Atlassian Confluence 4.0

Enterprise Communication on a basic level is well supported in Confluence. The blog functionality is not comparable to the standards of native blog-applications but flexible and good enough for enterprise communication on various levels. Blogs can be assigned to a user or a workspace and can be additionally structured with autocomplete tags. The blog feature benefits from the, overall good, feedback functionality in Confluence. All content can be commented and readability is ensured through threaded conversations. In addition comments can be collapsed which enables users to get an overview in longer conversations. Moderation is easy for authorized people and commenting may be disabled for particular pages. Publishing workflows are not natively supported but can be added with a plug-in. There are no groups of pages, but every single page can be moderated and access can be restricted.

The networking functionality, even if impressive in extent, remains poorly structured. Users are able to fill their profile with personal information, contact data and skills, and can choose to follow colleagues. The list of followed people constitutes the (indirect) personal network of a user and the respective page displays a simple activity stream of all members within it. In addition to the profile-, network- and status-updates page, each user has a personal space (wiki-page) which contains a user’s activity stream, a free text self-description (“About me”) and a collapsible profile summary (including current status, recent activity & network). The separation of personal space and profile is confusing and the profile summary, while itself useful, adds complexity due to unclear navigation. The confluence search function is good but not yet adjusted for Networking.

Project Management is based on the collaboration capabilities of a social software product. Atlassian Confluence is strong in collaboration and thus provides a good basis for Project Management. A new workspace can be set up for a project and configured with fine grained permissions for project members and other stakeholders. Beyond standard social software functionality, Confluence provides simple task and time-management. It is possible to set up a wiki page as a project dashboard including a calendar to display milestones and a master-task-list for the whole project. For more advanced project management, Atlassian suggest integrating with their issue-tracking software JIRA. In combination with it, Confluence workspaces can be configured as potent project collaboration platforms. Nevertheless, use and integration of the two products requires profound technical knowledge.

Companies can buy a Confluence license and deploy the software on their own servers or choose to have a dedicated instance on an Atlassian hosted server (SaaS). Confluence works with a broad range of application servers, operating systems and databases including Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Postgre- and MySQL. While large scale deployments have worked fine in terms of scaling, clustering has been reported to be problematic in single cases. The software is Java based and though generally well implemented, it has some weaknesses in the application architecture. Besides English, Confluence supports many languages including German, Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese. Mobile access is supported for most vendors.

The high granularity in the management of access controls gives Confluence the good rating in Data & Security. Although it may be time-consuming to manage access rights in the fine nuances that Confluence provides the effort pays off in enterprise use and LDAP integration with corporate directory groups facilitates the process. Confluence supports Single Sign On (SSO) and SSL encryption and the lack of proper life cycle management is outbalanced by the benefit of automatic system backups. Atlassian offers a plugin called “Universal Wiki Converter” which automates migration of content from all major enterprise wikis to Confluence. Due to the complexity of migration-processes for that number of supported tools, companies should test this plug-in for their particular system before switching to Confluence.

Atlassian Confluence is an attractive product in terms of Support & Services. For a relatively small company, the worldwide network of more than 300 partners in 80 countries is impressive. Even if direct vendor support is limited, companies will not have to suffer from that if they work together with experienced Atlassian partners. Furthermore the very good online documentation of Confluence and the active developer and implementer community online can be consulted for information and help. Atlassian tries to schedule major product updates of high quality for every fourth month, with minor (bug-fix) releases each month.