For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, there are a lot of rea­sons to like Con­flu­ence, a wiki soft­ware prod­uct that makes it easy to col­lab­o­rate across an enter­prise. Here are five rea­sons I enjoy using it.

Reason #1: Simplified User Interface

Con­flu­ence’s user inter­face is easy to use.  As the list of icons you see is so min­i­mal, you might think that Con­flu­ence isn’t a viable author­ing tool. But the beau­ty of Con­flu­ence is that Alt­lass­ian, the com­pa­ny who devel­ops the soft­ware, has hid­den away some of the more advanced func­tion­al­i­ty.  If you want to extend Confluence’s func­tion­al­i­ty even more, Alt­lass­ian includes more than 800 apps that you can add to the product.

Reason #2: Ease of Re-using Content

Con­flu­ence makes it easy to re-use blocks of con­tent using a two-step process.

First, using Con­flu­ence’s Excerpt macro, you enclose a block of con­tent (for exam­ple, a table) that you’d like to re-use.

The sec­ond step is decid­ing where the re-used con­tent will appear using Con­flu­ence’s Excerpt Include macro. You can have more than one Excerpt Include macro on a page, ref­er­enc­ing con­tent from mul­ti­ple locations.

Here are some more details on using the Excerpt macro: https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf59/excerpt-macro-792499102.html

Here is how to use the Excerpt Include macro: https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf59/excerpt-include-macro-792499101.html

Reason #3: Version Control and Automatic Track Changes

Con­flu­ence auto­mat­i­cal­ly tracks your edits and your Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts’ feed­back. Unlike some appli­ca­tions like Microsoft Word, Con­flu­ence auto­mat­i­cal­ly track changes behind the scenes. At any time, you can review the lat­est ver­sion of the con­tent and com­pare it against an ear­li­er draft.

To view a page’s his­to­ry and its list of edits:

1  Nav­i­gate to a page in Confluence.

2  Click … and click Page His­to­ry.
    [expand  title=“See the fol­low­ing screen cap­ture”][/expand]

Con­flu­ence dis­plays the his­to­ry of the page.
[expand  title=“See the fol­low­ing screen cap­ture”][/expand]
3  On the Page His­to­ry page, you can per­form one or more of the following:

a. Review an ear­li­er ver­sion of the page by click­ing an ear­li­er draft in the Ver­sion column.

b. Restore an old­er ver­sion of the page.

c. Com­pare two ver­sions of the page. Con­flu­ence will show what’s been added, delet­ed, or modified.

The one pro­vi­so about Confluence’s track changes fea­ture is it’s not as detailed as oth­er author­ing tools. For exam­ple, if you have mul­ti­ple Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts review­ing a giv­en page, it’s not obvi­ous who made which edit. In addi­tion, if you antic­i­pate that a page may need to be rewrit­ten, then you’ll be faced with a sea of edits. I find that Con­flu­ence’s Track Changes fea­ture works well if you expect light edits to con­tent you have drafted.

Reason #4: Built-in Support for Adding Flowcharts

Like many oth­ers, I am a big believ­er in includ­ing screen cap­tures or images to help clar­i­fy top­ics I am explaining.

One of the built-in macros is Gliffy, which makes it to easy to include flow­charts and oth­er types of dia­grams online. Here’s an excerpt of a flow­chart that I cre­at­ed in Gliffy.  It was sim­ple to cre­ate and edit.

Reason #5: Improve Your Authoring Experience with Apps

Con­flu­ence is pow­er­ful but you can eas­i­ly extend the prod­uct with more than 800 apps that cus­tomize and extend it using Atlas­sian’s Mar­ket­place.

For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, some use­ful apps include web ana­lyt­ics soft­ware that shows how many peo­ple are vis­it­ing cer­tain pages, how long they spend on each page, key­words that users type in Confluence’s search field, and on. I also cur­rent­ly use a source code app that helps me dis­play a page’s source code when Con­flu­ence does not for­mat con­tent as expect­ed. There are also search-and-replace apps that zero in on key­words and phras­es across mul­ti­ple pages instead of Confluence’s default page-by-page search tool.