Technical project documentationCreate and manage important documents online

Project Documentation

Managing projects is about more than just creating tasks. It's about communication - keeping stakeholders informed and providing a central location for project information. Confluence is ideal for managing project artifacts, posting announcements and facilitating discussions.

• Centralise project artifacts into one place where your team can find them. All your presentations, spreadsheets, documents and more can be dragged directly onto Confluence where they're shareable, viewable and editable.
• Collaboratively author meeting agendas, project plans and even build out a custom project dashboard with Confluence's online editing features.
• Make announcements and communicate key updates to the project team or the wider organisation using Confluence blogs. Project members can even receive blog updates over email or RSS.
• Track important milestones with tables and perform lightweight task management with Confluence tasklists. Third party plugins like TaskDock even let you assign, track, and complete targeted Confluence actions like commenting on page.
• Create the ultimate project management application by connecting with JIRA. Confluence provides out-of-the-box integration with JIRA so you can:
  • Insert entire lists of JIRA issues into your project page
  • Create shortcut links to JIRA tasks from inside Confluence
  • Build project dashboards by placing JIRA gadgets inside Confluence (or vice versa)
  • Integrate user management between the two applications.

I love JIRA and Confluence. How did we ever document our work in the past? mikegrindstaff via Twitter

Requirements Gathering

A requirements specification is never complete. It is an iterative document showing only a team's intentions at a given point in time. Confluence gives development teams the flexibility to rapidly update specs and keep everyone updated as requirements change.

• Create a standard requirements specification for your team with page templates. This saves you from "reinventing the wheel" for each new spec and ensures each specification is consistent with your team's standard. Third party plugins like Scaffolding even allow information to be captured using custom forms.
• Track how specifications evolve with page version history. Confluence creates a new version of the page each time it is modified so you know when and why certain edits were made. View changes between different versions and restore a previous version if necessary.
• Visually display your requirements with powerful third party plugins like Balsamiq mockups and Gliffy diagrams. Create images directly inside your specification without the need for desktop tools.
• Engage stakeholders like QA and product management so you can gather consensus quickly and prevent issues from arising down the line.
  • Comments let stakeholders ask questions and provide feedback directly on the specification page.
  • Email and RSS notifications let stakeholders keep track of changes and be aware of comments from other stakeholders.

Case study

See why Dow Jones uses Confluence to collaborate on almost every type of documentation and process. Learn more...

Technical Writing

Writing product manuals is a team effort. Technical writers need to ensure content consistency while developers need to ensure content accuracy. Confluence helps teams rapidly publish and update product manuals, making them available in a variety of formats.

• Rapidly create, iterate and organise your product documentation with Confluence powerful authoring features like a complete rich text editor, page versioning and Office integration. Third party tools like ePublisher let you bulk import your existing documentation into Confluence from Word or Framemaker.
• Publish your product manuals in various formats, including PDF, Word, HTML or XML. Third party Confluence plugins like Scroll give you an even higher degree of control for publishing professional product manuals from Confluence.
• Correct errors immediately and easily update your manuals for new product version so your documentation is always accurate.
• Safely open your documentation to editing and commenting by customers so they can contribute their knowledge. Enterprise security features, like CAPTCHA and granular permissions make this possible.

Case study

Find out why OpenCloud switch to Confluence for managing documentation and how they approach DITA, Docbook and PDF. Learn more...