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...).

[Mikita Cherkasau]

So what is Confluence used for in your org?

[Matt]

Confluence was brought on as a replacement for MediaWiki, despite the disapproval of MANY of our users, but it came in sideways with Agile and Jira.

Therefore, it's mainly used by technical users for quick content collaboration, SharePoint is much heavier in that regard, meeting notes, technical specs, architecture docs, and of course integration with Jira. Confluence is also a place where 3rd-party add-ons can be explored for additional functionality, whereas SharePoint is excluded from that. 

[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

[Mikita Cherkasau]

Mind sharing what you mean by curated, better reporting?

[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).   

[Mikita Cherkasau]

So if Confluence is your intranet tool, then what is SharePoint in your org?

[Travis Duffy]

SharePoint is really only for file storage.  Generic file repositories are synced to the Windows File Explorer using OneDrive for some teams and they don't even use the UI.  For other teams, they do use the SharePoint UI but that is mainly because they have metadata/filtering/grouping for files.  We don't use "Pages" in SharePoint, and only use lists in relation to file metadata (e.g. a SharePoint list that ties to a column in a SharePoint library).  We frequently link to SharePoint document libraries/files from Confluence spaces using Smart Links

[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.

[Rune Rasmussen]

We have both, and have always been a very Microsoft heavy company.
Atlassian and Confluence sort of came in from the side lines some years ago.

SharePoint is our intranet.
This is where we have information relevant to everyone. Control over who gets to edit and what they can edit is ruled with an iron fist.
Any information here is also in a very finished state and is not prone to regular changes.

Confluence on the other hand is used for information and documentation that has a much narrower audience and is generally understood to be more of a living thing where changes may happen more frequently.

Everyone needs to be able to access the employee handbooks, but not everyone needs to be able to access the technical documentation for our Jira setup.

We generally urge our users to NOT store files directly in Confluence and rather to use Teams/OneDrive for that as file management in Confluence is basically impossible.

Sometimes I think about challenging this setup and putting on a show about what we could potentially do with Confluence, but then I remember that we would have to almost triple our Confluence license cost and quickly forget about it again.

[Darin - Opus Guard]

For help getting the same type of record management and classification, check out Content Retention Manager for Confluence. It's built off similar premises of Sharepoint's policy engine. Let me know if I can help!

[Klaida_Communardo Products]

Hi @Artem Taranenko 

Hi, yes, many orgs use SharePoint and Confluence.

Typically, SharePoint is the repository (files, folders, lists), while Confluence is used for collaboration and documentation, and Jira for task tracking.

To avoid duplicating files, version conflicts, and tool switching, teams often bring SharePoint content into Confluence or Jira (instead of copying it). This keeps SharePoint as the source of truth while allowing teams to work where they already are.

Apps like SharePoint Connector for Confluence and SharePoint Connector for Jira support this and respect SharePoint permissions.