Item: Atlassian Confluence
Rating: 7
Author: Clay Horste

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Confluence to document our engineering practices. From documenting releases and server updates to storing coding guidelines for developers. We've basically replaced MS Office documents and Sharepoint with Confluence. Confluences make for a more user-friendly way to store documentation that is searchable, flexible and far easier to maintain.

Pros and Cons

It is really easy to make document templates with Atlassian Confluence.
If you don't like how you've organized your documents in Atlassian Confluence, you can easily rearrange your documents into a structure that better fits your business.
Building a linked document structure is really easy within Atlassian Confluence.
Atlassian Confluence is extensible with macros and extensions.
There are integrations with other platforms for Atlassian Confluence.

I was perusing the developer documentation and I found it to be poorly organized. It just felt unapproachable.
We get too many status updates from Atlassian cloud. I think they are trying to be transparent, but it feels more like oversharing.
Sometimes I feel like their lines drawn with other Atlassian apps could be less hard. While there is substantial integration with JIRA, for instance, it seems like you have to really look for ways to use the two together.

Return on Investment

We spend less time looking for documentation.
Our documentation for audits is much more complete and less cumbersome.
We are able to move more information into the cloud and reduce local server maintenance load.

Alternatives Considered

MS SharePoint and Team Foundation Server

We were using MS SharePoint which was integrated with TFS for managing our developer workflow and it was quite clunky. We had to be signed into the VPN to access any of it and it relied upon Internet Explorer for access. It felt slow and sometimes you could use other browsers and sometimes you couldn't. We have also moved to VSTS, Confluence, and TestRail; and things are much more usable and better documented.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio IDE, JIRA Software, Project Insight, Box, Zoom, Microsoft Office 365, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Remote Desktop Services

Likelihood to Recommend

We use Atlassian Confluence to organize our software development and IS teams. We use it for meeting agendas, documenting software releases, documenting server updates, policies, procedures. We don't, however, use it for documenting software development requirements or for documenting QA test cases. Confluence feels like it could go the extra steps and provide a good place for documenting the actual creation of software, but we still end up going to other vendors for those items.

A software developer's day using confluence.

Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence