The only thing that makes us unhappy with working with Atlassian’s software (www.atlassian.com) and more specifically Confluence is the fact that there is no way of sharing and showing how well it has organised our work!
Managing several networks (besides our own) and keeping proper documentation is quite a challenge which needs a lot of effort in the beginning. Most companies though cannot realise how much time is being wasted daily on information gathering and procedures monitoring and well keeping.
It took us about 6 months to gather the basic information that was needed in order for Confluence to become an everyday tool for us. The fact is that when you start realising the benefits of having everything documented it becomes an addiction. All our team members are now constantly updating our Confluence on a regular basis as well as keeping personal information, links, tools and useful commands on their personal spaces.
Right after we finished with the information gathering and addition, we started working with our external systems (billing, monitoring etc) which gave a completely new usage on our Confluence. It became the heart of the company’s information on which we monitor everything (from unpaid invoices and billing issues to server monitoring, ticketing integration and tasks management).
We also add our customers information and provide them with access on their private spaces so that they can also benefit from it as they can always find the latest configuration and information about their systems, policies and procedures. Some of our customers (who have access to a very limited part of the whole system) have asked us to implement such solutions on their internal network (a combination of openNMS, MRTG, Graylog, Munin, Rancid and Confluence) and integrate Confluence with those systems as well with their ERPs / CRMs etc.
