At my organization, we are using Confluence 5.9.7 for online documentation and collaboration. We have run across some peculiar behavior:
If I am editing a page, and then another member of my team starts editing the same page, I get a little notice at the top saying that this other user is making changes. That is good and expected.
However, if that other person hits "Save" before I do, then when I end up trying to save MY changes, Confluence almost always fails to merge them together. The strangeness is that we are editing COMPLETELY different parts of the page.
The result is that a diff screen comes up and I am given the option to either cancel my changes or overwrite the other person's changes. As an example of when this happened recently, I looked at the diff and it showed my additions near the very top of the document. Then, I had to scroll WAAAAY down toward the bottom of the document (pretty large wiki page) to see the other person's edits, which it showed would be removed if I hit the "Overwrite" button.
This seems like a best-case scenario for any sort of merge process. Not only did we not edit the same lines, we didn't even come close to editing the same sections of the document. So why did Confluence fail to merge?
This has happened so many times that my team has resorted to doing their documentation work in Word documents and then coordinating when they will try to copy-paste their changes into the Confluence page so that they don't end up clobbering each other.
It has also caused us to talk with our IT group to upgrade to Confluence 6+ so that we can use the newer collaborative editing feature. But I feel like this shouldn't be necessary for our use-case. Confluence should be able to merge these kinds of edits together.
