A corporate wiki for Information Management

What are the best aspects of this product?

Confluence is a wiki designed for companies to store, manage and share their information. It's "information management" rather than "document management".
I used to work at Atlassian, the maker of Confluence. While working there I appreciated the fact that ALL of the company's information was stored in Confluence. Now that I'm working somewhere else, I have come to fully appreciate the benefits of Confluence -- due to its absence!
The real benefits of a corporate wiki can only be truly attained by committing to it all-in. For example:
* Stop sending documents via email -- put the information on a wiki instead
* Stop email chains -- comment on the wiki pages themselves, and be automatically informed about updates and new comments
* Make all your corporate information searchable, rather than sitting in Office documents on individual computers
* Encourage information sharing by opening access of the wiki to as many staff as possible
* Staff who join the company have immediate visibility to all past information
In contrast, my current company sends all information via email and each person must keep their own email archive. Somebody who joins the company has no visibility to what happened in the past. There's no easy way to "discuss" information in the same place that the information lives.
Confluence has many features that make it easy to share information:
* "Watch this page" will notify you of updates to pages you nominate
* Add comments and discussions on the same page as the information
* Use plug-ins to extend the system, such as querying data from external systems, drawing charts, inserting calendars and cross-referencing other information within the wiki

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

Confluence can be challenging to configure and maintain, so there is also a cloud-based, fully-managed version that might be simpler for some companies.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

We used Confluence for "Information Management", which is distinct from "Document Management".
Document Management is figuring out where to store and manage files. It's an IT problem and really improve corporate knowledge.
Information Management, in contrast, is about handling an organisation's knowledge, encouraging interaction and staying up-to-date with changing situations. It's about the contents, rather than the tool. For this, you need a wiki rather than discrete, distributed files.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes