Confluence vs. SharePoint

What's the difference between SharePoint & Confluence?

SharePoint and Confluence are substantially different solutions. Confluence is the world's most popular commercial wiki, so the SharePoint Connector has been quite popular with existing SharePoint customers who want to replace SharePoint's wiki functionality with a best-of-breed solution. You may be able to meet your requirements with just Confluence, or you might need both working together.

SharePoint's primary focus is as a document repository - a place for storing documents that have been authored, and will be edited offline. SharePoint provides collaboration services around this primary function, in the form of discussion groups, lists, and a website builder that allows you to join all these functions together into a web portal.

Confluence's primary focus is open collaboration. The strength of a wiki is that it provides a flexible, powerful way to organise all the information that never made it into Word documents in the first place. Pages are edited and linked to each other within the Confluence application much more easily than writing everything up officially in Word. Once written, pages are easily linked to each other to create a web of information that visitors can browse naturally, so in this way Confluence allows, even encourages people to share more effectively than a document repository.

Any Confluence page can also host a discussion, or be used to store documents, or be used to provide portal-like integration with other services, or any combination of these things as the site requires. The big advantage of using Confluence over traditional document management that it takes you away from the sharing libraries of Word documents and towards collaborating on a web of interlinked information.

SharePoint's strength is sharing Microsoft Office documents. It provides easy integration to allow you to check files out of the central server, edit them and then check them back in again which is a bit of a long process. While many SharePoint features such as approval workflows and checkouts aren't available in Confluence by default, this functionality can be easily added by installing the relevant Confluence plugin:

• Ad Hoc Workflow Plugin (formerly Approvals Workflow Plugin)
• Arsenale Lockpoint
• Attachment Checkout Plugin
• Office Connector

You might be interested to read about a Confluence user's perspective (link no longer valid) on the differences between Confluence and Sharepoint as well as an in-depth comparison by Bill Arconati on the Atlassian News Blog.

You may also be interested to watch a recent webinar that takes a deep dive into the SharePoint Connector as well as checkout the short video below which is a presentation from the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco in April 2009 that discusses how you can supercharge SharePoint with an enterprise wiki:

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