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

Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australia, Australian-United States, American proprietary software company that specializes in collaboration tools designed primarily for software development and project management. Domicile (law), Domiciled in ...

. Atlassian wrote Confluence in the

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

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 its individual users. Enterprise software is an integral part of a computer-based information ...

, licensed as either

on-premises software On-premises software (abbreviated to on-prem, and often written as "on-premise") is installed and runs on computers on the premises of the person or organization using the software, rather than at a remote facility such as a server farm or clo ...

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

running on AWS.

History

Atlassian released Confluence 1.0 on 25 March 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 a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

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." Regar ...

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

Bamboo Bamboos are a diverse group of mostly evergreen perennial plant, perennial flowering plants making up the subfamily (biology), subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family, in th ...

Clover Clovers, also called trefoils, are plants of the genus ''Trifolium'' (), consisting of about 300 species of flowering plants in the legume family Fabaceae originating in Europe. The genus has a cosmopolitan distribution with the highest diversit ...

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

Features

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 search capabilities don't work well. eWeek cited in 2011 such new features in version 4 as auto- formatting and auto-complete, unified wiki and

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

social network A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

notifications and

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

integration of

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as Text (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

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

project management Project management is the process of supervising the work of a Project team, team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project initiation documentation, project documentation, crea ...

. The German newspaper ''Computerwoche'' from IDG Business Media compares it to

Microsoft SharePoint SharePoint is a collection of enterprise content management and knowledge management tools developed by Microsoft. Launched in 2001, it was initially bundled with Windows Server as Windows SharePoint Server, then renamed to Microsoft Office S ...

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 setting 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 a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is Collaborative editing, collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edit ...

language. This led to pushback 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 Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages which mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated. While HTML, pr ...

-based document source. The new source markup is XHTML-based, but 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 cannot 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 in Confluence Server allowing remote code execution, which had been present for over a decade. In October 2023, Atlassian disclosed a critical broken access control vulnerability allowing exploitation remotely.

References

External links