Trial: Inaccurate Support Articles for Confluence

[Will Smith]

I'm currently trialing the latest confluence on behalf of my company and, having never configured it before, am finding the entire Atlassian domain incredibly inconsistent in its navigation, vague in its instructions, and inaccurate in its descriptions. Right now, I just want to install an addon.

1. All I want to do is add the "Refined" theme for Confluence. The marketplace has "install" instructions tab saying you will be re-routed to a page where you can enter your license, (after downloading installation files). That never happens. I found a support article that talks about how to upload an app manually, but that gear icon is nowhere to be found. There isn't even a "top navigation bar" in the confluence web app.

2. Navigating the Atlassian domain: Literally every page I've been on has a different top navigation design, and none of them follow common or familiar design patterns. One even switches to using tiny font seemingly unnecessarily. I never know where I am in the app and have resulted to bookmarking pages because of how many pages you have to navigate through just to get to one that links to the one you're looking for.

3. How in the world is 7 days a long enough trial period to figure all of this stuff out? Unless this trial was my only job, I wouldn't have the time to not only solve all these problems on my own (if solvable), much less get around to actually using the actual application to test.

4. I've only accessed confluence via web app, so when I tried to sign up for a trial, I was confused as to why it wanted me to download a bunch of stuff. I tried to follow all of the instructions for Lenox, but am not a developer and just gave up. Finally, I stumbled on how to set it up in the cloud, but still have the problem of not being able to find features I am looking for because they are not organized in a "natural" way, don't exist where the support articles say they do, or the configuration turns out to be located at a different url.

My guess is that Atlassian is sort of piece-milled together, with not a whole lot of clear communication happening between departments. That says to me they either aren't using their own product (which explains a lot) or their product is not as useful as it seems.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I think the main thing you have missed is that there is a massive difference between Server and Cloud systems. 

You've swapped from trying a Server install (which is really only a single download and install unless you picked an old release) to a Cloud install (which, despite what I just said, is still a damn sight easier than Server.  But carried on reading documentation for Server. 

As the two types of system have very different layouts and functions, but a lot in common too, yes, you're going to find docs that appear to be relevant but don't make a lot of sense.

Have a look to the top right of the docs - many have a Cloud/Server<version-dropdown> to switch between the systems.  It's also worth a look at the urls

Despite all of that, I really do understand why it looks confusing, especially if you've come into it at the point they don't expect you to as a new starter!

[Will Smith]

Ahhh, that helps a lot. Thanks so much!