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Why Documentation in Confluence?
Steffen Burzlaff
What started as a wiki-based knowledge management platform has grown into a versatile, collaborative, feature-packed workspace that offers the perfect solution for authoring, managing and publishing documentation and other types of content. Read on to learn why Confluenceis the right documentation tool for your team.
What is Confluence?
Confluence is a software developed by Atlassian that serves as a remote-friendly team workspace. It's designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration among team members, regardless of their location. The name "Confluence" is likely chosen to represent the convergence or "coming together" of people, ideas, and information in a single, unified platform. It's a place where teams can "confluence" or meet to collaborate and share knowledge effectively.
It's Simple to Use
When it comes to writing, a difficult editor can spoil the experience. DITA- and markup-based solutions can be awesome, but the implementation time, extensive configuration, and maintenance of multiple systems and automations becomes tedious. Additionally, the editor can be hard to use, and difficult to master.
Confluence uses a simple, intuitive editor so your team can start working quickly. Using the trusty toolbar, it's easy to add headings, images, tables, lists, and more. The editor is one big blank canvas upon which your team can craft your documentation.
Collaborate with Your Team
Confluence is built for collaboration so your team can write as quickly as ideas come to you. This empowers everyone to work together to maintain and improve documentation. There are several ways to collaborate on your documentation in Confluence. Here are just a few to help you start producing beautiful documentation:
Spaces — Everyone on the team can use spaces in Confluence for both internal and external documentation. This means all your content is searchable in one system.
Write together — Multiple team members can work on the same page at the same time. While one person writes a new section, someone else can revise another.
Commenting — Whether it's on text, a file, or an entire page, team members can quickly add their thoughts as comments, and @mention team members to make changes collaboratively.
Sharing — Share pages quickly within your team to collect feedback.
Notifications — Each team member can receive notifications when pages they care about are created or changed.
What's more, Confluence's ease of use and versatility means it can be used throughout your organization to create and manage all kinds of content and projects.
You can break down silos and guarantee your team will be in the same system, at the same time, on the same page – quite literally.
Learn more about collaborating in Confluence.
Use It Anywhere, Any Time
Maybe you work from home, or you like to focus by camping out in breakout rooms away from your desk. Perhaps you work remotely on a totally different schedule than the rest of your team. No worries, Confluence works that way too. Confluence is a web app, so you can use it on any computer, even in the most remote location. It's great for teams that are all in the same office or distributed around the world.
Also, you know the documentation approach that requires you to install an app on your computer, manage files, push changes to servers, and hope you don't lose your work? No worries, Confluence doesn't work that way. Teams can easily collaborate because no one needs to install an app or download files on their computer. If you want to know more, maybe grab a cup of coffee with your administrator and discuss these cool features:
Server, Data Center, or Cloud — You can run Confluence on a single server, a cluster of servers, or have it hosted.
Updates — Confluence is updated often, so you can stay up-to-date easily.
Scalability — Confluence is a great tool for small teams and scales to the entire enterprise. We've seen 200,000+ users working in Confluence together.
Learn more about getting started as a Confluence Administrator.
Extend It with Apps
Confluence is always there for you, it's lovable, and you can teach it new tricks. With Atlassian Marketplace, you can browse for and easily install apps that extend your Confluence functionality. Like writing, apps improve over time with easy updates. Atlassian Marketplace has so many great apps to help you perfect your documentation toolchain. Here are a few examples:
Writing and formatting
draw.io Diagrams — A powerful, easy to use, and secure diagramming app with a huge library of shapes.
Gliffy Diagrams — An easy-to-use diagramming app geared toward communication, collaboration, and fast sharing.
Numbered Headings — A simple app that automatically numbers headings as you write.
Workflow and version management
Comala Document Management — A workflow app where you can create simple or complex reviews, tasks, and approvals processes.
Scroll Documents — Control versions, track changes, and manage your content development workflow with this app.
Content publishing
Comala Publishing — This app enables you to use "between-space" publishing to keep draft pages and spaces separate from your finished public work.
Scroll PDF Exporter — Turn your Confluence pages into PDF documents with rich output and full control over styling with this Server and app.
Scroll Viewport — Publish your Confluence documentation as a help center: customize the theme, connect with Google Analytics & your support system with this app.
Explore even more apps on Atlassian Marketplace.
Confluence in Action
Adapting to your personal style, Confluence provides a unique and beautiful user experience. Here are just a few examples of documentation written in Confluence:
Atlassian — Hey, this is the team that makes Confluence! Atlassian uses multiples spaces to separate documentation for each product with awesome search functionality so you can quickly find what you're looking for.
BMC — BMC uses expand macros and clear content overviews to quickly answer questions.
Comalatech — Comalatech uses an image-rich navigation in their custom theme to bring their brand personality into their documentation.
Igel — The unique theme Igel created really brings their brand together.
