Wiki Reorg Update: Testing Out Other Options

A few weeks ago, one of my collegues told me that one of his buddies at another software company had had great success using SVN and another wiki software called Confluence. So I checked it out and found out that it’s made by Atlassian, which also makes JIRA (the bug tracking software we already use). That, in and of itself wasn’t the interesting part of this story. The interesting part is that  Sarah of the ffeathers blog works there as one of the technical writers! I thought that was a very interesting six degrees of separation moment. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blog post…

In the beginning…

My boss was very intrigued by the idea of Confluence, as was I. It seemed to be a rather robust software offering, that would let us do all sorts of things we lament about not being able to do now, plus it would also help us share information amongst us, which is something my colleagues have been complaining about as well. We attended a webinar, which I must admit, I didn’t find terribly enlightening. The reason that happened was because I was expecting the session to be more technical than it ended up being. Mostly a error on my part, because as an introduction to the software, I should have expected it to be a little more business-oriented and marketing-related. But that’s okay, because we got to see the software in action and figure out if we wanted to proceed with an evaluation.

Proof of concept…

I downloaded the software last week install a local instance, and attempted to go through the setup procedure. Most of the managers in my company like to see the proof of concept before deciding to give their “buy in” on projects, so I thought this was the best thing to do next. The installation was as easy as the documentation said it was, although due to a slight technical glitch, I was having some problems. But I contacted Atlassian’s Live Chat technical support, and was on my way about 20 minutes later.

Customize this!

The next part of my proof of concept was to actually configure and customize the wiki and start loading in some content. Well, I stopped at the customization part of the show, since it was very cumbersome. When Confluence is set up, it appears to be easy to use (which will be good for my colleagues), however I don’t find the configuration/customization part to be as intuitive as it could be. I found my time was starting to get away from me as I was trying to sort through things, so I ended up just setting my local instance aside, and refocusing on my other documentation responsibilities. I did end up writing a quick and dirty white paper on Confluence and my thoughts on the whole product, so that my boss knows what I think of it.

The end result?

In the end, I think the product is a good one, and something we could definitely use, however I don’t think we’ll have the time to customize it ourselves, so I’m going to recommend we use one of Atlassian’s professional services partners, that will set everything up for us so we don’t have to do it ourselves. My boss is constantly saying that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and do things that aren’t our “core competency.” Whether that’s buying geoIP software to install with our website, or purchase a wiki software & have it configured out-of-house, I think my boss will go for that. And considering how much the Confluence software costs, even if the Pro Serv costs are the same, it’s still a steal, in comparison to other software purchases I’ve seen employers make in the past.