Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Square 9 Softworks is great in data management and flow. For us, they've done an excellent job with the Health Screening Tools, Cloud Storage/Management and Online Applications. It seems to be a very diverse product. I think because of that, you can talk with Square 9 Softworks about what you are envisioning to see if they are capable of it. I would not do that with many other products - they just don't have that flex.
Read full review Pros QUICK How-to Guides that can be generated and share instantly One can subscribe to the pages and spaces and receive updates in the feed on their home page Automatic Email notifications of new updates in the Confluence area The platform integrates easily with other Atlassian platforms including third-party apps thus improving its reliability Read full review Fast Manual indexing with what we consider the best in point-n-click OCR indexing. Webserver that incorporates Full-Text Content Searching, Workflow Queues, Full Document Management and Live document Signing on any mobile device or location. Fast workflow designers for rapid implementation Broad range of capture and information processing tools, easy to configure Loaded with essential security options Low price, and about 10X more powerful than MS SharePoint right out of the box. Multi-database support for a very low price with disaster recovery licensing, this is very rare in the industry. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Some of the administrative/security configuration with Windows Active Directory can be tricky when managed by separate corporate IT personnel (alignment in strategy) User adoption with any new process can be challenging, but overall user friendly menus As Database sizes grow (200,000+ records) paging through records can be cumbersome, probably need to migrate to an archive process to offload some of the data. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review We absolutely can't imagine not continuing software maintenance as there are always new additions that improve the system not to mention the excellent tech support when issues are encountered. Response times for troubleshooting are very quick and usually, my issue is resolved in less than an hour after connecting with support.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Super simple software to operate and configure. Very granular permissions and controls. Browser based setup with everything and very intuitive visual workflow building makes it easy to set things up. Troubleshooting document workflow issues is also made easy via the batch manager when you can track each document as it moves through the workflow.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.
Read full review Square-9 can get this product out to you in almost the same hour your order it. We got ours very fast.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The support we received from Square 9 Softworks was exceptional. From deployment to implementation, we always felt supported. The team we worked with had patience and exceptional response time. They were amazing to work with, I always felt supported. No matter how simple or complex my question was they always delivered.
Read full review In-Person Training It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.
Read full review Implementation Rating Overall, I am very satisfied with the initial implementation (and the subsequent upgrades and implementations made over the years).
This product has never rose to the level of being an major issue at an executive level. It has quietly and valiantly done it's job for our company!
Read full review I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review A similar product I have used was Time Matters. For a Law Firm, I think Time Matters is more useful as it keeps track of everything for a client, including billing. However, since I now work for a legal department of a corporation, SmartSearch is definitley more useful. It is not possible to seperate the documents we have internally in neat client files. We have various miscellaneous documents for many different services and customers or vendors. SmartSearch allows us to organize in broad categories that make sense to internal employees using it and to make sure security is set on specific documents. Time Matters would not have been sufficient for our managers to have access to, since it uploads all documents to the file - some of which are confidential.
Read full review Scalability This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.
Read full review The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review OCR capabilities allow users to quickly and accurately index files without data errors from manually keying in data Administrators can update users access through active directory without ever opening Square 9 and without generating accounts in yet another system Users can find files needed without ever leaving their desk Read full review ScreenShots Square 9 Softworks Screenshots