Combine SharePoint 2019 with Confluence Data Center

Sebastian Siegert

Hi everyone,

I'm working as a consult for a client who runs a wiki for 100.000+ users on Confluence Data Center and is establishing a SharePoint environment for their roughly 200.000 users.
My job is to create a concept to combine these two platforms and probably several more (local intranet, other websites in the network etc.) into one cohesive social intranet. Confluence will keep being the internal wiki, SharePoint will be the document exchange and collaboration system. My main goal is to make a proposal, which parts of the intranet should be hosted where but eventually the tools have to be linked together as closely as possible to improve the ease of use for users, especially those who have really good domain knowlegde but are not that tech-savvy.  

The basic idea is to have SharePoint 2019 as the central entity from where users can go everywhere. The first step in that direction would be to run a search in SharePoint and forward it to confluence. The results of the Confluence search should then be visualized in SharePoint, e.g. in a specific WebPart tha calls the REST API and (hopefully) gets back the results to visualize them. I've been in contact with the developers of the "Embedder for Confluence" plugin who, well, created a tool that enables embedding confluence in websites. However, they told me that they've not been able to create their plugin for the Data Center version of Confluence.

Are there limitations in the API that prohibit embedding Confluence Data Center into non-Atlassian software or would it generally be possible to embed parts of confluence into SharePoint?

I know that there have been questions regarding Confluence and SharePoint before but they were either verys old or did not provide an answer to my questions. I'd be grateful if you might have some ideas on the issue.

Regards
Sebastian

Bill Bailey

Hello @Sebastian Siegert , that is going to be tough, trying to mix a tool from 2010s with one from the 1990s. ;-) The two are somewhat orthogonal in concept.  Confluence works really well for collaboration of documentation source.  Sharepoint is file oriented allowing users to check out documents in Word, for example.

I think trying to marry the two into a cohesive system will be hard, and you will need to get a good understanding of what they want to do. At first blush, I would make Confluence the central point of the interface as it can handle the Intranet, where you could create Sharepoint dashboards within Confluence (mainly because the SharePoint UI is not really user friendly, and Confluence gives you access to modern code). 

I would also try to move them from storing content as Word files and move to Confluence pages to make full use of a modern toolset.

But yes, the Confluence API is very robust, so you can make calls externally without issues. Now displaying those results in Sharepoint would be highly challenging.

Good luck,

Bill