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
Enovia
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
Dassault Systèmes S.A. is a French company and a world leader in the production of 3D design software, 3D digital mock-up and product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions.
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.
Very well suited for direct integration with CAD packages (Solidworks/ Auto desk Inventor or AutoCAD) and version control of CAD Model/Assemblies and Drawing files) and creating parts and document objects directly into Enovia and controlling their lifecycle from CAD Interface. Similarly, Enovia's Engineering central is already equipped with Industry standard ECR/ECO process which needs little customization for implementing Engineering Change management process. The hardest part in Enovia is controlling the disposition of released material for the downstream process in other ERP systems. For example, if a released material has gone for production or purchasing in ERP system/MRP system then dispositioning that material with Major revision (which may need manufacturing to stop the production due to faulty design) have no direct control to stop the downstream activities. Most cases its manual process to communicate with ERP team to for taking action. Similarly, revision of Documents (material Spec for example) linked to thousands of parts required special process (some time needs to schedule in the weekend).
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.
When a part/assembly has been released in Enovia and gone for production or downstream processing, Enovia doesn't have much control, hence, Enovia should come up with an easy controlling mechanism for various disposition of parts and seamless communication with an ERP or downstream process.
If a document is linked to thousands of materials then revising this document takes long time gets floated to the BOMs where the previous document versions are used. So, Enovia should have an efficient way to replace the floating process or another efficient mechanism for document revision processing.
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.
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.
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.
Easy learning curve for the users- Very user-friendly Interface for Engineering central make the users happy and easy to learn the BOM creation and Engineering change management process.
Time-saving - Seamless Creation and revision process of objects saves a huge amount of time compared to other systems.
Easy to copy existing business data and modify them as required.
