Confluence 3.0 = Enterprise Wiki +++

I have just a little to add to Bill Ives’ excellent coverage of Atlasian’s Confluence 3.0 announcement yesterday.  Though I suggest you read his coverage too.

I found though both formal and informal surveys that Confluence lives at or near the top of the list of Enterprise Wikis when I speak to large enterprises.  I can’t quote the formal data, but I can share the following anecdote:  Many times I’ll ask a crowd how many people use wikis in their organization, then I’ll ask how many of those installations are Confluence.  Typically about half of those who say they are using a wiki will keep their hands up.  

I was a heavy user of Confluence about 2 years ago, and at that time I found it to be a very capable wiki.  I had used a few other wikis prior (and since), and realized that despite the simplicity of something like MediaWiki (the platform that powers the most popular wiki — Wikipedia), business users will demand a more robust user-experience than you get with wiki-markup.  Given the significant challenges you face with getting a wiki adopted in many organizations, it’s really important to make the wiki look like a real workplace tool.  My impressions about Confluence then was that the out of the box experience was a great start, but still lacked the “fit and finish” of the kind of websites that I was used to in my work environment at Fidelity.  We found that with a little bit of customization from a designer, the wiki really became an intranet destination.  We used Appfire to design a wiki-based intranet site, and were very pleased with the results. But for many uses, the standard look and feel is just fine too.

I’m impressed with the improvements in the newest version of the wiki.  One of the more interesting features is the inclusion of basic profiling and activity streams.  As we’ve been saying all along – E2.0 is about content and context.  Wiki pages alone tend to suppress the notion of authorship and focus you only on the content.  You can find out who wrote an article, but you have to look at the page history first (as opposed to profiles, blogs, or forums where authorship is very explicit).  Yes, the wiki-purist will say that you can create social profiles and networks with a wiki, but having the real functionality baked into the product makes it much more usable. Confluence joins other E2.0 platform players by offering more than a single purpose tool.  Although wiki pages still focus on content, they integrate with the profiles to create a much more useful experience.  And in line with many other E2.0 tools these days, you can post 140-character updates to to you co-workers.  How tsweet.

Speaking of platform plays: I found that many Confluence customers also use other Atlassian products. Most notably, many use Atlassian’s Jira – an issue tracking tool that streamlines the issue tracking aspects of project management.  Yes, Jira integrates with Confluence.  Atlassian’s products are favored by many Java development shops, but creative users will find that they are not just for developers.

Another important feature of Confluence is that you can use it alongside SharePoint.  Most enterprises have and use SharePoint.  And although SharePoint 2007 technically has a wiki feature, it’s basically unusable.  Confluence provides what SharePoint 2007 is missing.  SharePoint provides some document management features that Confluence does not have.  They work well together.  For many enterprises, this is the deal-maker.

It’s worth noting a bit of historical context here.  The Confluence/SharePoint connector was developed over a year ago by someone who (at the time) was not an Atlasian employee.  He created the functionality and then donated it to Atlasian’s open-source community.  As it turns out, it was such a great hit that Atlasian hired him last summer (and moved him to Sydney, Australia!).  

I mention this to highlight the active open-source community that Attlassian enjoys.  This community creates new plug-ins for all to use (for free or at modest cost), further enhancing Confluence’s value to their customers.  This community has been very good to the Atlassian eco-system.  But the reality is that not all contributions are as good or as useful as others.  My experienced was quite mixed.  Some plug-ins were great, and others were not.  As part of this new release, Atlassian added rating features to the community site. This will help you choose which plug-ins to use.  Hey, maybe Atlassian will hire the creator of the top-rated plug-in every year <smile>.

One plug-in that I’d love to see improved is the calendar plug-in.  I have not yet seen the killer wiki-cal application, but when I do I think it will be very well received.  That’s on my wish list.

One enhancement I’m very pleased to see is the improved wiki-to-PDF feature.  I found the previous version of this feature was sub-adequate for business use.  Another improvement is in overall system performance, resulting in a faster wiki.  Confluence 3.0 provides other new enhancements too, so you should check it out.  The way I see it, Atlassian is doing a great job of listening to their customers and improving the features that matter most to them.  

By the way, you can see some examples of publicly facing (prior version) Confluence sites here and here.  If you know of other nicely crafted sites, feel free to add them below for others to check out too.

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Tagged as: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, tool, wiki, workplace