Confluence (Atlassian)

Atlassian’s Confluence is a reputed vendor in the Enterprise Wiki arena. On the site there is an option of creating a test wiki page, but to get a full blown experience of the full functionality of Confluence one is supposed to download a trial version (37MB or 42MB options available) and run it on your local machine. One also has to install JDK (J2SE SDK version) from the java.sun site. So we had to manage with the test wiki offered on the Atlassian site. This also means that the three Wiki/Bliki Vendors we have profiled here, Confluence is not SaaS based.

Features

Confluence claims to be developed using HTML standards and is tested with all major browsers. The pages created are html pages and can be linked to each other. You can also organize your site by building hierarchies of pages, using the parent children concept. The fine grained security allows you to maintain strict space and page level permissions.

RSS: Confluence is integrated with your email and RSS and so allows you to be constantly updated on changes/comments/new wiki’s created.

Email Integration:

Email archiving allows you to:

• Keep a history of interaction with your clients, colleagues, or friends.
• Refer to email content when creating Confluence content, in general.
• Centralize yet another vehicle in Confluence as repository.

Export options: One of the special features of Confluence is the ability to export the pages to PDF (besides html and XML) and automated refactoring.



Advanced search: Search allows you to search spaces, pages, comments, blogs, attachments and even team email.
Update: Confluence also  searches within attachments.

Confluence run’s on hardware ranging from a Compaq iPAQ to an IBM AS400.

Image storage: The images are displayed in a Thumbnail gallery.

Stand out Feature

Free upgrades for 12 months

Editor

The editor is nice and simple, not too much clutter. Special characters, table manipulation is great (row, column adding deleting is a cinch). Has a Full screen feature for better viewing and Undo – redo buttons.

The hyper linking is a bit tedious- With tabs given for appending links by Search, History, Recently modified, and finally external links. It doesn’t seem to work in the full screen mode. Makes link manipulation difficult.

One very good feature is the multiple screens for Wiki and for the preview. So you can actually tweak code in case you want to roll up your sleeves and get your hands in wiki.

Disadvantages - Confluence will need the operating system to have JDK, and is restricted to only JDBC compliant databases.