Share the knowledge in your organisation effectively. Have a single version of the truth. Create, share and keep your long form documents in a single, searchable repository, which makes the right information easily available to the right people. Reduce the volume of emails and the proliferation of obsolete documents. Adopt Confluence. Scroll down the page for more information about Atlassian Confluence or contact one of our experts to discuss the benefits of Confluence and how it can integrate effortlessly with other Atlassian products like Jira Service Desk.
What is Atlassian Confluence?
Atlassian Confluence is a web based collaboration tool which lets teams share documents, tasks, and team calendars. It is used for team members to work together and store what they are working on in a single place. Its uses include organising meetings, creating documents collaboratively (e.g. the requirements in an agile software development project) and as a knowledge base.
Confluence keeps all your team’s material in one place. This is useful for organising meetings, working on documents together and storing and sharing accumulated knowledge. You can organise meetings by posting a live agenda in advance on which members can comment. While the meeting is going on, discussion can be noted and action points created which can be handled and tracked as tasks in Confluence. This is far more efficient than using email.documents, tasks and team calendars. It is used for team members to work together and store what they are working on in a single place. Its uses include organising meetings, creating documents collaboratively (e.g. the requirements in an agile software development project) and as a knowledge base.
Why is it useful?
Atlassian Confluence is ideal for working on documents together. A document can either be sorted in Confluence directly or as an attachment such as a Word document. All team members can see the latest version of a document and (subject to permissions) can comment on it and edit it. It is ideal for creating a document together and then organising use of the functionality in drafting the requirements and specifications of a new software (or other) product. Confluence integrates tightly with Jira and the requirments can become the stories of, say, a Jira Agile project.
Confluence can be your team’s knowledge base. As experience builds up, so does the knowledge base. All articles are stored in a single place, so there is less duplication. Team members can see what has already been written down, so they can focus on adding to it and improving it rather than repeating it. The repository is searchable. Confluence’s tight integration with Jira permits resolved Jira issues to be fed automatically into Confluence, becoming articles in the knowledge base.
Key features
- Spaces are top-level divisions into which information in Confluence is organised. Within a Space are any number of Pages or documents.
- Pages can be made according to a number of templates including ‘Meeting notes’, ‘Product Requirements’, ‘How to Article’ and ‘File list’ (For organising a collection of uploaded files). The templates can be customised and you can create your own templates.
- Attachments: Files can be attached to most types of pages and the File List page type is specifically designed to collect and organise attachments.
- Watching and Following: The watch and follow features enable you to stay on top of activities which are of interest to you. You can watch Spaces and Pages, so that when they are updated you receive an email notification. You can follow people in your team so you receive a notification when they perform certain activities in Clonfluence. The notifications appear in your Confluence Network page, which also shows you who is following you.
- Questions: Confluence provides a mechanism to put questions to the whole team. The format is similar to an online forum. The questions are shown in a list which can be filtered and team members can comment on and give answers to the question.
- Calendars: Team events can be put in one or more team calendars and the calendars integrate with Jira projects so events from Jira (e.g. Sprint timetables in agile development projects) appear in the calendar.
- Tasks: Confluence provides a mechanism for assigning and tracking tasks. All users have can have tasks assigned to them. Tasks can be assigned either by clicking the relavant menus or by using the “@mention” convention while typing the actions of a meeting. Tasks can be seen and tracked collaboratively, which is a significant advantage over the purely personal tasks in PIM software because everyone in the team can see who is doing what, which avoids duplication and tasks not being taken on by anyone.
