Confluence (software)

Confluence
Developer(s) Atlassian
Initial release 25 March 2004
Stable release
6.0.1[1] / November 2, 2016 (2016-11-02)
Written in Java
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Russian, Swedish, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish[2]
Type Collaborative software
License Proprietary
Website www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

Confluence is team collaboration software. Written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments,[3] it is developed and marketed by Atlassian. Confluence is sold as either on-premises software or as a software as a service.[4]

History

Atlassian released Confluence 1.0 on March 25, 2004, saying their purpose was to build "...an application that was built to the requirements of an enterprise knowledge management system, without losing the essential, powerful simplicity of the wiki in the process."[5]

In recent versions, Confluence has evolved into part of an integrated collaboration platform,[6] and has been adapted to work in conjunction with JIRA and other Atlassian software products: FishEye, Clover, Crucible, Bamboo and Crowd.[7]

In 2014, Atlassian released Confluence Data Center to add high availability with load balancing across nodes in a clustered setup.

Analysis

The book Social Media Marketing for Dummies considers Confluence an "emergent enterprise social software" that is "becoming an established player."[8] Wikis for Dummies describes it as "one of the most popular wikis in corporate environments," "easy to set up and use," and "an exception to the rule" that wiki software search capabilities don't work well.[9]

eWeek cites as new features in version 4 the auto-formatting and auto-complete, unified wiki and WYSIWYG, social network notifications and drag and drop integration of multimedia files.[10] Use cases include basic enterprise communication, collaboration workspaces for knowledge exchange, social networking, Personal Information Management and project management. German newspaper Computerwoche from IDG Business Media compares it to Microsoft SharePoint and finds it "a good starting point" as a platform for social business collaboration, while SharePoint is better suited to companies with more structured processes.[11]

Confluence includes set up CSS templates for styles and formatting for all pages, including those imported from Word documents. Built in search allows queries by date, the page’s author, and content type such as graphics.

The tool has add-ons for integration with standard formats, with a flexible programmable API allowing expansion. The software is relevant as an outline tool for requirements, that can be linked to tasks in the JIRA issue tracker by the same company.[12]

Discontinuation of wiki markup language

From version 4.0, Confluence no longer supports a wiki markup language.[13] This has led to a sometimes-heated discussion[14] from some of the previous versions' (mostly technical) users who regret the change.

In response, Atlassian has provided a source code editor as a plugin, which allows advanced users the ability to edit the underlying XHTML-based document source.[15] However, although the new source markup is XHTML-based, it is not XHTML compliant, so it would more accurately be called XHTML-like XML.[16]

Additionally, wiki markup can be typed into the editor and Confluence's autocomplete and auto-format functionality converts the wiki markup to the new format in real time.[17] After this real-time conversion, content can never be edited as wiki markup again.

A Confluence user has published an XML schema and a DTD for the Confluence 4 storage format. The same user has developed web pages that convert a limited subset of Confluence XML or rich text editor content to wiki markup.[18]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Confluence 6.0 Release Notes". Atlassian.
  2. ↑ "Language Pack Translations". Atlassian Documentation. Confluence User Community. Retrieved 2011-09-19.
  3. ↑ Krishna Sankar; Susan A. Bouchard (24 April 2009). Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals. Cisco Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-1-58705-763-2.
  4. ↑ Anja Ebersbach; Markus Glaser; Richard Heigl; Alexander Warta (2008). Wiki: Web Collaboration. Springer. pp. 337–349. ISBN 978-3-540-35150-4.
  5. ↑ "Atlassian releases new wiki: Confluence 1.0". Theserverside.com. Retrieved 2011-09-19.
  6. ↑ "Wiki tools are not all the same". KMWorld.com. 2009-10-28. Retrieved 2011-09-19.
  7. ↑ "Integrate JIRA and Confluence Wiki". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 2012-05-10.
  8. ↑ Singh, Shiv; Becker, Michael; Williams, Ryan (2009-09-26). Social Media Marketing For Dummies. John Wiley & Sons. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-470-28934-1.
  9. ↑ Woods, Dan; Thoeny, Peter (2007-07-23). Wikis for dummies. John Wiley & Sons. p. 193. ISBN 978-0-470-04399-8.
  10. ↑ Taft, Darryl K. (2011-09-19). "Atlassian Delivers Confluence 4". eWeek. Retrieved 2012-03-24.
  11. ↑ Schmidl , Jörg; Reebs , Johannes & Wucher, Oliver (2012-03-16). "Sharepoint versus Confluence und Jive". Computerwoche (in German). Retrieved 2012-03-24.
  12. ↑ "Atlassian Blogs". Atlassian Blogs.
  13. ↑ Atlassian. "Confluence 4.0 Editor - What's Changed for Users of the Old Rich Text Editor". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 2012-04-23.
  14. ↑ Atlassian. "Confluence 4 Editor - Customer Feedback". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 2013-04-16.
  15. ↑ Atlassian. "Specification - Confluence Advanced Editor". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 2012-04-23.
  16. ↑ Atlassian. "Confluence Storage Format". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 21 Mar 2014. We refer to the Confluence storage format as 'XHTML-based'. To be correct, we should call it XML, because the Confluence storage format does not comply with the XHTML definition.
  17. ↑ Atlassian. "Confluence 4.0 Editor - What's Changed for Wiki Markup Users". Retrieved 15 May 2012.
  18. ↑ Graham Hannington. "Atlassian Confluence resources". Retrieved 2012-07-10.
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