Cost benefit of Confluence - working hours saved

Question

Dear community,

with the EOL for Data Center looming in the not so far distance, we are doing cost benefit analyses to help our management decide whether to move to Atlassian Cloud or look for other solutions.

I've been trying to (very roughly) quantify the working hours saved by using Confluence and am having diifficulty finding any concrete estimates.

Have you done this kind of estimate before? How did you go about quantifying hours saved? Or can you recommend any literature on the topic?

Thank you and happy new year, 
Luisa

Confluence systems admin

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Luisa Grams

Some factors to consider in trying to estimate time savings between the data center products and the Cloud products:

* How much time does your team spend maintaining the server for your data center instance including upgrading the OS, upgrading the database, and applying security patches?
* How much time does your team spend on upgrades of the Confluence application itself?

Neither of those task will be necessary with the Cloud product. Since it is a Software as a Service product, Atlassian does the work of maintaining the hosts and the application upgrades.

Jack Brickey · Answer

I am unsure how you would calculate "time saved". What will you compare to? The absence of any documentation tool or some other tool?

my $0.02 FWIW...

I think you need to ask if you benefit from a wiki application and therefore need it. Then do a comparison between Confluence and other options to make your decision.

considerations:

* feature comparison 
* effort and impact of changing apps (exporting/importing current pages, training users, user acceptance, etc.)
* pricing - look at pricing history for each to get an idea of what to expect down the road
* Stability of the companies

be sure that the selected solution provides a good solution for exporting pages for import to another platform if that becomes necessary down the road.