Wiki Editing Just Got Easier: Atlassian Confluence Releases Office Connector
Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, has just announced Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their latest release, Confluence 2.9. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki - they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead.
Also, with the addition of the SharePoint connector, Microsoft's well-known collaboration and document sharing platform gets a big dose of Enterprise 2.0 goodness, which is sure to please the end users. However, Confluence makes I.T. happy too, thanks to their inclusion of tools - like LDAP integration and administratively controlled permissions - that are designed just for the needs of the enterprise.
Office Connector
The Confluence Office Connector provides seamless integration between their enterprise wiki and Microsoft Office. Users can now edit the wiki in Microsoft Word...and even Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint, too. The experience for the end user is intuitive; they simply open a document, make a change, and click "Save" just like they already know how to do. There's no big learning curve here which means users are more likely to adopt the technology instead of relying on their old methods of managing and sharing files. And since those older methods are likely to have been either via network file shares or as inbox-clogging emails, the Confluence solution can help I.T. transition everyone to SharePoint while also helping in the fight against email overload.
With the Connector deployed within Team Sites, wiki editing is finally easy and that alone make it a vast improvement upon the wiki that's provided with SharePoint out of the box.
SharePoint Connector
Originally released in beta form to a limited number of testers back in 2007, today Confluence's SharePoint Connector is officially available to everyone. Although the company offers a hosted solution as well, most I.T. departments are more likely to integrate the Confluence deployable software with SharePoint server instead (or other systems via the API) to build upon the solutions they already use in house.
The companies that have already adopted Confluence include several big names that you're sure to have heard of: Bank of America, Sun, Adobe, Cisco, IBM, SAP, Intel, Seagate, E*Trade, Citigroup, Microsoft, EMC - the list goes on and on, a veritable "who's who" of the world's top enterprises. In total, there are over 6000 enterprises currently using Confluence today, yet the pricing still makes it easy enough for even smaller companies to consider the software, with solutions that begin at $1200 for 25 users (or $600 for academic institutions.)
Learn More
To learn more about the new Office Connector and see it action, check out this video from Atlassian:
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I was a Confluence fan back in the old days and championed its adoption in a number of customers.
However, given the recent developments, I can't justify the price feature-wise anymore.
And regarding support, I'm still eager to see how they take the blow from www.mindtouch.com, for example. The extensibility appeals directly to big customers with in-house development capabilities.
Finally, it will be interesting to see who fills the enterprise semantic wiki space. Not an easy one to do. I have developed two semwikis, so I have an idea of what it takes to get there.
It's all about power users... they are not that power yet.
( what does Office integration tell ya? ).
@Sarah: Thanks for the excellent and accurate coverage of Confluence 2.9.
@Aldo: I'm sorry to find that we've lost an old supporter. I'm interested to hear more about the 'recent developments' you talk about.
The pace at which we've been producing new, useful, user requested features have really been appreciated by the bulk of our customers. We're proud to have 6000 Confluence customers this year (up from ~3700 last year).
What has really been driving Confluence development is ease of use. This invariably leads to increased adoption. We see adoption, encouraging all users to contribute and find content in their wiki, as our key mission.
We know that extensibility and our thriving ecosystem of addons and contributing developers (please see http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/) is an important reason why people love Confluence, but the majority of our customers don't massively customise Confluence. They buy Confluence because it just works, and because they can trust our
Wiki is evil in this case, I think it is not a good idea to connect Office and Wiki.
MindTouch provides a Desktop and Microsoft Outlook Connector. More importantly, with MindTouch Deki one can surface data from Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server and other popular enterprise applications and databases. In short, MindTouch allows users to do wiki collaboration around text and files like Confluence, but in addition to this users can also create dynamic reports, dashboards and mashups from other enterprise systems, Web 2.0 applications and web-services. NO you don't have to be a programmer to do any of this.
Our customers and users are telling us that the light-weight wiki collaboration is only giving them 10%-15% of the total ROI realized by MindTouch Deki. They realize up to 50% of total ROI with enhanced collaboration using MindTouch Deki's web-services capabilities in conjunction with the basic wiki collaboration. Finally, we're told, their ROI is fully realized when they've connected enterprise systems to create dynamic reports and dashboards and have integrated MindTouch Deki into their overall enterprise workflow. Of course, MindTouch is the only offering that facilitates this kind of collaborative surface.
Here is a demo video that shows what I'm talking about: http://mindtouch.com/demo it includes an actual customer deployment.
Congrats to Atlassian on the new product.