[nwatson]

At my workplace (going on two years at a startup) we were saddled with bad I.T. (every service was accessed by its IP address, no DNS lookup), hosted TeamSite/Sharepoint for engineering document management (with absolutely no imposed organization or hierarchy (though P.M. kept their stuff together well there) most things ended up being thrown around in email), Bugzilla, and Subversion.

After some organization changes -- long time coming -- we switched to hosted Confluence, JIRA, BitBucket/git. The transition has taken some time but communication is going so much more smoothly since.

Confluence especially has been great. Designs/how-tos/best-practices are so easy to write. Permanent records of discussions and decisions are so easy to track. I made sure to collaborate with a few others to establish the skeleton of our Confluence -- without a good skeleton it would devolve to chaos. But Confluence is so much better than Word docs floating around ... and I haven't seen any other Wiki tool that is so rich in authoring ... Confluence has:

  * great search capabilities
  * easy to organize
  * easy to create links to other relevant content
  * great text styling
  * great tables
  * plugins/macros for displaying PDF / Word / Excel inline
  * linking with JIRA
  * great diagramming tool Gliffy
  * easy cut-and-paste-of-images -- capturing screenshots is fast
  * (unfortunately to get GraphViz diagrams you need your own server, hosted version doesn't allow for that)
  * good export
  * and plugins for almost anything you'd need

We're finding all kinds of great ways to use Confluence. I'd been pushing Confluence for my whole time at the company because we had no institutional memory. Confluence is helping us build that. I haven't seen any other tool for the price that comes close, but I admit limited exposure. That's my experience.