confluence experiences?

Question

We're considering moving from trac to Atlassian Confluence as our knowledge base solution. ("We" are a growing IT consulting company, so most users are somewhat technical.)

There are many reasons we're looking for an alternative to trac: ACL, better wiki refactoring tools (Move/rename, Delete (retaining history), What links here, Attachments [change tracking], easier way to track changes (i.e. better "timeline" interface), etc.), "templates"/"macros", WYSIWYG/Word integration.

Confluence looks to be very nice from the feature list POV. But toying with it for a little I had the impression that its interface may seem somewhat confusing to the new users (and I recently saw a comment to that effect on SO). I hope that can be fixed by installing/creating a simpler skin, though.

If you've used Confluence, what are your thoughts on it?

• Do you agree it's not as easy to use as other software, can anything be done about it?
• What are its other shortcomings?
• Would you choose a different wiki if you had another chance?

[edit] my own experiences

Answer 1

Confluence is much more heavy than Trac in all aspects without providing any serious additional benefits. We use both in different parts of the company. Statistically Trac Wikis are MUCH better populated and much more actively used.

the following is just my subjective opinion:

Most of the features you've listed as Confluence benefits do exist in Trac (attachements, change tracking) or could be added as plugins/macros (move/rename) or could be easily developed by someone in your team with minimal python knowledge.

If your users are technical then they would appreciate a simple yet powerful Trac Wiki more than the 'Word integration'. In my experience Word integration is actually less efficient way for a professional to create a Wiki page then just type it.

Answer 2

For various reasons, I recently went from working on a one wiki at a time (ususally MediaWiki) to about a half dozen. In fact, I'm working in so many different wiki engines, I've lost count.

At my current employer the big flagship wiki's are Confluence, and I think it does have a lot of the major features that larger organizations need. The strength of Confluence is that it offers a lot of important content controls (groups, users, content spaces, delegated administration).

On the other hand, as an intermediate-level wiki writer, I am bumping into some problems. The Rich Text view tends to normalize the wiki text on the fly, which can create chaos with heavily formated text. And for some reason, there doesn't seem to be edit-by-section, which means I spend a lot of time waiting for the edit pages to load, (since a lot of my edits are to existing documentation that was ported to the wiki.

So, it isn't a slam dunk, but it is a good offering. I offer my personal experience as information, with a wiki, you need to weigh the high-end usability vs. number of writers you need for critical mass. I worked at one place that had a very feature filled wiki that most potential contributors disliked, and you ended up with very few, stale pages that were amazingly marked-up.

Answer 3

I'd say Confluence is very nice, and I recommend it. However, there's a few gotchas.

1. The WYSIWYG editor just isn't very good. It'll handle simple stuff fine - a small table, lists, inserting links, formatting text, etc. If you want to go farther - complex multicolumn layouts, multicolored tables, whatever - the editor is, well, fairly useless. Luckily Conflunece uses a slightly modified version of Textile - very powerful, and very easy to use. (Much better than "traditional" wiki markup.) In short, the WYSIWYG editor is bad, but it doesn't matter much.

2. Word integration is kickass. The killer feature is the ability to embed spreadsheets and powerpoint slides into pages - they appear just like they should. Plus if you're using Word and Firefox/IE on Windows, one click will open the embedded document in the appropriate Office app - and when you hit save the page updates. Plus the documents are versioned, and full text searchable, and the entire thing is shiny as hell, frankly. (Of course, if you're using OpenOffice the nifty one-click thing should still work, but it doesn't, at least for us.)

3. WebDAV support is really great. Every page appears as a folder containing any attachments (as files), any subpages (as folders), and the the text of the page as a txt file. Makes it trivial to write a quick shell script to create a bunch of pages, or renumber a bunch of attachments, or whatever. Downside: WebDAV support in Confluence is great; WebDAV support in major OSes - especially XP - is hit-or-miss.

4. Especially when you add plugins into the mix, you can do some very powerful things with forms, metadata, templates, graphs, reports. Want to see a table of the last person to edit every page labeled "tuna"? Sure thing. Or say you've got a page about a new project, and it's got some child pages about features you're planning. It's quite easy to attach metadata (like "who is this assigned to" or "priority") to the feature pages, and then embed some nifty reports and graphs in the project page. On the other hand, some of the really cool stuff is also really arcane or poorly documented.

5. We've found Confluence to be pretty resource hungry. We're not a Java shop, so it's entirely possible (hell, probable) that we've misconfigured something somewhere, but the full Tomcat stack chews through a lot of RAM (and a fair amount of CPU).

As for usability... As far as the core "wiki" experience goes, it seems pretty standard, and fairly easy to use. It's quite easy to add a comment, edit a page, attach a file, embed an image, add a link, format text, etc. Beyond that...well... it depends.

When we chose Confluence early this year, it seemed obviously the best choice. Key features were:

• LDAP/Active Directory integration. Confluence does this out of the box.
• Granular permissions. Confluence has very very strong support for this.

The only other wiki which was close was Deki Wiki, and at the time it was lacking some key features. I believe it's matured heavily since; if I was choosing a wiki today I'd look at it closely.

Answer 4

It worked fine for us. Word integration is really good, and its feature set is not in any other wiki solution. You can change skins if you don't like the default.

Answer 5

I've used Confluence for the past few months and like it. I agree with benc about the Rich Text editor. Do yourself a favor and do your editing in Wiki Markup. I found the notation guide to be muddy. By using both the user documentation on the Confluence web site and the notation guide, I could figure out how to do whatever I wanted. I've never used Trac, but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with Confluence.

Answer 6

I have used Confluence, and respect it as an application. However, I think that wikis are at their most effective when they provide the least possible "cognitive interference" to the storage/dissemination of information. By cognitive interference I mean one or more of: excessive effort to add an article/piece of info; lots of administrative tasks only tangentially related to the adding of an article/piece of info; interface that tries too hard to produce "publishable quality" documents.

For me the wiki is always a Work in Progress, and it's style, design and interface should always reflect that.

And for all of those reasons, my favourite wiki is OpenWiki (and OpenWiki NG - R.I.P.)

Answer 7

[replying to myself]

We've been using for a while, and as a power wiki user I'm very satisfied by its functionality.

New people have a little trouble figuring out how to use it the first time they see it. After disabling non-essential functionality (such as news, comments, etc.) it doesn't look as bloated.

The wysiwyg mode doesn't work very well for complicated documents (as expected), but wiki text is no worse than in other wiki engines.

All in all, it seems a great wiki engine (better than others for wiki power users).

Answer 8

Confluence is a very well-thought product which I'm using on daily basis for personal dev purposes and would highly recommend. It was even better before 2.6 got released (the new UI sucks to my liking, gonna stay on 2.5.7 forever).

Answer 9

One caveat, if you are running Confluence from an SSL connection DO MAKE SURE that your browser caches artifacts from SSL sites (which, in theory, it shouldn't). Confluence under SSL without caching is borderline unusable.

Answer 10

* Do you agree it's not as easy to use as other software, can anything be done about it?

It may not be as easy as some, but that's a tradeoff -- it's just very difficult to find a product that is both simple and powerful. "Powerful" meaning offers you the features to do many useful things. So it's important to know what you really need, and what you are likely to need. At my organization we have both internal and customer-facing pages, and Confluence gives us the stability/extensibility/flexibility we need. We use many of the plugins available, occasionally with mixed results as Confluence may exhibit bizarre behavior when some 3rd party plugins are pushed too far. (And that line isn't always clearly delineated!)

* What are its other shortcomings?

Plugins can cause unpredictable behavior (see above). Performance on a network -- even a decent one -- can be a little clunky at times. Unfounded claims, such as that you've already edited pages which were not saved (though almost always harmless), can be all too frequent and annoying.

* Would you choose a different wiki if you had another chance?

I've used a few different ones, and each has its drawbacks and pluses. Some of the free ones are much less stable than Confluence. Confluence support has been responsive if not always able to solve issues.

Answer 11

I do not like Confluence. I've had to use it for almost a year, and it's been quite annoying. I'm a seasoned wikipedian, and I've used many wiki syntax. I don't like Confluence's; this is subjective, but here are few points:

• Tables suck. The syntax is good for very small ones, but large ones are unmanageable.
• They enable smileys by default. How enterprisey. Say you have a list of MACs in your wiki; every instance of :D will be replaced by ☺ -- enterprisey!
• The doc on it is bad.
• There is no Mediawiki style parameterized templates; weeell, there is ("macros" or something), but for some reason I can't understand, they have to be installed by the "admin." So they're basically useless.

The main "enterprisey" feature of Confluence is its ACL (access control lists). They're a pain to use (it might have improved in the very latest version): a page inherits its parent permissions. But if you just want to add one user/group to the list of authorized viewers for one page, well, you can't. You have to manually specify all the groups/users again, plus the additional one.

It's also quite slow. It pops up whole windows for minor things like picking smileys instead of displaying it inline. Many features involving search, such as listing groups/users, display them in 10 items per page format. That's so retarded it hurts. We have, what, 2000 users, and 4GB of RAM → SEND ME THE WHOLE LIST, I can handle it. But nooooo, you have to click click click. Or rather, click wait click wait.

It also lacks a very useful Mediawiki feature: you can't just edit parts of a page, you have to load the whole page; and of course, you are sent back to the beginning. So if you have a long page, every edit/preview cycle is simply unbearable. Mediawiki and some other wikis add an [edit] button to the right of headings.

On the whole the UI is very quirky. I found Trac to be much more productive as far as Wikis are concerned. Of course its bug tracking feature is nowhere near Jira; but it's free and it's fast. In my opinion, don't switch if you don't really need to.

Answer 12

I agree with this recent comment. Certainly the lack of true MediaWiki-style templates is the worst part about confluence. Or is it that you have to pay for it (MediaWiki is free)?

Use MediaWiki. There is a worldwide supply of knowledge and it is easy to figure out how to do things. Confluence is a niche product that is just horrible from a support perspective.

Answer 13

Just saw this post though it's now a year later. Confluence is now up to version 3.1 and nearly 3.2

The huge difference between Confluence and any 'knowledge collab' system or 'enterprise wiki product' in the category is that Confluence has a very powerful, very flexible and extremely well documented plugin architecture. Thus it has over 200 plugins the dozens of companies have contributed or sell - some of them are extremely powerful and amazing products in their own right. In this area no one else is even close or even on the same playing field. Atlassian has invested hugely in this area and it shows.

Don't take my word for it - https://plugins.atlassian.com/ :)

Answer 14

Yeah, I agree with the previous post and I might add "Thus it has over 200 plugins..." none of which WORK!!!! What a sad tool. I have version 3.2 and I cannot even create tabs none of the calendar plug-ins work for 3.2 at the moment. There is a lot of documentation on the net none of which is helpful.

Answer 15

Expanding on Cody's answer above, MindTouch has grown their feature set over the last couple of years, and it's available in both paid for and free, open source versions. They're often compared to Confluence and it really just comes down to use cases - software developers prefer Confluence, business app owners prefer MindTouch.

Answer 16

Confluence integration with Word is nice, and the ability to refactor is nice.

The integration with Jira is painful. If you want to integrate issues with documentation about the issues, go for Trac. Just be sure to install the plug-in to index attachment content. Abiword is your friend here, it can read almost anything and make it into indexable text.

filter.docx = /usr/bin/abiword -t txt "%s" -o "%s"

Answer 17

As a dissemination tool (pass as much information as we can to as many people as possible) it's superb. Website-ish layout, threaded comments, email summaries, rss subscriptions, polls, great builtin richtext (and wikitext) editor, really powerful macros for populating content from other pages ... you name it. And most of it cames out of the box.

Used it for more than 5 years now and can recommend it to anyone as a intranet/enterprise wiki platform. Technically it's quite well made and most of complaints i seen in comments there comes from let's say "power users"- they usually are able to help themselves by using most advanced Confluence features. In my mind most important is to make enterprise wiki easy for rest of users.

It's a complicated task to run and maintain it especially when you want to use open it to outside world (e.g. using it as a collaboration platform with customers). Use of simpler skins is one time job.

Most important (in my opinion) is to get someone assigned to keep it (Confluence content) organized, helping new users by guiding them and sometimes just making noise to keep site running live and not allowing it become dead (after a month of silence nobody will be interested to visit it).

And if you have used Trac before consider (mental) cost of switching. If Trac was heavily used this cost might be too high. If only small part contributed to Trac then it (switching to Confluence) is worth trying.