Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki developed by Australian software company

Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australian software company that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. The company is domiciled in Delaware, with global headquarters in Sydney, Austra ...

. Atlassian wrote Confluence in the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

programming language and first published it in 2004. Confluence Standalone comes with a built-in Tomcat web server and hsql database, and also supports other databases. The company markets Confluence as

enterprise software Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is computer software used to satisfy the needs of an organization rather than individual users. Such organizations include businesses, schools, interest-based user groups, ...

, licensed as either on-premises software or

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

running on AWS.

History

Atlassian released Confluence 1.0 on March 25, 2004, saying its purpose was to build "an application that was built to the requirements of an enterprise knowledge management system, without losing the essential, powerful simplicity of the

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

in the process." In recent versions, Confluence has evolved into part of an integrated

collaboration platform Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them". As re ...

and has been adapted to work in conjunction with Jira and other Atlassian software products, including

Bamboo Bamboos are a diverse group of evergreen perennial flowering plants making up the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family. The origin of the word "bamboo" is uncertain, ...

Clover Clover or trefoil are common names for plants of the genus ''Trifolium'' (from Latin ''tres'' 'three' + ''folium'' 'leaf'), consisting of about 300 species of flowering plants in the legume or pea family Fabaceae originating in Europe. The genus ...

, Crowd,

Crucible A crucible is a ceramic or metal container in which metals or other substances may be melted or subjected to very high temperatures. While crucibles were historically usually made from clay, they can be made from any material that withstands te ...

, and Fisheye. In 2014, Atlassian released Confluence Data Center to add high availability with load balancing across nodes in a clustered setup.

Analysis

The book ''Social Media Marketing for Dummies'' in 2007 considered Confluence an "emergent enterprise social software" that was "becoming an established player." ''Wikis for Dummies'' described it as "one of the most popular wikis in corporate environments," "easy to set up and use," and "an exception to the rule" that

wiki software Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application), is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web applicatio ...

search capabilities don't work well.

eWeek ''eWeek'' (''Enterprise Newsweekly'', stylized as ''eWEEK''), formerly PCWeek, is a technology and business magazine. Previously owned by QuinStreet; Nashville, Tennessee marketing company TechnologyAdvice acquired eWeek in 2020. The print edi ...

cited in 2011 such new features in version 4 as the auto- formatting and auto-complete, unified wiki and

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

notifications and

drag and drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

integration of

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

files. Use cases include basic enterprise communication, collaboration workspaces for knowledge exchange, social networking,

Personal Information Management Personal information management (PIM) is the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages, and email mes ...

and

project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

. German newspaper ''Computerwoche'' from IDG Business Media compares it to Microsoft SharePoint and finds it "a good starting point" as a platform for social business collaboration, while SharePoint is better suited to companies with more structured processes. Confluence includes set up CSS templates for styles and formatting for all pages, including those imported from Word documents. Built in search allows queries by date, the page's author, and content type such as graphics. The tool has add-ons for integration with standard formats, with a flexible programmable API allowing expansion. The software is relevant as an outline tool for requirements that can be linked to tasks in the Jira issue tracker by the same company.

Discontinuation of wiki markup

As of version 4.0, in 2011, Confluence ended support for

wiki markup A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication Collaborative editing, collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be ...

language. This led to a sometimes-heated discussion by some previous versions' users who objected to the change. In response, Atlassian provided a source code editor as a plugin, which allows advanced users the ability to edit the underlying XHTML-based document source. However, although the new source markup is XHTML-based, it is not XHTML compliant. Additionally, wiki markup can be typed into the editor and Confluence's autocomplete and auto-format function converts the wiki markup to the new format. After the real-time conversion, content can not be edited as wiki markup again.

Security

Confluence Cloud data is encrypted in transit and at rest. In June 2022, Atlassian disclosed a

zero-day vulnerability A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a computer-software vulnerability previously unknown to those who should be interested in its mitigation, like the vendor of the target software. Until the vulnerability is mitigated, hackers can exploit it t ...

in Confluence Server allowing remote code execution, which had been present for over a decade.

Limitations

There is no standard way of adding captions to images in the server version, but captions can be added to images in the cloud version.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Confluence (Software) Atlassian products Proprietary wiki software Java (programming language) software Technical communication tools Knowledge markets Wiki farms