Confluence and SharePoint: what's the difference?

[Ada Chen]

Enterprises have plenty of options when it comes to collaboration software. Each tool has different strengths, how do our customers differentiate Confluence from file management systems like SharePoint?

Download this PDF to learn how enterprise organizations rely on Confluence for proactive collaboration and communication beyond file-sharing. You’ll learn how:

• Flexible use cases make Confluence a perfect fit for every team
• Confluence provides one place for your teams to work together
• Confluence allows you to easily manage content permissions and reduce administrative overhead
• Your team can customize and extend Confluence
• Teams use Confluence and SharePoint together

[Deleted user]

Why do we need to submit contact information just to read this PDF?

[Ada Chen]

Hi @[deleted] - This is a standard marketing practice for PDFs. If you prefer not to submit your information we've got lots of helpful articles on our blog too! http://atlassian.com/blog

[DPKJ]

@[deleted]you should also give skip option, to opt-out.

[John Dunkelberg]

It'd be nice to have a positional white paper like this with more depth.  We have Microsoft products highly used and are looking at when people should use Confluence and when they should use Sharepoint, Microsoft Groups, etc.  This paper is overly simplistic in narrowly presenting Confluence and Sharepoint.  If the intent is for Atlassian to have positive integrative experiences with the product group, it'd be nice to see evidence of that and a directional statement.

[Ada Chen]

Thanks for the feedback, @John Dunkelberg. We try to ensure content like this meets the lowest common denominator for most customers, and everyone has a their own unique setup and set of tools. Can you share a bit more about the other Microsoft products your teams are using and their use cases? 

[John Dunkelberg]

Part of the challenge is to rationalize use of: Confluence, Sharepoint Online, One Note, One Drive, Microsoft Groups, Microsoft Teams.  As a vendor I have every expectation that you would present your solution in the best light possible, of course, but each of these products has their own strengths.  We need to decide on best practices for where teams (who largely use Jira) store their meeting notes, internal IP on our product development (docs, pages, ppts, etc), retrospectives from sprints, root cause analysis, future planning and roadmaps.  It would be very interesting to see a whitepaper that presents Atlassian's argument for why your products are the right choice for such use cases, or how such might be handled on the Microsoft side but linked/integrated into the Atlassian side.

[James Dellow]

@John Dunkelberg I think it would be pretty tricky for Atlassian to write something definitive and convincing on this topic. However, your question reflects a widespread challenge that most enterprise-size organisations aren't 100% aligned with a single vendor. Some of the consulting work I do is specifically about addressing this issue, and while product strengths are a factor, there are lots of others. The overarching question is how mature and extensively has Office 365 been adopted?

[Ada Chen]

Hi all - just sharing an update that I'll be hosting a webinar in a few weeks on this exact topic! If you'd like to hear more in-depth analysis on some of the key differences, make sure to register: https://www.atlassian.com/webinars/software/confluence-and-sharepoint-whats-the-difference

We'll also have live Q&A at the end, so happy to discuss any other questions you may have on the broadcast!