Confluence and Sharepoint tandem

[Artem Taranenko]

Hi all,

Does anyone have both Sharepoint and Confluence in their org?

Curious as to your content policy in terms of what goes onto Confluence vs what goes into Sharepoint. Looking to understand what the common case or policy is for organizations that have and use both products.

Interested in use cases where sharepoint is used for more than just file storage.

[Mikael Sandberg]

My previous job had both, and the only reason we had Sharepoint was because Finance used it to store files in it that they needed. Everything else was in Confluence, with a few exceptions like customer facing documentation that was stored in a different system. 

[Mathew Lederman]

We have both and unfortunately no real policies for what data goes where. Confluence is more heavily used by the technical teams, and only licensed for half the organization. SharePoint is more heavily utilized by the non-technical teams, hosts our the company intranet, and is heavily used for document storage. As we're an O365 shop, SharePoint is licensed across the entire organization. 

[Christine Green]

Same exact scenario in my company, and we don't have any policies for what data goes where either (unfortunately)! 

[Matt]

Our organization uses both SharePoint Online and Confluence Cloud, and our experience aligns with Mikael’s. As a general rule, Confluence is not intended for document storage. If your work requires creating or using Office files such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you should be working in SharePoint.

While users can attach Office documents to Confluence, our policies strongly discourage it, and we perform auditing to notify users and further discourage the practice. 

Confluence and SharePoint each serve a distinct purpose in our environment. SharePoint continues to play an important role, and we do not expect Confluence to replace it. On top of document storage, lists, and integration with PowerBI are also key components of SPO. Also... the fact that it can be extended through SPFx without additional cost (glaring at you Forge...).

[Chris Buzon]

My Org uses both.  We use Microsoft Office products (not google sheets, etc - but word, excel, copilot) and EVERYONE at our company uses those.  Sharepoint is available to everyone.

Atlassian tools are used for development tracking, and some other functions - but only ~1/4 of our staff have Confluence seats.  It's quite expensive, so giving everyone access to them in addition to MS products is not feasible.

We rely on both for different things - if it's policy or needs to be accessible to everyone, we use Sharepoint (not always great, but everyone gets access), and if it's development related it usually goes into Confluence because it's easier to link to Jira, is more curated, better reporting*.  There is some extra stuff stored in Confluence because whiteboards are great, we don't have data limits etc (Enterprise tier)

We don't use any add-ons to sync the two platforms (this is cost issue, we have 12 confluence sites for different business units in our org)

A problem for which we don't really have an elegant solution

[Travis Duffy]

We currently use both at our organization, we've found it helps to go through the use cases and clearly define which tool is used for which use case.

For us, if teams need to use Office files (e.g. Excel files, formatted Word Documents), it should be stored in SharePoint, not as attachments on a Confluence page.  SharePoint is also the only solution that effectively supports linked office files, so if you have Excel files that reference other Excel files in columns.  Lastly, document repositories that have/require metadata should live in SharePoint, as Confluence doesn't have a metadata solution.  

On the flip side, we use Confluence as our organization's Intranet.  Almost all of our internal websites are hosted on Confluence.  We also train/direct our users towards Confluence for documentation, meeting notes, etc.  Wherever possible, we really try to get people away from using "legacy" file formats like Office documents for that sort of thing as there are simply limitations to it compared to cloud-native tools in Atlassian. 

For us, we 1.) have strong documentation outlining different use cases and tools and 2.) request processes for creating new sites and spaces that review the use case as a part of the request (We don't allow teams to spin up their own sites/spaces in our environment).   

[Joshua Cole]

This is a great question. Thank you for asking it. The other responses validate our approach, which is that files are stored in SharePoint and things like SOPs, policies, meeting agendas/minutes (really anything that would be considered “knowledge”), are stored in Confluence.

What’s thrown me for a bit of a loop is, if you’ll pardon the pun, Microsoft Loop for things like meeting agendas and minutes. Historically, we’ve used Confluence for those, but Loop’s tight integration with Teams meetings and channels makes that very appealing. However, for now, the expectation is that those continue to be stored in Confluence.

[Rita Nygren]

We have both, and there is little to no direction to the company as a whole on which to use when - at the department level, some want all the shared files in SP, some don't have a lot of file attachments but want wiki like pages so they are all confluence, and some leave their poor users to guess.  I'm not happy with the situation.