Pros And Cons Of Confluence

This blog is intended to provide completed knowledge on confluence merits and demerits to the readers. Before getting started with this session, you can have a look into this confluence training curriculum which aids in upgrading the confluence skills for enhancing your professional career.

Introduction to Confluence

All of your work may be created, collaborated on, and organized in one location. Confluence is a collaboration and knowledge platform for teams. By enabling your team to build, contribute, and capture any concept or project, dynamic pages give them a place to work on it. The Spaces help your team organize, structure, and share work so that each team member has accessibility for the information and institutional knowledge they require to do their best work. Find out more about Confluence’s features.

Confluence is mostly for teams of all types and sizes, from those employed on high-stakes, mission-critical projects that demand precision to those looking to build the culture of the team and communicate more authentically and openly with one another.

Your team will be able to make rapid choices, achieve alignment, and accomplish more as a result of using Confluence.

Why is Confluence essential?

How frequently do we raise issues only to discover that the criteria were altered after development began and that testers weren’t informed of the change before testing began owing to a lack of communication regarding the change?

As an outcome, the reported bug is marked as invalid and closed. This may be aggravating for testers since their credibility is harmed, as well as their perplexity and concern about what other uncommunicated modifications may exist in the application under test.

Another typical annoyance is when vital information is buried behind many email chains and is difficult to locate.

One of the first things to consider when developing the knowledge base is where you can keep your data. Relying on the use case of yours, various possibilities might have been examined by you, some of which were affected by previous organizational decisions or other technologies compatibility. Atlassian’s Confluence is a popular solution that is utilized numerous times. Confluence has a number of perfect qualities that are highly suitable for constructing a Knowledge Base, whether you utilize the version based on cloud or relaunch your own installation management instance. There are certain disadvantages, but we’ll discuss them later. To begin, consider the advantages of using Confluence to fuel your knowledge base. 

Confluence Usage Significant Advantages

Collaboration

Confluence’s collaboration tools, which are hailed as its most valuable asset, are the primary rationale for picking it across the competition. While administrators have complete control over permissions, anyone with access to space can add to the knowledge base. Individual contributions are tracked using version control. Furthermore, collaborators are alerted if changes are made. This ensures the knowledge base is timely, accurate, and comprehensive by creating an effective feedback loop for the collaborators.

Integrations

Apart from direct interfaces with remaining Atlassian product suites (like Trello, Jira, Bitbucket, Jira Service Desk, and others), Confluence has a thriving marketplace of integrations with other parties (either APIs or plugins) that function flawlessly with it. These integrations could help you with everything from creating better charts for connecting Google’s products’ suite and even appending gifs for your documents. Integrations increase the content’s richness, making it easier to consume in the future.

Analytics

What useful is a tool if it doesn’t have analytics? You may track the most liked, accessed, viewed, and other pages using plugins or APIs. This was a crucial part of figuring out how knowledge can be utilized in your company.

Confluence Usage Minor Benefits

The mentioned factors are the primary reasons why companies pick Confluence, but it also has a number of secondary advantages that make it a viable knowledge base option.

• The capability to export data in a variety of formats (EPUB, DOCX, PDF, etc).
• Content with connected content receives automatic updates.
• Scalability right from the startup to an enterprise.

Confluence Usage Demerits

Search

The search has long been regarded as one of Confluence’s most difficult problems. So many solutions were developed just for this issue. The “Chrome Extension for Confluence Search” of Obie is a simple and free solution to improve the accuracy and speed of your workspace search in confluence. The “Slack to Confluence Search” of Obie’s integration was also the quickest way to find documentation without having to leave Slack.

In Confluence, Obie looks for text such as:

• Titles of documents
• Text in the body
• Tags for confluence

Plug-in dependency

Where Atlassian’s original functionality falls short, the Atlassian community has stepped in to help. Unfortunately, native functionality falls short in a number of cases, so you’ll have to get used to relying on third parties. Even the third-party marketplace isn’t flawless, so you might need to make your own plugins to better service your needs or connect to your own APIs. In this case, you’ll need to design your own plugins in-house (which will almost certainly need the hiring of a Java developer).

Infrastructure for Hosting

Confluence’s cloud-based service makes it simple to get started, but if you have more advanced requirements, such as data locality, you’ll need to self-host. The cloud-based solution relieves your sysadmins of data security, upgrades, and scaling issues, but it does have restrictions for larger enterprises that outgrow the standard offering.

The advantages outweigh the disadvantages

Confluence’s advantages exceed its disadvantages in the knowledge base use case. The beauty of this platform is that it’s built to scale along with your business. Confluence finds a way to fit into each stage of evolution, from the early days when knowledge is maintained in the hands of a small number of people, through scaling to larger and distributed teams and onward to full-enterprise status with more sophisticated needs.

Conclusion

This session now ends, in this blog you have learned how confluence benefits from collaboration, integrations, and analytics. We also have discussed the confluence problems like searching, plug-in dependencies, and hosting infrastructure.  You need to get this confluence online training course for upskilling your knowledge which covers all in-depth concepts like confluence layout overview, content creation, page, and file versioning, confluence templates, add-on, etc real-time examples.

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