Confluence Screenshot tour
Solutions – Shared Drives
Bringing order to chaos.
Why use Confluence to replace shared drives?
Traditionally, organisations store documents, graphics, presentations and other types of files in a shared drive. Unfortunately, shared drives make it difficult to:
- organise content in meaningful ways
- manage security for particular files or folders
- determine the most recent version of a document
Worse, each department often has its own shared drive, making it practically impossible for anyone to perform an enterprise-wide search.
Keep it in Confluence
Confluence is an enterprise wiki, a secure online tool that makes it easy for you and your co-workers to create, edit, store, organise and share content.
Preserving the simplicity of a traditional shared drive, Confluence also offers many more advanced features:
Storing files the easy way
Confluence houses all kinds of content and is accessible whenever you need it. Easily upload your Microsoft Word files, PDF documents, images or any other files into Confluence.
Enterprise-grade security in Confluence gives you fine-grained control over who can access which content.
Accessible anywhere
Because Confluence is web-based, you can easily access your documents from home (with appropriate security). No more wrestling with the corporate VPN, or editing outdated email attachments.
You can even access content through your own operating system using WebDAV (such as 'Web Folders' in Windows).
See WebDAV in action 
(3 minutes, 5.6MB, Quicktime)
Find what you are looking for
In a shared drive, the only way to organise your files is in folders. In Confluence, there is linking, tagging, hierarchy and workspaces that help you organise information however you want.
Everything in Confluence is also searchable — even the content of attachments like PDFs and Microsoft Word documents.
Case study
- A wiki brings information out from the depths of individual home directories and network share drives and moves it up to the enterprise level where people can review and comment on it, but not necessarily edit it.
- Chris D'Agostono, Near Infinity
No more guessing games
Don't waste time determining which version of a file is the most recent and which ones are outdated, e.g.:
'Company Profile - latest.doc'
'Company Profile - revised.doc'
'Company Profile - use this one.doc'
'Company Profile - with Dave's changes.doc'
Confluence keeps track of every version of every page and attachment, no matter how many different people made edits to it. At any stage you can roll back to a previous version and view the audit trail.
Case study
- Initially, we were sharing knowledge articles. But people loved the versioning control of pages and attachments, so they actually started using it like a file manager — they share files and uploaded files as attachments; they record comments, and create pages for their attachments. They manage experimental results this way.
- Mingyi Liu, GPC Biotech
Staying in the know
Receive a notification when someone makes an edit to a particular page, or uploads a new version of a file. Stay informed by subscribing to RSS feeds and email notifications about the content most important to you.
Usage example
Receive an email every time the Sales Manager uploads the latest Sales Forecast spreadsheet.