The
Atlassian site describes Confluence as:
Confluence is a simple, powerful wiki that lets you create and share pages, documents and rich content with your team.
If you're looking for a better way to collaborate or a replacement for an open-source wiki, Confluence has the essential enterprise features for your organisation.
Atlassian will allow you to demo Confluence locally and has set up an all-in-one installation package to simplify setup. You do, however, have to be at least a little comfortable with command line.
This tutorial reviews setting up Confluence on OSX but should be very similar to setting it up on Linux or on Windows.
- Download the application. Go to http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ConfluenceDownloadCenter.jspa and download the standalone archive
- Unpack the archive and choose a directory to pop it into. Even though the app doesn’t need the MAMP stack, to keep things tidy I placed it there.
- Next, you need to start up the app. Open up your terminal window type cd and the the location of startup.sh – in my case: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/confluence/confluence-2.10.3-std/bin
- Type into your terminal window ./startup.sh
- Pop over to your browser and see what you see at: http://localhost:8080 and you will likely be greeted with an error message prompting you to alter this file: confluence-init.properties which can be found in /confluence/WEB-INF – you need to indicate where confluence can save data. I added the following line to the file at the end: confluence.home=/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/confluence/data after creating a directory called “data” in the confluence directory.
- Refresh your browser window – if it whitescreens (nothing on the page) go back to your terminal window and type ./shutdown.sh and then ./startup.sh –refresh your browser again. Hopefully you will be prompted to start your setup in a Wizard. The hardest part of the setup is done.
- You’ll need a license key. Click on the “generate an evaluation license online” link on this page. If you don’t already have an Atlassian account, create one. If you do, log in. Click on “Generate License”. Copy the license key and back in the Setup Wizard, paste it.
- Click on Standard Installation
- Create an Admin account
- It is done and you can start the demonstration space.
Confluence is very user friendly. Creating a new space to collaborate within, is simple. Adding, editing, and commenting on pages make sense through a top LARGE menu. A tools button offers you options to look at the history of the page, add attachments with comments, export to word or pdf, look at the markup, look at the page’s information (title, author, last change, a TinyURL style URL, and a simple interface to copy, move, or remove the page. Pages naturally and intuitively nest when added from an existing page’s level. It gives you multiple ways to view where a page lives from a hierachical view to breadcrumbs to links on the page showing children.
After setting up the application, it was extemely easy to use from the get-go.
Pricing on Confluence ranges from $600 - $8000 depending on whether you are using it commercially or academically and how many users you want to license the product for.