What is Confluence?
Confluence is a team collaboration application that provides a
platform for all teams working on a project to work together and
share updates and information effectively. It reduces lots of
communication gaps and improves the software development
process.
It allows all the departments and teams to organize, share and
discuss their work. It provides solutions regarding content or
information, which is accessible to everyone. Any team or
individual can share important information & data, post updates,
and communicate with others.
Features of Confluence:
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Content Management: With Confluence, you can
create dynamic content by inserting images with customizable
sizes. You can create an infinite number of pages with
versioning and history. The history helps you to understand
the number of changes done by users in a specific period of
time. Plus, you can create a centralized content repository by
hyperlinking the pages. Also, you can upload various PPTs on
Confluence and start a discussion thread for the same. Various
built-in readymade templates assist in offering documents as
per industry standards.
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Space Management: Confluence offers unlimited
virtual space to an organization. This space can be
distributed to various departments like development, human
resource, marketing & finance, etc. within your organization.
These are cloud-based spaces that store the information, thus
making it easy to access from anywhere, anytime. Users can
keep a backup of all data of a specific space by exporting the
same to an XML file.
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Add-Ons: Confluence is featured with powerful
add-ons that make finding answers for common work questions
easy, with planning events and internal Q&A. These add-ons
include team calendars and questions for Confluence.
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Site Management: You can rename the pages
with links update in Confluence. The users can import the
spaces or pages from plain text files. Users can also export
these pages to PDF and HTML. The best part is it keeps a
backup of the pages on a daily basis. You can view the report
of the ‘orphaned’ pages that are not linked to any parent page
and eventually link the same or delete them on the basis of
requirements.
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User Management and Security: Confluence
allows you to follow industry-standard user management
practices. An admin can assign permission to individual users
and groups for viewing, commenting, as well as editing
content. Confluence is a secured platform that asks users
whether they are human or robot while logging in via CAPTCHA.
If the users fail to log in via CAPTCHA, they need to answer
the security questions. Besides this, it uses the same
security filter while adding comments, creating, and editing
new pages. You can restrict or allow users to either view or
edit the page.
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Jira Integration: You can insert the issues
of Jira in Confluence to give a better understanding of the
scenario. The OpenSocial gadget specifications are used to
share content between Jira and Confluence. Plus, you can
search the Confluence knowledge base directly from Jira with
the Quicknav search gadget.
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Work in One Place: The unlimited space in
Confluence allows you to assign designated zones to every team
in your organization. It helps to keep your works organized in
one place. You can find work fast with a powerful search
engine and a structured hierarchical system.
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Project Management: Project management is a
major part of Confluence, and it offers a flexible platform to
all companies irrespective of size. You can track all of your
projects in Confluence, and Jira tickets help to give a clear
understanding of the progress.
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Dashboard: The dashboard is the main feature
of Confluence that also comes with the full customization
facility. The users can select an ordinary page to keep as a
landing page. You can also edit the global layout file under
advanced customization. Once you modify such features in
Confluence, you need to do the same with every upgrade.
Benefits of Confluence:
-
Collaboration: Confluence’s collaboration
tools are the leading reason for choosing it over the
competitors. While administrators can manage permissions at a
micro level, anyone who has access to space can contribute to
the base of knowledge. Version control is embedded to track
individual contributions. Moreover, any time updates are made,
collaborators are notified. This creates an efficient feedback
loop for the collaborators and ensures that the knowledge base
is comprehensive, accurate, and on time.
-
Integrations: Apart from the direct
integrations with the rest of the Atlassian product offerings
like Jira Service Desk, Jira, Bitbucket, Trello, and more,
there is a very robust marketplace of third-party integrations
that work seamlessly with Confluence. These integrations can
assist with anything from making better charts, connecting to
the Google Suite products, to adding GIFs to your documents.
The use of integrations enhances the richness of content to
aid in future consumption.
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Analytics: With the help of plugins or APIs,
you can track most viewed, accessed, liked pages, and so on.
This is a critical component to understanding how knowledge is
used in your organization.
Role of Confluence as a DevOps tool:
People give a lot of credit to automation when they talk about
DevOps. And in some ways, it is true because it cuts down the
costs and eliminates unnecessary human intervention. However,
you should understand that DevOps is a cultural shift, centered
around the quality of communication that happens between
development and operation teams.
Since automation provides faster, more frequent deployments,
having a collaborative, high-trust environment is more important
than ever. Without such an environment, teams can collapse. Even
worse, the productivity achieved through automation can take a
severe hit.
That's why teams should focus on improving communication.
Because Confluence provides seamless communication throughout
the organization, it can be an appropriate candidate to
facilitate a connection between the development and operations
teams. It allows third-party integration with multiple
applications, and from phases like planning to feedback, it
offers various kinds of templates that you can use instantly.
DevOps is a process that never stops and Confluence helps you
achieve that state effectively.
Conclusion
Confluence is an integrated cloud-based platform. It also works
as a dynamic documentation platform that allows teams to
collaborate easily. It has all the security features that are
required for safe and secure communication. Also, it allows you
to integrate third-party apps that enhance its functionality.
