Confluence (software)

Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki (collaboration software) developed by Australian software company Atlassian.[4] Atlassian wrote Confluence in the Java programming language and first published it in 2004. Confluence Standalone comes with a built-in Tomcat web server and hsql database, and also supports other databases.[5]

Confluence
Developer(s)Atlassian
Initial release25 March 2004 (2004-03-25)
Stable release
7.10.2[1] / 2021-01-19[±]
Written inJava
Operating system
Available inEnglish, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Russian, Swedish, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish[3]
TypeCollaborative software
LicenseProprietary
WebsiteConfluence - Team Collaboration Software

The company markets Confluence as enterprise software, licensed as either on-premises software or software as a service running on AWS.[6][7]

History

Atlassian released Confluence 1.0 on March 25, 2004, saying its purpose was to build "an application that was built to the requirements of an enterprise knowledge management system, without losing the essential, powerful simplicity of the wiki in the process."[8]

In recent versions, Confluence has evolved into part of an integrated collaboration platform[9] and has been adapted to work in conjunction with Jira and other Atlassian software products, including Bamboo, Clover, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye.[10]

In 2014, Atlassian released Confluence Data Center to add high availability with load balancing across nodes in a clustered setup.

Analysis

The book Social Media Marketing for Dummies in 2007 considered Confluence an "emergent enterprise social software" that was "becoming an established player."[11] Wikis for Dummies described it as "one of the most popular wikis in corporate environments," "easy to set up and use," and "an exception to the rule" that wiki software search capabilities don't work well.[12]

eWeek cited in 2011 such new features in version 4 as the auto-formatting and auto-complete, unified wiki and WYSIWYG, social network notifications and drag and drop integration of multimedia files.[13] Use cases include basic enterprise communication, collaboration workspaces for knowledge exchange, social networking, Personal Information Management and project management. German newspaper Computerwoche from IDG Business Media compares it to Microsoft SharePoint and finds it "a good starting point" as a platform for social business collaboration, while SharePoint is better suited to companies with more structured processes.[14]

Confluence includes set up CSS templates for styles and formatting for all pages, including those imported from Word documents. Built in search allows queries by date, the page's author, and content type such as graphics.

The tool has add-ons for integration with standard formats, with a flexible programmable API allowing expansion. The software is relevant as an outline tool for requirements that can be linked to tasks in the Jira issue tracker by the same company.[15]

Discontinuation of wiki markup

As of version 4.0, in 2011,[16] Confluence ended support for wiki markup language.[17] This led to a sometimes-heated discussion by some previous versions' users who objected to the change.[18] In response, Atlassian provided a source code editor as a plugin, which allows advanced users the ability to edit the underlying XHTML-based document source.[19] However, although the new source markup is XHTML-based, it is not XHTML compliant.[20]

Additionally, wiki markup can be typed into the editor and Confluence's autocomplete and auto-format function converts the wiki markup to the new format.[21] After the real-time conversion, content can not be edited as wiki markup again.

Security

Confluence Cloud data is encrypted in transit and at rest.[22]

Limitations

There is no standard way of adding captions to images, there are only workarounds.[23]

See also

References
  1. "Confluence Release Notes". Atlassian. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
  2. "Supported Platforms". Confluence Support. Atlassian. Retrieved 11 June 2018.
  3. "Language Pack Translations". Atlassian Documentation. Confluence User Community. Retrieved 19 September 2011.
  4. Krishna Sankar; Susan A. Bouchard (24 April 2009). Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals. Cisco Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-1-58705-763-2.
  5. "Configuring a datasource connection | Confluence Data Center and Server 7.10 | Atlassian Documentation". confluence.atlassian.com.
  6. "Atlassian Standard Infrastructure on AWS". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  7. Anja Ebersbach; Markus Glaser; Richard Heigl; Alexander Warta (2008). Wiki: Web Collaboration. Springer. pp. 337–349. ISBN 978-3-540-35150-4.
  8. "Atlassian releases new wiki: Confluence 1.0". Theserverside.com. Retrieved 19 September 2011.
  9. "Wiki tools are not all the same". KMWorld.com. 28 October 2009. Archived from the original on 7 September 2012. Retrieved 19 September 2011.
  10. "Integrate Jira and Confluence Wiki". Atlassian.com. Archived from the original on 13 May 2012.
  11. Singh, Shiv; Becker, Michael; Williams, Ryan (26 September 2009). Social Media Marketing For Dummies. John Wiley & Sons. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-470-28934-1.
  12. Woods, Dan; Thoeny, Peter (23 July 2007). Wikis for dummies. John Wiley & Sons. p. 193. ISBN 978-0-470-04399-8.
  13. Taft, Darryl K. (19 September 2011). "Atlassian Delivers Confluence 4". eWeek. Retrieved 24 March 2012.
  14. Schmidl, Jörg; Reebs, Johannes & Wucher, Oliver (16 March 2012). "Sharepoint versus Confluence und Jive". Computerwoche (in German). Retrieved 24 March 2012.
  15. "Confluence 5.4: Integrated with Jira like never before". Work Life by Atlassian. 3 December 2013.
  16. "Confluence 4.0 Release Notes". Atlassian.com.
  17. Atlassian. "Confluence 4.0 Editor - What's Changed for Users of the Old Rich Text Editor". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  18. Atlassian. "Confluence 4 Editor - Customer Feedback". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 16 April 2013.
  19. Atlassian. "Specification - Confluence Advanced Editor". Atlassian.com. Archived from the original on 12 April 2012. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
  20. Atlassian. "Confluence Storage Format". Atlassian.com. Retrieved 21 March 2014. We refer to the Confluence storage format as 'XHTML-based'. To be correct, we should call it XML, because the Confluence storage format does not comply with the XHTML definition.
  21. Atlassian. "Confluence 4.0 Editor - What's Changed for Wiki Markup Users". Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  22. "Security Practices". Atlassian.
  23. "[CONFSERVER-2584] Captions for images - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products". jira.atlassian.com. Retrieved 20 December 2017.
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