Atlassian Confluence
About Atlassian
Atlassian is a software company in Sydney, Australia which makes products for software developers - including Confluence (a wiki), Subversion for revision control, JIRA for issue and bug tracking, GreenHopper for agile software planning and management, Bamboo for continuous integration, Crucible for code review and FishEye for source code repository browsing - all of which are included in the JIRA Studio package.
About Confluence
Atlassian's Confluenceis a powerful and quite popular wiki. The cost of confluence depends on the number of user - ~$3,300 (USD) for 100 users and up to ~$18,000 for >20,000 users (see pricing table). While its disadvantage is that it is not free (like MediaWiki), confluence is often free for academic use (or some I'm told) and does has many nifty advantages/features including:
- Ability to create groups / spaces and to set permissions of each page (different from MediaWiki where every page is public)
- A nifty WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface (an alternative to wiki markup, although sometimes buggy)
- Lots of online documentation, videos and support
- The ability to link/embed Microsoft Office documents (and a few other document types) using "SharePoint Connector"
- Many macros to add such elements as charts / comments / RSS feeds / lists of people etc
- Drag-and-drop functionality (from desktop into browser).
- Auto-complete for images/macros/links (watch video tutorial).
- Page version history (similar to MediaWiki)
To learn a little more about these features watch the Confluence overview video.
Video Tutorials
Here I've listed some videos I've found useful. For more videos go to Atlassian's youtube channel.
- Adding a banner to Confluence - shows how easy it is to create a custom banner. By creating a custom layout it's also very easy to put your whole "confluence wiki" into a frame/table such that you can go the "wiki" section of a project site, but it still have the same banner and "look" as the rest of the site.
- Using Confluence's autocomplete
- Confluence's Google Analytics Plugin - don't fully understand yet but I definitely would love to start using "Google Analytics" - it looks brilliant.
Links
- Atlassian.com - official site.
- Atlassian's - Wikipedia - where some of this info came from
- Confluence Documentation Wiki - good place to go for technical questions
