[PragmaticPulp]

Confluence (and all of the similar products) can be used successfully, but you need the teams to agree on and enforce a logical document hierarchy. It’s not really difficult to organize a company wiki into teams, projects, and other logical divisions if you make it a priority.

The primary failure mode I see is when people just throw random documents into Confluence wherever convenient at time of writing and never go back to logically organize anything. One symptom of this is when key information is being recorded in a hundred different people’s “Personal Space”

Taking even half a day to organize the average Confluence makes a huge difference.

[triceratops]

If using the lowest friction or default path in a tool leads to bad outcomes, that's a problem with the tool. Not the user.

[PragmaticPulp]

You create the lowest friction/default path according to your company's needs.

There isn't a universal note taking application that comes pre-organized for your team's use case. You have to put some work into any tool you use.

[triceratops]

I disagree. The point of a tool is to reduce work.

Most teams and companies aren't special snowflakes that need individualized organizations, and document hierarchies. There can be such a thing as sensible defaults that you customize or tweak later (no idea if Confluence ships with that - I've only ever seen Confluence installations in their already-screwed-up state). At the same time, an inexperienced user staring at a fresh Confluence install isn't going to get the organization correct right off the bat.

If you have to put in work upfront before the tool is even halfway useful, it better be really damn good after that. Confluence is not.

[DocTomoe]

Disclaimer: I am a consultant working for an Atlassian-centered consultancy. I do a lot of Confluence-based projects recently.

You would not believe how special some use-cases are, especially when you work with organisations that have highly regulated environments. I've seen anything from markdown files in a git repository being semiautomatically created in a Jenkins run to an organization having built essentially their own wiki software because nothing on the market fulfilled their need at the time (now 5 years later, they realise no-one uses that thing because it is just unintuitive). I have seen organisations that have no content oversight and some who had a whole department of "content czars", whose sole job it was to keep their documentation fresh and updated. I've seen organisations that had strict rules on approving each individual change, with complex approval workflows.

If you have never documented anything, Confluence may be overwhelming, but so will every tool that has "sensible defaults", because before too long, you will start hitting the envelope. Documentation software is not like a MacBook that you just buy and start using, you always need some level of customisation.

So, is Confluence damn good? No - there's a lot that could be improved. But from the mediocre solutions on the market today, it is one of the better choices.

[iso1631]

The lowest friction is not doing any documentation

[wankle]

Agreed, we use Confluence and use an agreed upon structure. It works fine from what I've experienced.

[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

Can you share your structure? Or do you know any good open-source ones?

I personally have never seen it work, but of course I've also only seen a handful of data points.

[wankle]

Best advice I can think of, avoid more than three indentations in the outline.