What is Confluence?
Confluence, like many tools, focuses on collaboration.
First off — if you’re like me — you vurp every time you hear the word collaboration. There are a million tools out there that say they provide the best collaboration in the business. But it’s the HOW that is most important.
Conceptually, think of Confluence as a building with a bunch of expandable rooms inside. And inside each room is the capability to create an infinite number of expandable whiteboards where one can write, draw, and organize useful information.
Now imagine walking into a building like this, and being greeted by an information desk were you can easily locate rooms that might be of interest to you. Rooms that contain a bunch of people using these whiteboards to capture and track all of the things that they are working on, and using them to communicate with their team, extended teams, and people just like you.
This is Confluence.
Confluence provides the ability for you to create a room inside the Confluence building that can be targeted at people who are all working on a common cause — people that will benefit most from seeing the things that the other people in that room are working on.
In Confluence you can create a room that’s for you and you only. You can also create a room that’s completely open, You can also define restricted areas in these rooms, or define the things that people can and can’t do when they are in your room. However, there’s a reason why the default option in Confluence is to keep those rooms completely open. The more open we can be with each other, the more we will all benefit.
Imagine a workplace where, during your break, you can walk around and peek into all the other different rooms that people in your company have created. You can go right up to someone’s whiteboard, add a comment, fix a mis-spelled word, or even add some improvements to a diagram someone has created. Except with these whiteboards, every single change is not only preserved, but it is tracked (showing exactly who has done what and when), and has the ability to easily revert back to a previous state at the click of a button.
It’s in buildings like this where communication is fluid, and information scales up efficiently, quickly, and seamlessly. It encourages discovery, fosters and flourishes ideas, and cuts way down on duplication of effort. It makes getting things done with others insanely easy by making valuable information easy to find and maintain. Anyone who has seen a content gathering tool years into its implementation knows how important the maintenance factor is when it comes to information.
So what makes Confluence different? These three things:
1. Openness
2. The Editor
3. The Add-ons
Why is Openness important? Well, it’s tough to collaborate if we are all working behind closed doors. A lot of tools have and allow for collaboration, but they make the user manage who they are sharing with. And permissions management is a headache and a nightmare. Yes, you can lock down pages and areas of Confluence, but by default it’s all open.
The Editor is super important too. TONS of tools out there have WYSIWYG editors, but I guarantee that 9 out of 10 are insanely frustrating to use, non-intuitive, outdated, and have severe limits to their functionality. The editor in Confluence is not like that. It’s awesome. Really awesome. And it keeps getting better with every single release, which is fairly frequent. To be fair, it isn’t as powerful of an editor like Microsoft Word in 2016 — It’s more like Microsoft Word circa the early 2000’s — Exceeeeeept when you take into account the Add-ons.
The Add-On capabilities in Confluence make it far more insanely powerful/useful than anything Microsoft Word could ever provide. If Confluence is kind of like a bunch of Word pages that you can link together, then the Add-ons are like tiny little micro-programs that give you the ability to do things like draw, create flowcharts, define and query structured data, create surveys, and add all sorts of other fancy bells and whistles to your pages. The Add-ons are what make Confluence better than any other tool or program that you’ve ever used for centralizing and sharing all the wonderful things in your brain.
Is Confluence right for everyone? No. But if you have a team that communicates frequently amongst itself and / or with others, it can save vast amounts of time, and even make work fun again.
