Confluence is a collaboration and content sharing platform used primarily by customers who are already using Atlassian's Jira project tracking product. The product appeals particularly to IT users.
$10
per month
Epicor ECM
Score 4.6 out of 10
N/A
Epicor ECM is based on docStar, a document management software offering that was acquired by Epicor in 2017.
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.
It is well suited for billing service storage and retrieval. It ends the need to pay extra for a storage space. It also makes for easy cleanup of files on a yearly basis.
Templates - By being able to create templates for each document type, it made organizing files much easier. It also made the titles similar in format, which also allows for better organization.
We were able to scan documents directly into docStar, which helped us eliminate extra steps. For example, if we were missing a page from a document, and we received it at a later time, we could scan just that page into docStar as opposed to scanning the entire document again.
The functionalities are straight forward, so it is not hard to use the docStar system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our support for DocStar has been phenomenal! They are always prompt, courteous, and effective. We have never had a bad experience with the support staff and they are always available when we need their help.
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.
A former employee of our company chose DocStar after much research and Q&A with the DocStar seller. I believe she truly put a lot of time/effort into choosing this system, but the end result is that it is not a good match for our company. After reviewing her notes, I believe she chose the system due to its ability to be customized through the template system
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.
We have saved almost 10,000 dollars a year just in toner cost. We had to implement some up front cost for tablets and other computer aspects but the initial cost of this was about 3,000 to 4,000 dollars. docStar has saved us an instrumental amount of money and will so in the future as well.
