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Confluence
Case Study – Johns Hopkins University
- Headquarters
- Baltimore, Maryland USA
- Industry
- Higher Education
- Department
- Student Information Systems
- # of Confluence users
- 305, of which 100 use it regularly
A Conversation with Geoffrey Corb, IT Director, Johns Hopkins University
Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins University became the first research university in the United States. Its aim was two-fold — to advance students' knowledge and to advance the general human knowledge through discovery and scholarship. Today, more than a century later, the University spans across nine academic and research divisions, each of which are grouped among the finest schools of the country. With its emphasis on learning and research, Johns Hopkins University has revolutionized higher education within the United States.
Interview on Confluence
(Johns Hopkins University also uses JIRA, the issue tracker. Read the JIRA case study here.)
Why did Johns Hopkins University decide to use a wiki? Why Confluence?
We wanted to establish a collaborative web environment where we could chat, post issues of concern, collaborate on development, share things we were doing, report our status, and work with our primary vendor. Our document management solution had historically been a source code control product, which makes any programmer twitch. We have a huge volume of Word documents, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets—we could only search through them in the repository in which they were stored.
With Confluence, we liked how we could take all our existing content and put it all on a page and know that those documents were indexed and searchable. It provided a very nice solution for that.
In December 2004, we started an informal consortium between ourselves and the other schools who are implementing the same student information system product — a product that was new to market and for which we were collectively early adopters.
I was aware of Confluence by nature of your marketing, having been a JIRA customer. We looked at open source wikis, but we liked the polished look of Confluence. We implemented it and tried to create this group environment. We did it and it flopped.
- "[We] turned from creating Word documents and Excel spreadsheets into the almost living, breathing pages within Confluence." Geoffrey Corb, IT Director
It flopped?!?
It had nothing to do with Confluence. It really had to with the involvement and commitment of those involved: we were not interacting very much outside of the system. Having a tool that would allow us to interact would have been great had we interacted. So I sat here on this really great tool that I was anxious to use and said, "Hey, why don't we start using Confluence internally?" One of my managers and I turned from creating Word documents and Excel spreadsheets into creating the almost living, breathing pages within Confluence.
I found it to be ridiculous to write a lengthy specification document when all I am going to do is to send that document to a number of people as an e-mail attachment and they are all going to redline it and then send it back to me. Half of them are all going to say the same thing anyway. Instead I thought, 'why don't I go into Confluence, create a page and fill in the details. This way, when we go to write a specification document, anyone who wants to collaborate or is a stakeholder can put in their two cents.' This would also facilitate close customer interaction to support some of our agile development efforts.
So we started converting. And now we use it extensively for our documentation, for building a knowledge base, and for collaboratively developing specifications and policies. Whenever people want to know about something, they know to go into Confluence first and see what they can find.
Were people afraid of the transparency of the wiki?
There was a huge hesitation. It took a long time for people to get themselves into the system. I don't know that I could qualify why, but there was a point where it just kind of exploded. At some point nearly everyone got comfortable and its use blossomed.
Do both students and staff use Confluence?
Our environment is being used by staff. Because of the fact that we have licenses that are generally available, I could see students groups being interested. I can also see something happening such as we create a generally available Confluence environment where we could provision out space to student groups.
What departments are using Confluence?
All of the University's admissions, financial aid, registrars, and student billing offices—about 30 departments—use Confluence, in support of our student information system implementation.
- "It has become a routine thing for me every morning to read through the summary email." Geoffrey Corb, IT Director
What is the best feature of Confluence?
The "summary" email that I get every night. It has become a routine thing for me every morning to read through the summary email, look at what's changed, and to look at new pages that have been created. We're seeing a rapid growth of newly created pages, or more frequently lots of updates on existing pages. So it's a nice way to get caught up on what's happening, what people are doing, and what's being documented.
Seeing that you deployed both JIRA, an issue tracker, and Confluence, a wiki, do they interact with one another at all?
We use them together���mostly through the use of JIRA filters in Confluence. For example, we have Confluence pages that enumerate issues related to a particular release of a product and then populate the page with additional notes or related commentary. In a JIRA issue, we might reference a Confluence page in the body of the issue or in the comments.
In two years, where do you see wikis at Johns Hopkins University?
I hope to see more of them. I see them as an easy opportunity to publish content to the web. We are in an environment where we are still either paper-based or the documents live in network drives, file systems���basically systems that are inaccessible. I would like to see more people posting what they know in a collegial and cooperative environment, letting people correct one another and comment on one another.