Objective

Is Confluence a solution for Document management system?

Environment

Server

Procedure

Confluence can be used as a document control system. It’s built-in features to manage, version, search and organize attachments for customers justify it as an end-to-end replacement for a shared document repository. For example, you can attach documents of any size and type to a Confluence wiki page. Both the attachments and pages themselves are versioned, and attachments inherit the view permissions of the pages to which they attach to. In this way, you can consider Confluence pages as folders in a system, and its attachments as files.

For Confluence Server (self-hosted), there is even a WebDAV functionality. Mounting Confluence as a WebDAV drive provides the ability to access documents stored in Confluence from the desktop. This allows to drag, drop, and open attachments from and within the native application on your desktop.

However, Confluence has a different approach to sharing and interacting with the content. Confluence is designed to be an enterprise collaboration system. To take full advantage of Confluence, let your documents be as Confluence pages – continually accessible via the browser, also supporting various forms of rich content, dynamic reports, and threaded discussions. Confluence even allows you to import existing word documents to Confluence wiki pages. Therefore, Confluence is designed to reduce dependence on desktop applications and their documents (e.g. Microsoft Office files locked in email threads and shared drives).

Additionally, Confluence provides direct integration with other document management systems: check the SharePoint Connector for Confluence and a file connector for Confluence which allows integration with document management tools such as Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Many customers utilize Confluence as the collaborative front end while continuing to manage the lifecycle of their static documents with SharePoint or other DMS tools as the storage in the backend.

To summarize, Confluence was not designed to be a document management or file-sharing system for documents which are created offline. Instead, it focuses on features that improve the editing and sharing of online content created within the wiki itself while also including the ability to store and organize attached files with version history.

Additional Information

• Various methods for importing content into Confluence.