Jira Confluence and Document Retention Systems
Asked by Lindsey Maassel:

Hi Jira Community,

* Is Jira Confluence the best product for document management?
* How exactly does archiving work, is there a limit to space?
* Are other biotech companies using this system, or other systems, and how is it working for you?

Thanks!


Answers:
author: Darin - Opus Guard
body: [@Lindsey Maassel](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1126296) welcome to the community! Let me see if I can help.

Since your question seems to be focused on content retention, I'll start with a recommendation to check out [Content Retention Manager for Confluence](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1233769/content-retention-manager-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) in the Atlassian Marketplace. It's incredibly easy by design and lets you dial in a content retention policy ([Why Develop a Data Retention Policy](https://docs.opusguard.com/kb/why-develop-a-data-retention-policy/)) to manage storage and liability associated with long living content.

\| Is Jira Confluence the best product for document management?

If you're thinking of Confluence specifically (Jira is a different product focused on issue tracking and agile project management), it's an excellent product for your team to collect ideas, document specifications, and overall thought leadership as you would with other historical document management products. If you are thinking of files themselves, as previously stated, it's not ideal as it isn't really meant to be a file store.

\| How exactly does archiving work, is there a limit to space?

Archiving is a way to hide content in Confluence to keep spaces and the file tree clean. Depending on your subscription, there is a storage limit (Free is 2gb, Standard is 250gb). For most use cases, it's more likely you'll hit the user limit in Free before storage, but in Standard, it's likely you'll run up to the storage limit. Important to note that Archived content ++still counts++ against your limits. Archiving makes content easily recoverable by users by design, so if you're trying to fully remove or even purge (irrecoverable) content, you'll need another solution.

As for the Biotech, I know of several companies that are not necessarily silicon valley "tech" who are using Confluence and Jira to make work easier, maybe they'll spot this and chime in.


author: Jan-Peter Rusch
body: I'm not sure, if Confluence should be seen as a document archiving / management system. If you understand documents as files (Word, Excel, PDF,...) one can store these files as attachments in a Confluence page. There will be versioning but eg. searching for a content in a specific version (non recent version) of an attached file is difficult, if not impossible without an addon.


author: Aron Gombas _Midori_
body: Lindsey,

You are mixing up things. JIRA and Confluence are two separate products!

1. JIRA is an issue tracker, not really fitting a "document management" purpose.
2. Confluence helps teams to collaborate on rich content and can be used to manage documentation.

If you look for retention and archiving, there is an add-on dedicated to that: [Archiving Plugin](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.midori.confluence.plugin.archiving/server/overview). See the [add-on documentation](http://www.midori-global.com/products/confluence-archiving-plugin/) or the [YouTube quick intro video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4c8tKck1zk) to learn more.