Document Library for Confluence

[Madhu Reddy]

Hello,

We are new to Confluence.

Is there any possibility to build a Document library in Confluence similar to Sharepoint Document library, Where we can manage the version history, alerts, columns, search tags... etc.

Looks like smart attachments is not available for Confluence Could, Please suggest an alternatives..Thanks

Madhu

[Mike Rathwell]

Hi @Madhu Reddy 

So... short answer is you CAN but that is leaving most of the power of Confluence on the floor. Having been in both worlds, I find SharePoint to be one of the least capable of this genre of tool and, because all the things are hard to do in SharePoint it does usually end up being used in the manner you describe; a clumsy file server.

I have this conversation with many coming from the rather limited world of SharePoint.

The best way is to NOT attach documents to Confluence. Rather, directly create Confluence content. Existing documents do, btw, copy/paste in very well. The pages created are versioned with commits attributed to who published them and it's easy to look at what changed between versions. Even better is that your documentation gets USED. The must frustrating thing for most is to see a title that seems to be what you want and, only after downloading to open separately, find out it's not. Moreover, if a reader lands on the CONTENT right up front, they are far more likely to read it rather than just not bother with the rodeo of the download/open.

Every group of humans I have gotten down that road has come to embrace it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Confluence is not a file storage place where documents go to die.  It is a wiki.  The pages in it are intended to be living documents.

Because it's not a file share, its file handling is pretty primitive - you attach files to pages, they get a simple sequential version, and there are macros that can read the attachments to extract bits of the content, or all of it, and display it on a page.

Pages are versioned, with a full history, and have tools to compare versions, they have a page tree ("folders"), alerts, tables, tags and many more functions - they are the main thing you should be thinking of as "documents"

The structure of Confluence Cloud does not let people write apps that do document management - it's not a good way to use Confluence.

[Mike Rathwell]

What @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- said. Even your question title kind of gets it wrong and is predicated on the clumsy nature of SharePointless. You don't need a documentation library for Confluence. It is best USED as your documentation library as is. 

I predict when you pivot to this mode of usage, you will come to view SharePoint as I do but won't describe because this is a family program