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Is anyone utilising Confluence as a document management tool?

Roan O'connor

Has anyone implemented confluence and utilising it as a document management solution.

How did you go about setting it up and do you still use it for this purpose? What challenges did you face while setting it up?

Is it a good tool to utilise for document management or do you have any other suggestions?

Accepted answers

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Gorka Puente {Appfire}

Hi @Roan O'connor,

Confluence is a really good tool for document management.

Being said that, your experience migrating to Confluence is going to be different depending on your current tool to manage documents (IBM Connections, SharePoint, Jive, Google docs,...). Here a comparison among three different alternatives. What's your context and minimum requirements?

I'd recommend these quick readings

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/confluence-evaluator-resources/confluence-document-management-system

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/confluence-evaluator-resources/confluence-business-case

In addition, I'd add that if you are also using Jira, the integration is just the best in the market

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/confluence-evaluator-resources/confluence-managing-documents-with-confluence-and-jira-together

And if there's a feature that Confluence doesn't have, I'm confident you'll find it in a third-party app through the marketplace

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/

Regards,

Gorka

Benji

Used confluence in different situations for document management. I found out that a tool is one thing, but to make sure its properly used you need to help people using it, consistently and actively.

unknown

Hi @Roan O'connor,

As Gorka said, Confluence is a nice tool for collaborative document management.

I actually work for K15t Software, a vendor of Confluence add-ons. One of the major challenges we've seen people facing when using Confluence for managing documents is that there are some difficulties when managing multi-page documents.

The main difficulty is that there's no way to version and track groups of pages as single units of content – this is only possible on a page level. This is problematic because more often than not, structuring documents across multiple pages is the natural way to go.

We actually made a solution to make this possible – it's called Scroll Documents. You can find out more info at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/k15t-scroll-document-versions-for-confluence/cloud/overview , and if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer them.

Cheers, Tom.

Roan O'connor

Thanks for the feedback and information, appreciate it.

Asko Kauppi

👍

Vadim Rutkevich_4dwnfh

Hi Roan,

please take a look at Smart Attachments for Confluence. It provides all the essential tools for document management in Confluence and neatly integrates with the native functionality.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop an email at vrutkevich@stiltsoft.com.

Thanks.

Sincerely, Vadim

Laura Schneider

Put another way, Confluence by itself without additional tools is a terrible tool for tracking multi-page documents. And, like a steel trap, content goes in Confluence but can't come out without additional tools to help the output since Confluence outputs only outdated Word and non-ADA compliant PDF files.

Heather Kendall

@Laura Schneider Do you have any alts that you would recommend?

Laura Schneider

Sorry, @Heather Kendall , I haven't personally found one yet, but then I'm a technical writer and do things completely differently: I work with other technical writers to document what SMEs know in professional tech comm software, such as FrameMaker, InDesign, Flare, RoboHelp, XHTML, and/or HTML+CSS.

A format + tool that my new department uses is documenting in ASCIIDoc language and outputting using Antorra, which I look forward to learning in the near future. As a 25+ year veteran in this field, technical writers just don't collaborate with SMEs in the way that Confluence is designed to support for purposes of creating end-user or other customer-facing, professional documentation.

Confluence is fine for brainstorming, taking meeting notes, sprint retrospectives, planning picnics, exchanging light internal company information, and doing other light collaborative pre-work that might possibly be picked up by a tech writer team at some future date, transferred to appropriate tech comm software, honed and formatted, and then used in formal, external-facing documentation.

But, that's not Confluence's designed intent and, as is implied if not made clear on this thread: Confluence alone is terrible for creating outputs of any kind. Perhaps by using the several mentioned third-party plugin tools you could get some simplistic, rudimentary outputs, but I am not familiar with any Confluence plugins and defer to those who are.

Matthew Joslin_AppFox_

Agree with everyone here! Quite a few teams use Confluence as a lightweight document management system but it doesn’t fully cover typical DMS or technical documentation needs out of the box (especially around lifecycle, approvals, and governance).

That’s usually where the gaps show up: structured review/approval flows, clear document states, and auditability aren’t really native.

A common way to bridge that is with apps. Workflows for Confluence lets you add clear document lifecycles (draft → review(s) → approved → expire → reapprove etc.) with version controls, automated actions and visibility, so you’re not relying on manual processes all the time.

Tools like Scroll Documents tend to focus more on managing and publishing structured documentation sets, whereas Workflows is more about governing and automating the lifecycle and approval process itself, so it fits well if your main goal is adding DMS-style control on top of existing content.

TL;DR - Confluence works! But most teams end up extending it to get there, particularly for compliance with things like ISO 9001 👍

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