[game_the0ry]

I guess I am in the minority of devs - I am a fan of project management tools, particularly confluence and jira.

I switched into tech from finance, where your projects management tools are multiple email threads on the same topic and an excel spreadsheet that gets emailed around for people to update.

Yes, it could be better, but I am happy that it is not a lot worse.

[pseudosavant]

Confluence squarely falls into the intranet trap. The only intranet/wiki/etc that anyone likes it the new one, no matter the product/technology. Old document stores gather cruft, aren't maintained, and become full of incorrect information over time.

Eventually, you start over (MediaWiki -> SharePoint -> Confluence -> something else) and the new one is great (Confluence is awesome) and the old one is passe (Sharepoint sucks!). Nobody has solved the fundemental problems around intranets.

[bluepizza]

To be fair, SharePoint always sucked and was never any good.

[game_the0ry]

Agreed. I work for a big corp that uses sharepoint - I would take a poorly set-up confluence / jira workflow any day.

[bluGill]

Sharepoint sucks where I am because IT can't leave our URLs alone. thus there is old information out that that would be useful if I could find it. And other old information that I tried to update but I couldn't find it anymore.

I long ago made a personal rule that when someone asked a question I would answer by pointing them to the documentation. If the documentation doesn't exist or isn't up to date I'd fix it first. So long the the URLs (and thus the index pages) don't change I had a large store of useful information. This is the only way I have found to ensure document stores don't gather cruft.

[tynpeddler]

I'm with you on this one. I love confluence.

It's web based so no installation hassle.

It allows the raw storage of documentation.

It allows you to search uploaded documentation.

It allows you to easily search everything! At my last company, someone pointed out to me that I could find almost anything I wanted to know about existing systems in our confluence.

It is excellent for collaborative editing.

It is excellent for writing and formatting documentation that must be shared.

It has a wide variety macros and plugins that let you effortlessly embed charts and diagrams. Admittedly, some macros (ie gliffy) are vastly superior to others (lucidchart).

You can write good documentation with minimal effort. But it also provides a comprehensive set of tools to format the crap out of your documents if you want to.

At this point, I'm really struggling to figure out what someone actually wants out of a "perfect" product. A lot of the things the author complains about would require draconian solutions from a systems standpoint that would just set off another round of complaints that the system is to restrictive.

[mrweasel]

> It allows you to search uploaded documentation.

> It allows you to easily search everything!

The first one is correct. Confluence will happily search PDFs uploaded to pages. Search in general is... well it's not good. Confluence very much requires that you know exactly what you're searching for and roughly where it is. Unless it's a PDF. In that case it will be the top result for 8 out of 10 searches.

That being said I still think Confluence is one of the best documentation platforms available. It's a little sad that Atlassian is discontinuing the server version (datacenter still exists). Many of their customers simply cannot legally use their hosted option. I know we have at least two customers who are absolutely screwed when they reach EOL on their on-prem installation, because they cannot afford datacenter licenses.

[tonteldoos]

Oddly, to your first point, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Came from a company that used sharepoint for almost everything, that I referred to as /dev/null - if you didn't know EXACTLY what you were looking for, search was useless after you uploaded or created something. It was not uncommon for the document with matching search terms in the title, to show up on page 3 of the results. Moved to a company that used Confluence for almost everything (there was already a fair bit of content), and search was an absolute dream. Even with terrible search terms, the page (or document) you were looking for was invariably in the first 3 results.

[rednerrus]

If only JQL was available for Confluence...

[ethbr0]

Confluence and JIRA both depend on how your company configures them.

They can both be set up to be incredibly useful, or completely useless.

Typically, the more configuration was decided by someone who doesn't do technical work, the more they slide towards the latter. In most companies, they're configured exclusively by people who don't do technical work (e.g. HR).

[tootie]

Same. They absolutely fall into the category of "worst tools available except for all the others". It takes work to configure a JIRA workflow and set of dashboards that works for your org, but every other product I've tried just doesn't even try. I was really shocked the first I tried Notion and Asana since they were so hyped, but they felt way to simple to be useful. Even with a small team we found them way too confining.

[billconan]

I'm ok with confluence too. It used to be slow, nowadays it seems to be fine.

I think the real problem is "writing is difficult." I used to write blogs, now I don't do it anymore. it's too involved.

could there be another form of content that's easy to create? like audio and video (with searchability ).