The Atlassian Confluence product features a robust collaborative authoring environment that integrates with your familiar Microsoft Office applications as well as other Atlassian products, such as Jira. With this product, you can retire the shared drive. With Violette Solutions, you can be up an running with Confluence in as little as one to three days effort.

We have used Confluence for these kinds of scenarios:

• Project repository, where a team captures the essential work products and status, such as for a client bid.
  
• Reference material, for ISO 9000 desk instructions or AS 9100 work instructions.
  
• Configuration settings, for systems and applications so that you have an on-line disaster recovery manual.
• Team work space for organizing a cross-functional team communication deliverables, such as schedules, quality incidents, improvement reports, etc.
  
• Training material delivery, where an internal resource delivers training at the point of use, through a standard web browser.
• Requirements definition, for development projects that incorporate built-in reviews and suggestions.
  
• Brainstorming, where a team captures their thoughts directly in Confluence for later organization.
  

Once you have Confluence installed for any one of these scenarios, users quickly adapt Confluence to the other scenarios, leading to a rapid Confluence adoption.

Out of the box, you create Confluence spaces, which are similar to a workgroup in a shared drive environment, add users to the space, and add pages.  A Confluence page is a combination of a Word document and a directory.  You may edit pages directly in Confluence, or edit pages using the familiar Microsoft Word application.  You can attach files to a page, much like you would add files to a directory. This combination of page and directory allows you to create an annotated directory listing, where you arrange and describe the contents in a way that makes sense to the reader. Each page and attachment are independently versioned, so if you make a mistake or overwrite an existing file, you can always get back to where you started.

Each page within Confluence has room for comments, so users can post their opinions on a page's content without having to update the content directly.  This has proven useful in situations where a single author owns a document within a broader collaborative team.

Confluence provides a unique web address for each page, which remains constant regardless of how you structure your content.  Suppose you start out with a single collection of files.  As time goes on, you discover how to organize those files in a way that makes sense for a new user. In a shared drive environment, you would move files around, and existing users would wonder where the files went, at the same time, internal links between files would break. With Confluence, you move the pages around, and yet the existing users have direct access through their unchanging web addresses.  Any hyperlink you embed from one page to another survives this style of reorganization. Confluence gives you the capability to evolve your site's organization into a user-friendly structure, while preserving your cross-referencing work.

Beyond Word-document style pages, you can load any type of file, including Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents and images.  With a single line macro, you can enable users to view Excel content with any browser, and also provide one-click editing of Excel spreadsheets within the familiar Microsoft Excel application.  Likewise, with another one line macro, you can enable users to display PowerPoint presentions through any browser, and also edit PowerPoint presentations with Microsoft PowerPoint. These simple tools allow you convert a shared drive metaphor into a powerful team project space. 

Where we can help

We have spent the time and energy to learn how to install Confluence, customize Confluence, and train users.  We have learned

• how to present Confluence to a team that is used to the shared drive concept.
• how to install and configure useful Confluence plug-ins
• how to teach users to upload and organize their own files and data.
• how to create templates to pre-populate pages with standard sections.
• how to configure directory pages with pre-defined macros.

We believe we can get your team up and running using Confluence with a one to three day effort, for a basic scenario,. Such a scenario may start out as a compliance-related or customer-deliverable application.  We have found it takes about one to two months before the true Confluence capability dawns on the users, so we can provide follow-on support as your team grows with Confluence.

Contact us at info@violettesolutions.com to start consolidating your collaboration efforts today.