Confluence supports collaborative writing and provides a range of social media and information handling capabilities that support collaboration.
Collaborative Writing
Confluence provides a wiki that is easy to edit. The wiki editor interface resembles MS Word. Pages can be restricted to teams for viewing or for editing. Any number of users can open and edit the page. Thus documents can be written collaboratively. Each team member can contribute information related to that team member's role or specialty. A technical writer can edit for completeness and clarity at time convenient to the team.
Project Management
Confluence supports creating tasks and assigning them to others on Confluence pages.
Confluence allows users to create tasks on pages, with @mentions to assign tasks and notify users.
Confluence blueprints (built-in page templates) support creating meeting notes (and the agenda) and task reports.
Confluence blueprints support creating Decisions pages, recording project decisions.
Task management
Organize, track, and review decisions
Content Management
Confluence wiki pages unite project and business documentation with software and web service documentation in one enterprise repository with Confluence content management capabilities.
Share files as attachments to pages or in a file list with previewing capabilities and version control
Notifications
Confluence notifies users of recommended pages based on a setting in the user's profile.
Confluence allows users to watch a page or a space and be notified of changes, as well as RSS feeds and notifications of changes including a daily summary of changes to all pages the user has permissions to view.
Notifications (icon to the left of the profile picture) let users know about mentions, content shared by other users, or content replied to or liked. Depending on the instance configurtion, notifications are received from JIRA also.
Confluence sends notifications by email when events are added to a calendar to which the user is subscribed.
Rating
Confluence offers the capability for users to "like" pages.
Discussion
The Comments feature supports threaded comments.
Team Communication
Confluence has a "Share" button on every page.
Confluence has the @mention capability, which supports notification of users about content and about conversations they should be involved in.
Confluence has macros to display the change history for a page, recently updated content, contributors to a page, and all of the content by one user.
Confluence has the capability within the profile to identify your status and a macro (user status list) to display a list of statuses for a user. This capability is disabled on the NCI Wiki.
Atlassian has a business-oriented web chat service, HipChat (https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat) with anticipated integration with Confluence.
Confluence allows users to blog, which provides a separate set of wiki pages for news that is updated regularly. The blog feature is used to announce each program in the CBIIT Speaker Series.
Networking
Confluence has macros to display a user's network (users being followed by that user, network macro), a user's profile (user profile macro), a user's status (user status macro), and a user's profile picture (profile picture macro).
Confluence allows users to follow other users and provides notifications on their activity.
