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RSS FeedApril 8th, 2009
More confluence pains
I had a pretty happy March – it was warm in DC, the Cherry Blossoms were on the way, and I was looking forward to visiting Vegas!! Well, now, it is April – it is cold, Cherry Blossoms are already here (almost gone), and my Vegas trip has not made me significantly richer.
Further, one of my business partners has started using Confluence back and has been putting some new documents there for everyone else to review. I am usually happy to review docs if I can find them! Confluence just doesn’t make it any easy for people to do things. For a while, the general consensus has been that Confluence is technically solid, with a stupid user interface. Most of the people from Atlassian have repeatedly said that that upcoming releases will relieve that.
Well, the latest version of Confluence seems to have no better UI than previous versions. The so called “2.10? version is either an eye wash or a change on the internals. The user interface is hardly any easier, or even much different from previous versions.
Sometimes, I think that the problem is with Atlassian at a more general level. As a stupid example – note that even the “Screenshot Tour” on Confluence’s own website isn’t really a tour – just a group of 6 pictures and you cannot even go from 1 picture to the next.
Now that’s just bad.
June 26th, 2008
Review of Confluence – Enterprise Wiki
Our business partners have been using the Confluence Enterprise Wiki for almost two years now, and as part of that, I use it on and off. Finally, the day has come when I am just going to rebel.
What is surprising to me is that this software sells! People in fact use it! How, why, I really do not know. As a user, I have never really been a fan of it. The UI is kloogy, nothing is intuitive, and even filling out a resource feedback form requires training. When I look at the Confluence website, I find that they claim the features such as top grade security and searchability. Thankfully, they don’t claim “Highly usable!” as their forte, and in this tiny respect I agree with them.
Some other peeves (opportunities for improvement – if you are an Atlassian person)
- It uses some wickedly technical labels like: “Hide Children”, “View in Hierarchy”, “Add Child Page”?
Are these labels for real, or they were left behind before the user testing was done?
[To give credit where it is due, there are some more meaningful labels such as Add Spreadsheet etc.] - The hierarchy of a space is not clear at all. If you end up in an unfamiliar corner of the neighborhood, you may have to click Back Back Back to find your spot.
- Extremely slow: Now, you could blame this on the server, on the hosting, but I know other applications hosted on same platform, running about 4 times faster than Confluence. (Not all of them are Java, but as I user, I don’t really care.)
- No Web 2.0: This software was probably developed in 1990s, and was fit for that time. Most of us have been spoilt by fancier software such as Blogger, Yahoo Mail, and can’t stand a delay of 10 seconds just to show a “Saved successfully” dialog.
So, that is that. If you happen to agree or disagree with what I said, just leave me a comment.