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
Oracle Beehive Enterprise Collaboration Server
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Beehive Enterprise Collaboration Server provides hosted collaboration and voice / web conferencing tools at the enterprise level.
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).
The software is well suited in most areas of messaging. The communication features it contains and the messaging quality it utilizes provides for standards, like scalability, manageability and, most importantly, secure communications. Again, the software is well suited for scenarios where an organization is aimed at making use of a centralized management. it is built to provide a unified collaborative platform characterized by a single object model and also has a database storage for almost all communication records.
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.
The only area that the software has room for improvement is in the mail part. To a large extent, the email capabilities to the Oracle Beehive Enterprise Collaborative Server is not user-friendly. My opinion is that if the mail option was made in a more separate appearance to that of the calendar, task management, and address books it would appear more user-friendly.
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.
The only feature that makes Beehive Enterprise Collaborative software stack up against similar software is unification. It is wholly unified. Basically, it allows IT to function as one platform providing services like email, team workspace, and conferencing. Uniquely, this results in saving time and cost related to managing separate systems
If one uses all its features to its optimum, I think they can go for break-even within around 1 year. We were able to achieve it. It helped us grab many projects.
