knowledge sharing easier with its simpler interface and better search. While SharePoint can be powerful, it often feels clunky and complex, making it harder for our team to actually use it.

Incentivized

Document sender u can only send one at a time, doclink sends mass emails all at once and can archive all your documents, making it a complete solution.

Incentivized

Vasion had a much better interface for installing printers for staff. It was very easy for staff to manage their own printers and install what they want or need. Vasion also seemed to be better equipped for reporting and use by our non-technical staff. We were also impressed with the support of Vasion and how easily they answered all of our questions.

Incentivized

This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.

Incentivized

• The AI feature which lets me find relevant documents while reading one document is really beneficial.
• Centralising of knowledge systems is one of the key differentiators for large organisations.
• As long as folks keep using Google Docs and Atlassian Confluence, there is going to be a challenge in building a continuum.

Incentivized

• Now set up it has significantly reduced admin time for everyone. I would say on average 1-2 hours per month per staff member spent on expense forms and submissions.
• Cancelled paid version of slack as no longer needed.

Incentivized

• Having seen similar organizations implement software solutions costing upwards of $1 million, I can safely say the ROI on our MaxxVault implementation has paid off massively for our customers and staff. We could not do what we're doing without MaxxVault.