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
PairSoft
Score 5.8 out of 10
N/A
PairSoft, the company formed from the March 2021 merger of PaperSave and Paramount Workplace, offers their eponymous procure-to-pay platform for the mid-market and enterprise, with close integration to Microsoft Dynamics, Blackbaud, Oracle, SAP, Acumatica, and Sage ERPs.
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.
PaperSave is ideal for any fundraising company. Its ability to import spreadsheets from queries and import documents into constituent records is an invaluable tool for a fundraiser. Though the program sometimes has its hiccups, overall it serves its intended functions quite well.
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.
PaperSave is extremely easy to use and integrate into any fundraising office. If your company is using Blackbaud products, PaperSave will integrate seamlessly with Raiser's Edge and Raiser's Edge NXT. The ability to save documents to records seems like such a simple concept, but because Raiser's Edge doesn't offer this function in its own program, PaperSave is a life saver.
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.
Similar to what I mentioned earlier in this review, the main pro of PaperSave for my company is its Raiser's Edge integration. The program loads immediately as soon as Raiser's Edge is launched so there's no need to open separate programs. The documents and queries loaded from PaperSave into Raiser's Edge were simple to upload and read.
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.
PaperSave works well in part due to its database integration functionality. It allows our team to use Raiser's Edge (our main tool as it's our constituent database) without having to constantly switch back and forth between programs. It's simple enough for new staff members to learn as part of their on-boarding process and hasn't caused any major issues for our team.
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.
