Tried Using SharePoint as a Wiki... Why Confluence Works Better

[#1]

The problem nobody admits they have …

Most organizations don’t actually lack documentation. What they lack is trust in their documentation.

People don’t know which version is current, which page is safe to edit, or where the “real” source of truth lives. As a result, onboarding turns into a series of conversations instead of a learning process, and teams rely more on chat messages than on written knowledge.

Very often, the story starts with a reasonable assumption:

“We already have Microsoft stack and SharePoint. Let’s use it as our wiki.”

What you can try to do with SharePoint

Intention is always simple. A single place where teams could document how things work, share decisions, and gradually build a knowledge base that grows with the organization.

At first glance, SharePoint setup fit perfecty. Document libraries, folders, versioning, permissions - everything seems ready for a knowledge base. And yes, SharePoint has a wiki module, so technically we could create pages, link content, and store information. What else we need to decide that it would be the best tool?

Yeah.. Technically nothing but over time you quickly realize that, maintaining this system start to feel heavy. Every meaningful update required opening a document, thinking about ownership or permission, and worrying whether changing something might break an existing process. People hesitate to update information because it feel “official” and hard for them to change.

You end up with with a though that knowledge is indeed somehow technically stored — but it is not really alive.

Where SharePoint breaks as a knowledge base

Documents are not knowledge

A document encourages a very specific mindset. It feels finished, owned, and formal. Even when collaboration is technically possible, people hesitate. Editing someone else’s document feels intrusive, and improvements often end up as comments instead of actual changes.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is never finished. It evolves as teams learn, adapt, and refine their ways of working. When knowledge is locked inside documents, updates become slower, duplication increases, and soon multiple “almost correct” versions start to exist side by side.

Structure becomes a negotiation

As the amount of content grows, structure becomes harder to maintain. Every new document raises questions: where should it live, who should have access, and how does it relate to existing content?

Because these decisions take time, people naturally choose the path of least resistance. Yes! They save where they already have permissions or reuse existing folders even if they are not a perfect fit. Over time, the structure stops reflecting how people think and starts reflecting a history of compromises.

At that point, the system makes sense mainly to those who built it…

Search replaces understanding — but only partially

SharePoint search is pretty powerful, but it assumes that users already know what they are looking for. New team members often don’t. They search for concepts, not filenames, and they don’t know which document contains the answer.

When people repeatedly ask questions in Teams or Slack instead of searching, it’s not because search is bad. It’s because the system doesn’t support exploration and learning. Search alone can’t replace clear, human-oriented knowledge structure.

The mindset shift: documents vs pages

The real breakthrough is not about features or integrations. It is about understanding that SharePoint and Confluence are built around different mental models. SharePoint is optimized for managing documents in which is really good! Confluence is optimized for building shared understanding. Once you recognize that difference, the choice became much clearer.

What changed when you move the same page content to Confluence?

Pages invite collaboration

A Confluence page feels less formal than a document. It doesn’t signal “this is finished” - it signals “this can be improved”. People are far more willing to fix outdated sections, add missing context, or clarify confusing parts without asking for permission first.. And other people see what changed instantly.. That improve collaboration even more..

Over time, content quality improved not because of strict rules, but because everything became more natural.

Structure follows thinking, not storage

Instead of folders, Confluence uses a page hierarchy that reflects how topics relate to each other. This make it easier to decide where new content belongs and how it connects to existing knowledge.

Navigation start to tell a story. New team members could browse, not just search, and gradually build an understanding of how the organization works.

Documentation becomes part of the workflow

The tight integration with Jira change how documentation is used. Decisions, requirements, and technical context could be linked directly to the work that triggered them.

Documentation is not something only created after the fact. It became part of the conversation while work was happening, which significantly increased its relevance and accuracy.

An honest truth: SharePoint is not the villain

SharePoint is extremely good at what it was designed for. It excels at document management, compliance-heavy scenarios, and situations where control and governance are more important than open collaboration.

Problems arise only when we expect it to behave like a wiki…

The real mistake companies make

The most common mistake is not choosing the “wrong” tool. It’s assuming that one platform should cover every use case.

The most effective environments I’ve seen use SharePoint for controlled documents and Confluence for shared knowledge. Each tool plays to its strengths, and teams spend less time fighting the system.

Build in Confluence export and store in SharePoint. That makes more sense!

One question that clarifies everything

If you are deciding today, ask yourself a simple question:

Do we want to store information, or do we want people to use knowledge?

The answer usually makes the decision obvious.

My final thought

Confluence is not a replacement for SharePoint.

It’s a complement — and that’s exactly why it works.

Do you agree? 

[Martin Runge]

Hi Mirek,
Great article! However, I respectfully challenge one specific recommendation you made: "Build in Confluence export and store in SharePoint."

In my experience, physically moving or duplicating content from Confluence to SharePoint often creates a dangerous "Double Content" dilemma. Exporting a page to a PDF or Word document and storing it in a SharePoint library effectively creates two artifacts for the same information.
This can wreak havoc on Enterprise Search (whether you are using Microsoft Search, Atlassian Rovo, or a third-party tool). When a user searches for "Project X Requirements," they will likely see both the Confluence page (the living, current version) and the SharePoint document (the static, potentially outdated export). It becomes tough for the search engine to rank the "correct" one higher, and even harder for the end-user to know which is the Single Source of Truth.
I generally advise clients to keep the "living" content strictly in Confluence to avoid versioning confusion, or to link the Confluence page in SharePoint if visibility is the goal, rather than duplicating the artifact. Curious to hear how you handle the search relevance and versioning conflicts in that export scenario!
Best regards, Martin

[Mirek]

Hi @Martin Runge ,

Thank you for reading and feedback!

Yes, that is true if you think about one iteration that you end up with Confluence page that is exactly the same like an export that land on SharePoint especially when editing is allowed later on both platforms.

The point is that when you have two tools in your organization SharePoint is better in storing and viewing static files (especially those from Microsoft) that we know are the "latest approved version" so export from Confluence is a form of a document snapshot that is approved and could be widely used after that by thousand of users in the organisation that mainly do not need to think about "is this outdated or not?".

When Confluence is always used for collaboration to create / update regularly content without any form of problem then is the best approach. Someone have to review it and once ok -> assign to it a version and store it on SharePoint. There could be a list or releases also on Confluence linked to SharePoint - if properly marked and communicated then we got everything to have a proper document release management system.

At the end you create a process where people (and AI too) knows that here are the versions that might be simply changed but always the final approved version is released regularly (manual or automatically - it is up to you how you define the process) and formal approved versions document are stored on a repository (and SharePoint is pretty good to be that place)

So to give you an example legal team collaborates on Confluence and create a agreement template and on the other hand a sales representative need to provide the most recent version agreement draft to a customer… So he is 100% sure that latest version is on SharePoint (see the version, release date.. ) and since both tools are linked he can check what is under development also on Confluence - so before sending this to a customer he knows everything without asking anyone including what might change in near future once approved and when verified by legal team. In addition he can also jump in to a conversation on Confluence if he need a change or clarify something before sending or add hot feedback when customer give a valid point to change the document (template) for future.

When the same legal team would have to work on a Word document which would be initially stored on SharePoint collaboration is less effective and results are worse. So that is why I mentioned that creating / updating on Confluence and exporting makes much more sense than thinking than keeping everything in one tool.