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 - especially one's that have recently starting using Confluence! Since we have a whole group dedicated to new users (woo!), I'd love to know...

What was the reason you started using Confluence?

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

[Josh Martin]

My company was a heavy user of documentation in Microsoft Word.  These word docs would be passed as attachments via e-mail and saved on shared network drives or on our SharePoint Intranet as a document library.  For me, word docs always felt clunky, slow, and just all around a bit dated.  I wanted something super simple that I could write documentation in a standardized way and be able to easily share the documentation with others.  That's when Confluence entered the picture.  I love it so much and I feel like it is so flexible and can be anything we want.  Currently, my department is the only user, but we're getting ready to roll out Jira Service Management using Confluence for our Knowledgebase-- I think once the rest of the business units in my company see how flexible and easy it is to find documentation, we'll start rolling it out to more people.

[Jena Slezak]

That's awesome @Josh Martin ! Love that you're paving the way for the rest of your company. If you don't mind me asking, what department do you work in?

[Josh Martin]

@Jena Slezak I manage a small team of developers and analysts;  I like to call our department the "Dev Apps Team" 

[Jena Slezak]

@Josh Martin so glad to hear it's working. Would love to hear how the company-wide rollout goes! Good luck!!

[Ollie Guan]

The company I work for has been using Confluence since 2013, when it mainly served the R&D team for requirements management, meeting minutes, collaborative editing, etc.

In 2019, we upgraded the original server to Data Center. Today, we have more than 30,000 users using Confluence for daily work collaboration, more than 3 million page visits per month, more than 300,000 new pages.

Confluence has been fully used in all functions of the company. From the initial R&D team to the current group-wide business team, Confluence provides us with a stable and high-performance cross-departmental collaboration platform.

You can read more about this part here.

https://www.atlassian.com/zh/customers/ctrip

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Ctrip-s-Confluence-data-center-operation-practice-with-more-than/ba-p/1726224

[Karina S. {Elements}]

@Jena Slezak hope you're happy in your new role! I just joined the marketing team at Elements last month and we use confluence for almost everything: documenting, collaborating, planning... 

[Musa Efe Erten]

Hi there,

We had started using confluence about 1.5 years ago within the product team. Our team is responsible mainly about analysis, test and support activities for our internal customers besides and within new project dealings and new product developments.

Previously we had knowledge silos in our team. Sharing and collaboration culture is also low. Thus, we had spend our time/effort mostly "to discover already discovered knowledge" from mails, word docs and people minds. Most of the time we had found old or misguided knowledge that at the end of the day we did double checks :)

Our onboarding/orientation process was long-demotivating which brings "teaching efforts" to experienced team members because there were no knowledge base which new members can benefit from as a self service. In stressful moments this bootleneck had created demotivation for new members also. In remote working world that we are experiencing right now people can feel lonely easily.

After some research of best practices & literature research we had started "knowledge management practices" in our team. We tried to execute in an experimental way because at the start we had not know which practice we can used to or which practice will deliver benefit us. So we had started with 9 practices consist with "creating knowledge base in confluence" or "get together and present the work/deliverable" (as a team collaboration activity.)

I had surveyed my team as before/after perspective. Results are encouraging and motivating. Approx +%85 we had created team/employee satisfaction along with +%50 efficiency in onboarding process. I plan to get details of the survey and to create infographic about it (will post in here :)).

We are in journey. We are experimenting. We are happy to use confluence. But we have lots to do. We constantly seek new/efficient ways to use/interact with knowledge as we are trying the think it as a team member.

[Jena Slezak]

Wow, thanks @Ollie Guan ! Going to give those articles a read now!

[Shweta Ramdas]

@Jena Slezak , We are using Confluence platform in my company. I wanted to study confluence features in details and to learn how this platform can help technical communicators to create a clear and simple documentation.

[Umer Sheikh]

@Jena SlezakWe are using Confluence for our regular retrospective meetings. However, I am not very familiar with the whole product.