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
Planview IdeaPlace
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planview IdeaPlace offers an “idea-to-impact” solution that includes: An employee-driven innovation management platform, which is backed by proprietary crowd science algorithms to tap employees’ knowledge and insight while enabling diversity, inclusion and cross-organizational collaboration. Services and support by a team of experts who excel at global program design and work with sponsors to optimize impact. Software that is architected and managed for…
Director of Advanced Product Planning - Consumer Electronics
Chose Planview IdeaPlace
Spigit's reputation scheme and excellent pricing were the primary reasons we went with them in 2010. They also seemed eager to improve the product and meet customers' needs.
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.
If you have a community with more than 100 active users, and you're looking for ideas around operational improvements that can be acted on in a 6-12 month window, Spigit will work great, and it's one of the best options out there. If you're trying to customize the platform much, you should plan on paying Spigit's service group to do that for you, because it's not easy to do yourself. If you're looking for ideas that will take more than about a year to implement, Spigit is as good as anyone else because that's a really tough thing to do in an innovation community!
Acknowledges and supports the culture around the problem and market it is trying to serve. Just using the platform won't solve our problem, we need a cultural shift and Spigit has helped support that process.
Customer service - just overall amazing service. Responses are very quickly turned around, they've gone the extra mile many, many times. They are also very open to platform improvements and take feedback very seriously.
As the system administrator, I feel their platform incorporates a great balance of templates, out-of-the-box formatting, etc., and customizable content. In a nutshell, we are able to do what we want but we don't have to spend forever to do it. We can use what they have or we can add in our own design.
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.
There are many ways to configure the solution. Some features make more sense to use at times and should be hidden from users at other times. It would be nice if Spigit had pre-defined configuration templates that reflect the experience and knowledge of their current customer's experience using the software and not just a 1 size fits all base configuration. The good news is with a little experience, these configurations can be created as saved templates.
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.
Firstly, it is hard to define or describe an ROI for an innovation project (and tool) that is in its experimental phase... But a positive is the impact in the overall engagement of employees, especially in overpopulated structures where it is not easy to "become visible, and the smart ones wait for a chance like this platform.
Where a clear and strong sponsorship is in place, this platform can stimulate ideas that can potentially have a great impact in services improvement
Based on our specific limits in engaging top management, we still cannot see a speed in products or processes improvement.
