Confluence supports collaborative writing and provides project management capabilities and a range of social media and information handling capabilities that support collaboration. This page describes Confluence support for collaboration:

Collaborative Writing

Confluence supports collaborative writing as follows:

• Confluence provides a wiki that is easy to edit, with an interface resembling the Microsoft Word interface.
• Pages can be restricted to teams and individuals for viewing or for editing.
• Any number of users can open and edit a page.

Project Management

Confluence supports project management as follows:

• Confluence allows users to create tasks on pages, with @mentions to assign tasks and notify users of the assignment. (Use the task icon in the wiki editor. Refer to Tasks, Task View, Task Report.)
• Confluence blueprints (built-in page templates) support creating meeting notes (and the agenda) and task reports.
• Confluence blueprints support creating Decisions pages, to record project decisions.

Content Management

Confluence supports content management as follows:

• Confluence wiki pages unite project and business documents with software and web service documentation in one enterprise repository organized in a hierarchy.
• Confluence allows users to share files as attachments to pages or in a file list, with previewing capabilities and version control.

Notifications

Confluence has the capability to notify users as follows:

• Confluence provides RSS feeds.
• Confluence sends notifications by email when events are added to a calendar to which the user is subscribed.
• Confluence notifies users of recommended pages: those recently "liked," commented on, or created. Users may disable this notification in their profiles.
• Confluence allows users to watch a page or a space and be notified of changes by email.
• Confluence can send notifications of changes by email including a daily summary of changes to all pages the user has permissions to view. Users set up these notifications in their profiles.
• On-screen notifications (workbox 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 configuration of the instance, notifications are received from JIRA also.

Rating

Depending on the configuration of the instance, Confluence offers the capability for users to "like" pages.

Discussion

The Comments feature supports threaded comments.

Team Communication

Confluence supports communication among members of a team as follows:

• 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 as well as tasks to which they have been assigned.
• 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.
• Depending on configuration of the instance, Confluence exhibits the capability within the profile for users to declare their status and a macro (user status list) to display a list of statuses for a user. 
• Atlassian has a business-oriented web chat service, HipChat . It is anticipated this will be integrated 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 supports building a network among users as follows:

• Confluence allows users to follow other users and provides notifications on their activity.
• Confluence has macros to display a user's network (network macro to list users being followed by that user), a user's profile (user profile macro), a user's status (user status macro), and a user's profile picture (profile picture macro).