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
OpenText Service Manager
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenTextâ„¢ Service Manager (formerly from Micro Focus) is scalable service desk software powered by machine learning, analytics, and automation. It provides an ITSM platform for standardizing service delivery and support across the enterprise.
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).
HP Service Manager (HPSM) is well suited for a big company and it does the job that it's intended to do but it's not perfect. It has a fairly large learning curve for searching Knowledge Management (KMs) and it takes time to learn how to be fast at creating/resolving tickets while on calls. I have been using HPSM for about 2 years now and we recently moved from the desk client to the web client and we are seeing a lot more issues than we did with the desk client. They keep coming out with updates for it so eventually most of our issues will hopefully be resolved. Overall the web experience is better as it looks more modern than what we used in the past.
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.
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.
When you search Knowledge Articles, it is not like Google, and you need to learn how to search for what you need.
It takes a very long time to close tickets in HPSM. Here are the steps to close a ticket. 1. Add notes. 2. Add KM 3. Click Resolve 4.Click Save 5.Click Close 6.Click Okay to Message (ticket has recently been modified) 7. Click Close.
It's slow and sometimes crashes/freezes and you lose all the information you may have entered. I usually use notepad++ to gather all my notes and paste them into HPSM.
When searching previous tickets the preview pane does not allow for sorting by date to have the most recent at the very top every time you pull up previous tickets. Sometimes there are pages and pages of previous tickets and you have to click and scroll to get what you need.
I click on search KMs and it takes me to a blank page and I have to click the back button which then brings me to the search KM page.
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
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.
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 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.
