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 in the process." In recent versions, Confluence has evolved into part of an integrated collaboration platform and has been adapted to work in conjunction with Jira and other Atlassian software products, including Bamboo, Clover, Crowd, Crucible, 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 Marketingfor 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 the auto-formatting and auto-complete, unified wiki and WYSIWYG, social network notifications and drag and drop integration of multimedia files. Use cases include basic enterprise communication, collaboration workspaces for knowledge exchange, social networking, Personal Information Management and project management. 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.
As of version 4.0, in 2011, Confluence ended support for wiki markup 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.
Limitations
Two pages cannot have the same title within the same namespace, even if they have different parents. This could prove awkward if Confluence is intended for documentation having repetitive titles. There is no standard way of adding captions to images, there are only workarounds.
