Confluence Wiki – Not so Wacki
Confluence Enterprise Wiki is a great example of a Rich Internet Application which combines the best of online and offline experiences. The major features of Confluence such as collaboration, document management, version control, security, comments, notifications, online storage, search and office integration are available through a browser. These features plus an interactive GUI, ajax functionality and a java based structural core, all contribute to a fast, engaging user experience.
MediaWiki(Wikipedia), TWiki(Wikispaces), Sharepoint(Microsoft), Jotspot(bought by Google) have many of the best practices adopted by Confluence, but they haven’t expanded their offer to the same extent. Sharepoint is slow has poor navigation and usability, Twiki has moderate editing capabilities and poor integration with external plugins, MediaWiki while having success with Wikipedia relies on the open source community for development, while Jotspot seems to have been lost in the GooglePlex’s myriad of products. All of these minor issues affect a rich user experience. Much of the success of Confluence is due to the active development community, multiple plugins and opensource api. Adaption of W3C standards, cross platform, and cross browser compatibility combine to enhance ubiquitous access.
Search(everything is searchable) is enhanced through the ability to tag content, add links, organise hierarchically, and dynamically create pages based on labels. Dynamic(as a page is created) search for content is powered by lucene technology(java open source) integrated into the application. The ability to restructure, change, and rename content as part of a company’s organic growth is easy.
The initial user experience is positive, with a simple click of ‘edit’ to add text, images and other multimedia content to pages. The availability to further edit in wiki markup adds rich, complex functionality historically only available in desktop applications. Document management is similar to a desktop performance, while version control and online collaboration removes network capacity overloading, and the inefficient historical practice of mailing around word documents or files. Old versions are available for review and restoration, whilst concurrent editing gives notifications to the users.
I think the fact that Microsoft uses Confluence for several of their wikis is an advertisement for the quality, reliability and functionality of content delivery of this product.
6 Comments
Hi Peter,
Thanks for this introduction to Confluence. I’ve heard that they allow not-for-profit’s like universities to use free of charge. Perhaps we should consider using it on DigitalOrgs.net.
Your point about Microsoft using it is amusing!
~ Jason W
Currently the university license is quite cheap compared to other corporate applications. A few thousand per year ongoing, unlimited users. Has a lot more functionality than Media wiki but unfortunately no teaching and learning instance as yet. I ran a trial last semester as part of a collaborative project with INN347 at https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/web2/Home but unfortunately we had to submit a printed copy, hence the missing Exec Summary.
Hi Peter,
I’ve implemented Confluence recently and while it is a bit “raw” I find that most people can engage with it after minimal training. It’s cheap to buy and fast to implement – good Web 2.0 characteristics in my opinion!
Paul
Hi Peter,
One of the major problems at work is our knowledge/documentation. We currently have a mediawiki set up but I personally don’t find it that useful.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Confluence, and it seems that where it has been implemented properly it works well. Hopefully our work can move forward with it so I can stop hearing good things!
Jason
thanks for your comments Jason
Confluence is definitely more advanced than media wiki
Features such as watch lists, ability to embed complex macros and integrations with other
developer application tools such as Jira, FishEye, Crucible, Bamboo and Clover are
just a few reasons to use confluence
1 in 6 web/application developers world wide use one or more of the above tools
FvaA4y I bookmarked this link. Thank you for good job!
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