Item: Atlassian Confluence
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Bepress adopted Confluence as our company-wide Wiki, to varying degrees of uptake in different departments. The vision was to have the knowledge sets required to do each business function existing in parallel on Confluence to how it exists in employee's brains, however, this is only as strong as the weakest link and invariably some departments had more valuable Confluence pages than others depending on how invested they were in documenting and maintaining.

Pros and Cons

Excellent page hierarchy tools.
Simple but useful word processing features.

The product relies on the uptake of users (and strong QA processes) to ensure compliance.
Display bugs with large tables.

Return on Investment

Retaining knowledge of departed former employees was INVALUABLE. Right now, someone at Bepress is benefitting from the work I put into my own Confluence pages .
Having a repository of knowledge spares managers having to answer mundane/trivial questions and focus on their work.

Support Rating

Never needed to contact support! Confluence runs very, very well, the only bugs or errors being invariably user error (especially with employees who struggled with the concept of hierarchies altogether).

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Atlassian Confluence go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Atlassian Confluence again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Confluence allowed our Marketing Department to share things like workflows, best practices, templates, and meeting agendas. This facilitated any of us knowing what the others did, and how to back them up in cases of absence, as well as providing intellectual continuity with former employees, who's work persisted in Confluence beyond their dates of employment.

I would NOT recommend Confluence for offices that struggle with QA or employee motivation, as it is very easy to not record your work or new developments in Confluence. It requires an intentional work culture and a core of power users who are handy with organization and can take lead on visioning.

A Major Organizational Value-Add If your Culture is Right

Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian Confluence