Taking Confluence for a wiki testdrive

My boss must have just comeback from an IT conference, he calls me into his office starts off by saying “having effective knowledge management can increase the net worth of a consultancy by at least 100%”. He was preaching to the converted, I walk out of his office with the assignment of evaluating Confluence as a knowledge management solution for our company globally.

‘‘If HP Knew what HP Knows we would be three times more profitable.’’ Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett Packard

I love Wiki’s after google, Wikipedia has to be my second most used site. I have used Confluence many times on many sites including SAP SDN, IBM dveloperWorks to name a few. I was looking forward to giving this product a test drive. Plus Atlassan are aussie as.

This was not my first exercise in evaluating a potential knowledge management solution. It feels like groundhog day, every time I finish a project and get some bench time I have to evaluate a KM product – Sharepoint, SAP Portal and KM, E-rooms etc. They say madness is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result, they also say you do what your told if you want to get paid. Here’s hoping this is the last time.

Before i start playing i like to research on the product and their competitors, i went to the Atlassan site and i found a wealth of knowledge on Confluence. Atlassin is one company that do eat their own dog food.

I started my investigation by installing the bundled solution, I have to say i am not a fan of HSQL, as a developer i prefer something more transparent. So quickly downloaded and installed a version on SAP Java WebAS and MsSQL too easy.

The installation footprint was tiny, which lead me to finding out what was driving the application – The dominant components seem to be Sitemesh for content and look and feel and Velocity for templating.

Sitemesh – easily enables you to create panel based layouts. It uses decorators to intercept page rendering from different apps to give your application a consistent look and feel. One thing that impressed me about Sitemesh is the ease in which you can render your content into different formats, Confluences uses this very effectively!

Apache Velocity – is a macro templating engine based on mvc. Separation is encouraged by storing the templates (.vm) independent of java code. Inside these templates you combine VTL (template language), html and resources (file, jar, classpath, url, datasource and xml) to create dynamic content. Using parameters when calling makes it very powerful and easy to re-use.

Confluence provides many different types of plugins, they look very easy to create meaning there is a large community of users creating there own plugins and macros and sharing them.

After a couple of hours of using the application i was hooked. I had created a few simple spaces with a rigid page hierachy, this combined with the flexibility of labels makes for a complete taxonomy.

Writing content and blogs was also easy with the options of rich text editing, wikimarkup and macros.

The dashboard approach, bookmarking, RSS feeds and breadcrumbs makes navigation a breeze. The search is powerful and suprisingly accurate.

The Administration console as expected was rich in features, Themes can be extended, uploaded and modified and applied at a global or space level. Using the theme builder plugin allows for further branding. Security can be applied at user, group, space and page levels.

Simple and powerful.

I am sure the following are being addressed, the cons i found were – the layout has a heavy reliance on tables, ajax is very limited. I know there is limited LDAP support and a complimentary idM product Crowd, however I couldn’t find any mention of SPML or SAML in relation to Confluence, will it fit into existing provisioning?

Some of the features others were hoping for was better IM and forum capabilities. Also suggestions that content macros be put in a visual drop and drag feature and content editing have immutable or restricted to users feature.

So will we adopt Confluence, we have bought a couple of onconfluence hosted licences and started getting some content up there, time will tell.