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I missed this post letting us know the feature was being removed, so I just thought something was broken. I agree with much of what has been said here. What's the point of keeping documents in Confluence if we can't edit them there.
There should have been something available to replace it, before it was removed.
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April 11, 2022 edited
Dear Atlassian Community,
This is Divya, I’m a Product Manager on our Confluence Cloud team. We see your feedback on removal of the Companion App in the Cloud, and would love to hear from you.
We want to learn about your needs as we explore a native replacement feature. Please book some time over Zoom to chat: Divya Sriram Calendly .
Thanks for engaging with the community, if I may attempt to summarise the community feedback here, as I think it is evident in this post.
We, as paying customers of Confluence, would love to work with Atlassian on improving the ability to edit documents in confluence.
The problem is that this forum thread is regarding the fact the Companion App was disabled and taken away from us prior to a replacement being available, this has left many of us in terrible situations, damaged our reputations as technical advisors etc.
So, assuming listening to the community includes actually following through with action after listening then there are two solutions A - Re-enable the Companion App until a replacement is available B - Release the replacement solution
I look forward to hearing more from Atlassian on this issue ASAP, as for many of this it is highly urgent as it is not an over-exaggeration to say that this is causing businesses to look for alternative intranet solutions that include document management.
@Avni Barman your workaround leaves local copies of files on computers, which is problematic for some document types. Like others here, we never experienced the bugs to which you refer and find your stats hard to believe. A workaround that you've not suggested is that we use SharePoint instead of Confluence, is this something you'd recommend?
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@Dave Patrick That is what we have begun doing. We are also now storing our documents in SP instead of Confluence. Creating pages is not as nice in SP as Confluence, but having to use multiple solutions is too difficult, so we've begun the migration to SP now against our desire to do so.
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Back on 25th January this year (precisely 80 days ago) , Avni from Confluence wrote on page 1 of this blog:
"Rather than investing team resources to fix this, we decided to put those resources into making this feature available natively in the editor for all users. We hope to have a better estimate of the timing of that in the near future."
I put in my vote for that near future announcement of the timing, or more importantly the actual release of the new feature, is long overdue when the old feature has already been switched off ...
HOWEVER
We should all remember that the Companion App (apparently "buggy" according to Avni) could essentially be a CYBER SECURITY RISK for your organisation ..
I'll explain according to how I understood the explanation given to me by a specialist in such things so forgive me if it is slightly not technically accurate ... it gives me enough concern that I don't recommend this process
You have your browser open in Confluence 👌
You click <<Edit in Word>> on the screen.
That invokes a command on the REMOTE HOST SERVER .. wherever in the CLOUD world that you are connected to!
That command tells that remote server to effectively CONNECT into your PC (i.e. bypass all firewalls) and firstly OPEN WORD on your PC!! Tell your IT department that!
Then secondly to allow your WORD program on your PC to DIRECTLY EDIT the file (bypassing all firewalls again) which is sitting on the remote server!! Tell your IT department that!
When you finish editing and click SAVE, Word then sends an instruction to the remote server to save this new version of the file (bypassing all your firewalls) ... OK .. this is the same "save on the server" process as uploading a file from your PC
I don't know ... but I imagine that a Cloud Sharepoint does the same thing because neither Confluence or Sharepoint are "apps" running on your PC .. it is just a browser interface!
Now I know that using a wiki in a browser to do any Confluence (or Sharepoint) activity is invoking the command to run on the remote server ... but that is very different to that remote server then invoking a command to be carried out on your PC (Open Word to edit this file)
So .. if Atlassian are working on a more "native" system which operates from the Editor toolbar .. great. Although, having this in the Editor toolbar is not the same as the old Companion App <<Edit in Word>> in View mode
The Companion App integration is not a cyber security risk. Your description about how the feature works is wrong.
It sounds like you're referring to the legacy "Edit in Office" feature, which was also known as Office Connector and is still available in Confluence Server/DC (but has been removed from Cloud for 5+ years). This uses the standard WebDav protocol, which I believe SharePoint also uses. I can elaborate on the technical details for this feature if needed, but that should not be relevant to this thread. I would like to make it clear that even for "Edit in Office", the web server is not controlling the user's machine in any way. The web server is not triggering/pushing the file to open on the user's machine, the file is opened via a URL in the browser which uses the Microsoft Office protocol, this allows Office to open and then pull the file from the web server.
The Companion App is a desktop app which communicates with Confluence. There is no connection initiated by the "remote server" to the user's local machine, the remote server has no control on the users machine, the remote server has no access to your machine. The Companion App makes requests to the remote server, just as your browser would. It automates and simplifies the file change management functionality, however, it is technically equivalent to manually downloading and uploading the file through the browser. It also does not bypass firewalls.
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I might not be following exactly what your saying, but as far as I understand
"So something told my Word program to open!!"
Yes, you did when you
"Then chose on the "preview" screen to "Edit with Word""
No different than when you click a PDF on a website and it opens in acrobat reader, whatever the browsers associated action is will occur. The website can't force word to open on your PC without you clicking the "Edit with Word" option, so I don't really see the security concern
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yes I clicked "Edit with Word" button ON THE CONFLUENCE SCREEN in my browser
But at least to me, that means Confluence "SENT" the instruction to my PC. Perhaps that is "just how browsers work" that I don't understand with code in the background of the screen.
But certainly I did not click "OPEN WORD" as a normal icon on my desktop
But regardless .. the point is moot for CLOUD
The problem is CLOUD currently has NO WAY to edit the document without first downloading
.. and hence you now have these reactions of people bypassing the now "function-impaired"/"missing function" Confluence and choosing Sharepoint ...
Ever seen the Black Knight scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail movie?
I have commented on this thread before the app was pulled. But now that the companion app is gone, I can say that being forced to work with local copies has already caused file conflicts and has thus wasted our valuable time and money. Thank you for your excellent decision, @Avni Barman
Unacceptable .... how can you call yourself a document collaboration platform if you don't supply proper functionality to easily maintain documents? Just stopping this functionality and mentioning that somewhere in the future this will be solved ('when exactly?') is a very poor approach.
This is extremely frustrating to have this feature removed just 5 months after we migrated from on-prem to cloud. This would have been a deal-breaker for me in moving to cloud if I had known about it 6 months ago.
This is quite disappointing for us and our customers that the feature has been removed without a replacement yet.
Is there an ETA for the native implementation?
Does a cloud ticket exist we can refer to?
Our customer is wondering if the have to buy a paid app or if they can wait for 1-2 months and it will be implemented.
Also the fact that the upload of the same file twice in the edit mode of a page leads to multiple icons is very bad UX in our opinion. Furthermore, it's not possible to change the appearence of uploaded files to a links.
Why is Atlassian removing more and more features in Cloud that have been there on Server/DC? It's hard to understand how we can persuade our customers to move to Cloud if this continues like that.
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There is and drop-in replacement/alternative to the Companion app called GoEdit.
GoEdit has been created and offered way before the Companion app (since 8 years and since 3 years on the cloud) has been created and will be there for a much longer time since it is multi-platform and multi-product.
Sounds great Eugen. Would have thought 8 yrs would have been enough to fill in the Security Self-Assessment Program & become part of Bug Bounty though :(
Hi. We have recently migrated to Cloud and now I am looking for a possibility to edit .pages files directly on Confluence as we used to do on Server. How this can be done? Thanks!
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We don't need a file replacing feature. One of the best features of the Companion was to allow was to allow editing of an attached file, with it's own native app on your desktop. Consistently for many years this worked. As said in an earlier post, not everyone uses Google Drive. None of the Marketplace apps are sufficient to be able to do this. Very disappointed.
I've been very successful pasting a one drive link to a document into Confluence. I didn't think I could get by without the editor, but luckily everyone in my organization has access to the one drive, so in this use case it gets us by.
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