Powerful tool with no design inspiration
September 30, 2019
Powerful tool with no design inspiration
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence
Atlassian Confluence usage has grown in our business as a method to capture ideas, build on them and then finalise a decision. The whole team uses it. We also needed a place to capture our reference documents and processes as they are defined. Decide we want Graphic Designers to load mock-ups straight to the Google Drive folder for a customer so sales or design support just does a follow-up email/call? Then edit their "Process Guide" in Confluence.
- Load an idea. Never lose it. Everyone can edit the core page or add comments. The old "parking bay" full of post-it notes doesn't get lost at the end of the conference.
- Templates - lots of different formats that provide suggested processes improvements in their very design. And we edit the pages to suit our company process anyway.
- Extra tools. Add images, links, Trello board, JIRA task links, etc. I found the inbuilt draw.io tool useful the other day when working on a process and now that diagram is added to the proposal document we send customers.
- Pages can be categorised, so we have an Internal Process pages, Project pages, Team Directory pages, etc.
- Atlassian Confluence is not very graphic so the user interface has a lot of options which can be daunting for new users. It feels like an old system - so busy with text options everywhere, I feel like I want to break out in DOS commands and throw away my mouse.
- Navigation is not always intuitive - I know there is flexibility there, but it can be confusing. Therefore user engagement is not as strong as it could be.
- I'd love to have tables displaying pages alphabetically with field and filter options. I have customer information but want to see the missing info more easily so I can action these. Or add a customer and it sorts itself in the right order. And then my template for customers can have a field added for all customers. There is a danger that the data can become too static as it doesn't make it easy to see the data. Same forms approach has an application to our other categories
- I think it does the job of capturing ideas and has had a positive ROI.
I used Lotus Notes many years ago and Atlassian Confluence reminds me of that - ugly and functional. We use Atlassian Confluence because we use JIRA. I doubt anyone would select Atlassian Confluence if they didn't also use JIRA. I've looked at Basecamp and it has a better feeling to it though JIRA Core and Service Desk are excellent tools so I can't imagine throwing them out for something pretty that might have limitations.
Do you think Atlassian Confluence delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Atlassian Confluence's feature set?
Yes
Did Atlassian Confluence live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Atlassian Confluence go as expected?
No
Would you buy Atlassian Confluence again?
Yes