Why did you start using Confluence?

[#1]

Happy Friday, Confluence-ers! Jena here from Confluence's marketing team 👋 I joined Atlassian at the end of last year and I'm still trying to learn as much as I can about our awesome customers. If you'd like to help a girl out (😇), I'd love to know...

What was the reason you started using Confluence?

Sound off in the comments! 📣 Excited to hear from you all!

[Eugénie Denarnaud]

Love this question!
We've been using Confluence for about 7 years, if not more now. At first it was used by R&D teams only, mostly because they were using Jira.
However, we decided that a single source of truth was the best option to support our growth, and gradually got all teams to use Confluence to formalize their knowledge. We didn't believe in making a difference between "tech" and the "rest of the world" as we are a SaaS company - product information is key for everyone.

All employees get an account on their first day. Our most seen spaces are R&D, Product Knowledge, People and Revenue Teams Spaces.

I honestly was planning on switching to another wiki solution at some point, due to UX issues which prevented most of our non-tech users from using it smoothly, but some of the latest releases made me change my mind and hope for even more improvements.

[reuben_hollifield]

We started using Confluence as a system settings documentation tool when we initially deployed Jira Server in 2018 (JSD and JSW).  As we make changes to system settings, we update the corresponding Confluence page with the new information. 

The big advantage of using Confluence for this, rather than other tools, is that we can see version history and compare them to see what changed, who changed it and when it was changed.  

We also use it for knowledgebase articles connected to our Service Desk, process documentation across many departments, and a little bit of project management.  It's a great tool and very helpful!  :) 

[Amanda Barber]

We use it as a Product Team to maintain a single source of truth, write out product specs, keep meeting notes and sometimes to create dashboards for users who don't have access to Jira (or no need to frequently use it.) Our devs use it to refer to our product specs while ticketing work, document everything, and keep meeting notes/agendas/etc. 

We love how easily Jira tickets can be linked, as well as the vast number of great macros.

[Jena Slezak]

@Eugénie Denarnaud thank you for this! Agreed, it's easier when everyone is using the same central systems for knowledge sharing. What challenges were your non-tech users running into, if you don't mind sharing?

[Jena Slezak]

Version history is a game changer @reuben_hollifield !!! Totally agree. What teams use it for project management? How do they like it?

[Eugénie Denarnaud]

@Jena Slezak in a nutshell, the pages layout were pretty colorless and difficult to read. The creation button was difficult to see and you had to know the editor and macros well to create a readable page.

The left menu also tends to change the layout of a page and you have know that you should collapse it while reading.

Now I would say our major navigation paint point, aside from search, is that it's difficult to navigate in page from one header to the other (anchors work, but it's manual and you have to know they exist), and navigating from one page to the other is difficult too. When you click a confluence link you don't really know where you are and you're more likely to bounce after having read the page instead of discovering other content :)

[Jena Slezak]

Appreciate the insight, @Eugénie Denarnaud !!

[Giovanni Schiano-Moriello]

Great question! I initially started using it as part of a JSD/JSW implementation to house the JSD Knowledgebase.

[Ammar Ahmed Butt]

Here goes! 

Back in Oct 2020, I started my career as an intern (project coordinator), I was given a support project which I was supposed to manage, there was no documentation, when, how, why, what was done, what's remaining, how do we support, nothing. Although the company was paying for Confluence and JIRA. I started exploring it, and honestly my whole company was like, why didn't we used it this way? Why were we not using it but we were paying for it. 

Now I'm leading all the processes plus managing a major product, each and every step, every MoM, every requirement, from 1st step till last one, everything is documented. I just love to document things and keep things in order. :D

[oldfieldjohn882]

I only ever used confluence in a project management capacity to track various tasks on various projects through the systems development life cycle, the software development life cycle, and the application development life cycle and was introduced to the application through a previous employer, I am also wanting to use it for games development software tracking however there's a process of reforming and or reengineering the requirements on a daily, weekly, monthly, and or yearly basis which requires refactoring information and assigning tasks to myself and or others for completion which then branches out into various industries and topics and is often blocked by financials, laws, people, governments, geography, intelligence, qualifications and skills requirements, however, am excited to use the application to get going. I  am just not quite sure how to get going independently without an employer and or a budget. So it's sort of just formed on a company, created a whole variety of project ideas.

[Andy Gladstone]

My previous company became Confluence Server customer in 2011 when we migrated from our internal Linux based Wiki server to Confluence. The Wiki project produced some great content and began the process of centralizing our knowledge, but ultimately failed due to lack of contribution across the organization. The only way to create or edit pages was through Wiki Markup Language, which very few team members knew or were willing to learn. So there was a high consumption, low contribution. When we looked for a replacement the requirements were simple WYSIWYG editing and access to all. Confluence Server met both of those needs, and it immediately helped us reverse the consumer trend into a contributor and collaborative culture. 

Sparing many of the details, fast forward 11 years and my current organization has undergone a similar transformation, albeit from dissimilar origins, and has a vibrant and active Confluence Cloud site that has become the centralized knowledgebase and source of truth for all documentation related to every area of the business. It has completely transformed our ability to service our customers and share knowledge internally and is a pillar of our success in not only surviving, but thriving through the Coronavirus era.

[Jena Slezak]

That's amazing @Ammar Ahmed Butt ! Are any other teams using it too?

[Jena Slezak]

@Andy Gladstone if there was a love button, I'd hit it! That's a great story. Love that other teams have adopted it as well. Are there any business teams that use it more than others?

[Andy Gladstone]

@Jena Slezak thank you! Adoption has been so wide in our organization, almost every team uses Confluence extensively. The most active teams are our Development Team, Product Team, ISV Sales Team, Customer Service Team and Applications & Underwriting Team. I also need to shout out our Technical Support Team for a recent push and effort to reel in the sprawl they had with documentation across OneNote, Google Docs and SharePoint to bring all of it into Confluence and retire the outdated pages on the other platforms.

[Ammar Ahmed Butt]

Yes! My whole company is following the process I made, Sharon recently published an article, Community Leader Ammar Butt

@Jena Slezak 

[Tere Pile]

Our development team has been using Confluence for 10+ years.  While we have other tools available to us, for core internal documentation, and communication it is essential. Inclusive of information we share to marketing or support teams who can then take 'make' client facing and share however the company sees fit in the other tools we have.  I personally feel it's far better than writing a document, working in sharepoint or salesforce so I promote it when I can.  That being said our license does limit larger user company wide, which is fine.  There are always things I'd live to see improved, w/out having to pay more for apps or going premium but not enough to change tools. 

[Sue Wilson]

When I first starting using Confluence, the biggest learning curve was the best way to set it up so that users would want to and continue to use it!  It was a tough sell because there were a lot of 'old school' users who liked to just type up a word doc and thought having to create a page in Confluence was too much work.  So, I started by creating a Company home page with cool 'lozenges' with pictures to guide them to their team spaces.  I then took some of their word docs and imported them directly into pages.  I showed them how they could import, type from scratch, and export as well as easy navigation to other team pages, and most of them jumped on board like their pants were on fire!!!  LOL  I call that a win!  To this day, as far as I know (left that company after 14 years), they still use it as their source of truth for everything company related!

[Wayne_Reilly]

First started using Confluence not long after it was available. Mainly to write up formulas for commercial property rent calculations so all our support people could find an easy way to check amounts. Later at other companies using Confluence for process documentation, automated testing progress, tracking regression testing with a large testing team and now for onboarding and getting up to speed new seasonal workers.