With its Wikipedia-like content creation capabilities, Atlassian Confluence makes an excellent wiki platform that is easy to use and deploy.
Its superior customization capabilities (using 800+ Atlassian Marketplace apps) and seamless integration with Jira allow cohesive cross-team collaboration, making it perfect for teams of all shapes and sizes.
It’s no wonder that Confluence is trusted by many innovative organizations like Spotify, NASA, and Lufthansa Systems to increase knowledge sharing and simplify cross-team collaboration.
In spite of its many capabilities, Confluence comes up short when it comes to document management. Besides the built-in editor, the platform only allows you to manage files (Word or PDF, for example) as attachments. To modify a file’s content, you need a third-party application like Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Fortunately, you can leverage Microsoft SharePoint to organize, access, and edit documents right within your Confluence.
Read this blog post to discover the benefits of enabling document management in Confluence using SharePoint and how you can achieve it.
Why You Need Document Management in Confluence
Although you can attach most file types in Confluence, you can’t freely edit them the way you can with a cloud storage system like Microsoft Office 365. Instead, users have to download the attached documents, edit them, and then reupload the updated files. This makes collaboration across teams inefficient.
Atlassian is aware of this drawback, so they recommend using the Atlassian Companion app to edit attached documents within Confluence. However, this method still requires multiple uploads to keep your team updated on a single document.
Worse still, without the attachment lock feature, you may be editing a document completely unaware that your teammate has already uploaded a new version of the file. You must then download their file to start all over or overwrite your changes.
Another thing to keep in mind: the default size of each file that you can upload in Confluence is 10MB, and the maximum size allowed is 2GB (with administrative permission). For any file bigger than that, you must opt for different platforms or sharing methods. This limitation makes it difficult for teams who require large amounts of storage to collaborate on the cloud.
Therefore, having robust document management is essential to fully utilizing Confluence capabilities. It also ensures that the wiki page becomes the definitive source of updated and organized knowledge across your enterprise.
SharePoint: A Best-in-Class Document Management Solution
SharePoint is a web-based collaboration platform. Its exceptional document management and storage capabilities make it one of the best enterprise document repositories.
Managing content and finding information have never been easier thanks to its indexing and federated search.
Once uploaded on SharePoint, your document is automatically indexed with a unique ID assigned to it. SharePoint also creates document metadata like title, author, date created, and date modified for categorization purposes.
Using the federated search function, you can browse through several resources (e.g. different departments’ document repositories) and search engines quickly.
That’s not all there is. You can take teamwork one step further by collaborating in the cloud. The ability to edit documents using Microsoft Office 365 is the #1 reason to use SharePoint.
If your organization is already using both solutions, integrating Confluence’s wiki platform with SharePoint’s document management capabilities is a smart move.
Here’s why.
Benefits of Enabling Document Management in Confluence Using SharePoint
When you incorporate document management in Confluence using SharePoint, indexed documents are easily accessible in the multi-team corporate wiki page through SharePoint federated search.
No more switching between platforms to look for information!
With document management in Confluence, you can now embed more than just photos, videos, and presentations. Collaborate and create highly engaging Confluence content by embedding libraries filled with relevant information through SharePoint.
In addition to that, enabling document management in Confluence using SharePoint eliminates the need for third-party apps to edit and manage documents.
While the Atlassian Companion app allows you to edit attached documents using desktop applications, it’s impractical if you work remotely or don’t have access to the desktop application.
With SharePoint’s document management feature, you get to modify and manage the embedded files all within the Microsoft Office 365 cloud system! This spells good news for productivity.
With enterprise-wide collaboration across different platforms, there is always a risk of information silos, which in turn, leads to misaligned teams.
For example, your development team is using Confluence to update release notes and product documentation. Meanwhile, the sales team creates and stores all their marketing materials, sales plans, and product information in SharePoint.
There’s a new version update and the development team has documented it in their Confluence page. But the latest version information is not available in SharePoint. Your sales representatives will continue to pitch obsolete features and miss the opportunity to showcase the new features your team spent so much time on.
By enabling document management in Confluence using SharePoint, information and real-time updates are available in both platforms; thus, minimizing siloed data and systems.
Everyone who collaborated on the content will be able to participate in the discussion and share feedback effectively within their preferred platform. Comments and feedback are instantly available across the two platforms.
Document Management Done Right: Confluence and SharePoint Integration
Integrating SharePoint document management in Confluence is extremely simple using SharePoint Connector for Confluence. The app enables you to directly embed, edit, share, and manage SharePoint documents in your Confluence wiki page.
Don’t just stop there; embed a list or an entire document library and make your wiki page a centralized knowledge hub.
Read More: How to Embed a Document from SharePoint Online in a Confluence Page
Teams can then browse through the SharePoint list or library within Confluence without switching platforms to locate relevant documents.
But don’t let this vast amount of information overwhelm your readers. Customize the document viewing setting as either Fixed, Linked, or Responsive to manage information in an orderly manner.
Staying true to the concept of real-time collaboration, you can work on SharePoint files right from Confluence using Microsoft Office 365. Similarly, SharePoint users can embed, view, and comment on wiki pages and blog articles within SharePoint.
Future Improvements for Optimized Document Management in Confluence
The capabilities of SharePoint Connector for Confluence are not limited to embedding, viewing, and editing SharePoint documents, lists, and libraries in a Confluence page.
Exciting future improvements that you can utilize for optimized document management in Confluence include:
As of now, the default option is to select the root folder in the app when you’re embedding a document library in Confluence. Soon, you’ll be able to customize the level of folder structure to optimize document management.
Currently, you can only view and edit SharePoint files within Confluence. In the near future, you will be able to upload new files into SharePoint without leaving the Confluence platform using the upload button.
Conclusion
The SharePoint Connector enables more fluid document management in Confluence, allowing enterprise-wide collaboration and knowledge sharing with ease.
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