Confluence (software)

Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki developed by Australian software company Atlassian. Atlassian wrote Confluence in the Java programming language and first published it in 2004. Confluence Standalone comes with a built-in Tomcat web server and hsql database, and also supports other databases. The company markets Confluence as enterprise software, licensed as either on-premises software or software as a service running on AWS. 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. The book Social Media Marketing for 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 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. The 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.