Why should I use Confluence?
Asked by Oleg Nesterenko:

This is my first try of the Confluence and to be honest I so disappointed. I still cannot get, why people are baying Confluence if Google provide same services for free.

Probably some companies can afford to hire an expensive scrum master to manage their documentation, but for a small startup it is a death.  
I was planning to use Confluence as a secure storage of tech documentation and collaboration tool, so I started from the importing of excel files to a new space. But suddenly I found that Confluence cloud is not able to handle a simple excel sheet. Instead to open it as spreadsheet, it opens as a doc. My question is: why should I pay and waste my time to learn some of Atlassian tricks.  
I'm going to use offshore services, so I want to prevent users to download docs from the cloud. How can I do it if I'm not able to provide proper view of uploaded documentation?


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: \>Be honest, I don't see any profit for company if their employees will spent all day in creation their own spaces, with some unreadable information and will waiting for likes.

Nor do I, that's why I use Confluence instead of writing Google docs that can't be found, and are out of date within minutes of being written.

People simply don't use Google docs for sharing with a wide audience, it's yet another place docs go to die (like Sharepoint). I can't think of a single organisation that writes a Google doc that is still used 6 weeks after it was written, but I can point at Confluence pages that are used daily over a decade.

And people don't use google docs for "shut up and write", unlike Confluence.

I think you've decided you want a controlled document store rather than a wiki and are railing against your mistaken choice of tools rather than the application itself. I would poll your organisation to see how they want to work - with proper collaboration and sharing, or a document repository which has some (very nice) collaboration tools but is not aimed at sharing widely.


author: JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_
body: Hi Oleg,

to be honest, Confluence is not made for storing Excel files. There are certainly better solutions for this: Google Tables, Share Point, you name it. Even Google Drive or Drop Box might fit better. As long as you want to or have to stay with a file based approach storing your documentation consider using another product.

While Confluence offers a pretty secure way to store information, it is not designed to be a cloud or on premise file storage. Confluence shows its strength on collaboration \& interaction, which (as least it seems to me) is not the thing you want to reach in the first place.

I still do not understand what a scrum master has to do with Confluence. Are you referring to Jira?

Best regards,

JP


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Google docs and Confluence are not "the same services".

Google provides a good collaborative word-processor that gives you great documents that you can sling around. Confluence provides a good collaborative wiki with some word-processing functions, and hence an automatic documentation site.

Off the top of my head (so there is definitely stuff missing from this)

* Standardised company information (a footer for example) across every doc
* Templates
* Mentions and likes
* Inline and document comments
* Write-once, use many times
* Labels
* Macros
* A structure that enables cascading permissions and a proper page tree
* and...

Now, actually, I'm not saying that Confluence is "better" than Google docs in general. What you need to look at is what you want to use it for.

I work for an Atlassian partner, so, of course, we use Confluence a lot. Some of our people use Google docs instead, because it suits them better. So do I, in some cases. For one-off random bits of stuff that we have no intention of sharing widely or keeping long-term when a colleauge likes it. It's great for independent docs, but as soon as you want structure, longevity, immediate availability, a coherent place to keep everything, Google docs fails. Not because it's "bad", but because that's not what it is for.


author: Oleg Nesterenko
body: Thank you for the answer.  
But my question literally meant "Is it make a sense for me to use Confluence in the Startup stage?"  
I perfectly understand that it's great tool combining mini Facebook and Wikipedia, I worked with Confluence many years as a user. Mostly I read someone's documentation, but since I decided to use it like an admin, I found it very confusing and not user friendly.  
Probably some of huge corporation as your company may afford this tool and to pay $120k to a scrum-master as well, but my startup cannot.  
Be honest, I don't see any profit for company if their employees will spent all day in creation their own spaces, with some unreadable information and will waiting for likes. I was looking for a tool that can provide a maximum security and confidentiality for the company in the initiative stage.  
I spent few hour in YouTube and Google looking for proper tutorials, but unsuccessfully, may be you can advise any source of proper information (not confusing) how to import \*.xlsx file to confluence cloud and after to open it as Spreadsheet not like a Doc