What are some small selling points for Confluence?

[Mischa DeNola]

I'm trying to get my engineering department to adopt Confluence for internal documentation (we already use JIRA). I want to start out small (just my team first) to show it's potential--I've used Confluence a bunch in the past. But, my boss keeps dodging the conversation. So now I'm going to start sending him little bits maybe once to twice a week until he talks to me about it. Here's what I have to start with:

* Did you know that getting out of Confluence is as easy as getting into it? You can export a space, or your entire instance in a number of customizable formats.

* Did you know that there are some great, out-of-the-box templates for managing Sprint retrospectives and decisions?

* Did you know that Confluence allows you to easily connect JIRA issues to pages, and when you do so it creates a backlink from the actual issue? Imagine being one-click away from the spec when you're looking at a ticket.

Anyone have anymore?

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hey Mischa,

how far does your internal documentation go? That'd help to come up with better arguments. Would it only be for documentation? You already got a few good points there but I think you can't get around a live demo to show the real potential for documentation, collaboration and the everyday use. If you prefer to press 'C' in your personal Confluence space instead of opening a text editor for a note - you're there! ;) 

• Collaborate on content using comments, inline comment, mentions
• Build beautiful documentations (you don't have to spend lots of money for a ton of apps, even with 1-2 cheaper ones you can achieve great results) for internal or even external use. Look at the Atlassian Documentation, of course the best example but still Confluence + Scroll Viewport
• You have a ton of possibilities to connect related content (links, labels, page properties + reports etc.)
• In combination with Team Calendars and Jira manage your teams and visualize data from Jira (Sprints, Releases, vacation, you name it) within Confluence, plan meetings, team member availabilities etc.
• Build up an intranet, use blog posts (great stuff)

Best,

Max

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Write and maintain in one place, see it in many (the include macros are a firm favourite in my usage)

Use as a knowledge base in a help desk, with articles popping up in SD for users

Massive extensibility

Create many Jira issues directly from lines in Confluence

Mention your friends to get them to help you with your pages, or give them tasks

Make notes directly in place in the body (including the mentions if you want specific help)

[Taranjeet Singh]

Really like these points for Confluence.

[Mischa DeNola]

Thanks for feedback, everyone!

Our use for Confluence would be strictly internal docs. We currently use Google Drive, which is nice and all, but there's so much manual cross-linking and maintenance.

As far as a Demo, it's kinda hard to show just how cool it can be if I use a cloud site, where plugins are limited, and as a demo site, I'd never be able to talk anyone into a JIRA integration with our on-prem JIRA instance. I have been thinking of just doing a small set of internal team stuff for a quarter, then show how my team uses it.

[Tom Rough]

Hi Mischa,

In reference to what Max has already mentioned, we would be happy to show both you and/or your boss a demo of how Scroll Viewport (or any other of our apps) works. Obviously, it depends on your use case and what you want to do with your internal documentation within Confluence. Would you potentially be wanting to create a Help Center or Knowledge Base portal for your users? 

If so, having a Viewport activated within your Confluence space would provide you with the option of having an alternative view for your content. This means you could author your internal documentation in Confluence and then display this same content in a way that suits your customers' needs. 

In relation to your original question asking for selling points for Confluence, I can also add that we use Confluence for:

• announcing news to our customers via blog posts 
• preparing and presenting release notes for our apps
• producing internal documentation that authors can share with one another and comment on
• presenting external technical documentation for all our apps (Help Center)

For all our public content we author in Confluence and then present it through Scroll Viewport, and this even includes our website. I hope these examples may provide some additional selling points to your boss. Furthermore, to reiterate whats already been said in the other comments, I know a lot of our customers also use Confluence for their own Intranet.  

If you have any further questions in relation to whats been mentioned please do not hesitate to contact us at hello@k15t.com. Furthermore, if you're interested in trialling Scroll Viewport you can access more information here.

Cheers, Thomas (K15t Software) 

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Thanks Nic! Who needs fake internet points anyway ;)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Dammit, can't +1 discussion points.