What is Confluence Cloud?

Confluence is a collaboration tool that brings people, knowledge, and ideas together in a shared workspace, so you can do your best work with the confidence of your entire organization's expertise behind you.

This page is going to take you through some of the key things you can do with Confluence, so you'll be able to take full advantage of it and determine how it can best meet your needs. 

Create 

You can use Confluence to create beautiful pages and powerful dashboards in a matter of minutes. While Confluence has all your typical text editing features, what makes it really powerful is all the dynamic content that it comes with, like roadmaps, expands, and search bars. 

Sounds like complicated web development? It's not. Open the menu, choose the item you want, and add it to your page, then watch it automatically update as your page changes.

Confluence also lets you bring your other apps and files together. Say you're working on a marketing plan, and have a series of graphic assets that you're planning on using, and a Trello board on which you're tracking your tasks. You can attach those graphic assets to the page, and embed the Trello board on there too. 

In fact, you can attach any files to a Confluence page. Some files can even be previewed and updated from within Confluence.

Best of all, you and your team can work on a page together, with collaborative editing supporting up to 12 simultaneous editors. Create anything from meeting notes and product requirements to marketing plans and HR policies. If it's something you have to create regularly, save time and create it as a template. 

So next time you need to work on something, start with a Confluence page. 

Collaborate 

Teamwork can get messy. Good ideas get lost in the email void, team members come and go, different timezones affect timelines, and the more time you spend looking for information, the less you have to get things done.

Confluence changes that. In Confluence, everything is organized into spaces, which lets you have a distinct, self enclosed place for every project or team to work in, so you know where to go to find all the assets, information, and discussions related to that.

Spaces have:

• An overview on which you can keep information about your team or project.

• A blog, which you can use for announcements and updates. 

• Pages, for all your work. Organize these in a hierarchy or using labels, so it's easy to find whatever you're after. 

Confluence content isn't static, so when you make a change to any of your content, it updates immediately, regardless of who's viewing it, or from where. That means that if you've made a typo or need to update a policy, you just edit the page and make that change, without having to worry about redistributing anything. 

Confluence also has automatic versioning. That means that every time you upload a new version of a file, or update a page, Confluence saves a snapshot of that. Then, if you decide you've made a mistake (or someone else has), you can revert back to a previous version. 

Instead of having group conversations in email chains, where they're hard to find and invisible to anyone outside, put them on a page and move the discussion to the comments. Inline comments mean you can comment on a specific word or sentence (or file, or image) and have a whole discussion in context. For general feedback, use the comments at the bottom of the page.

When you come to a consensus, solidify it in a decision, create action items to follow up, and use @mentions to ensure that anyone else who needs to be kept informed remains in the know.

Share 

Confluence is open, so you're not working in silos. That means all of your organizational knowledge  - best practices, research and insights, customer feedback - is available to every employee, enabling them to move fast without starting from scratch. 

Working on a new project? Start with a quick search to see what information and resources your organization already has that you can build on, instead of starting from scratch. Check what other teams are working on, and identify opportunities for you to save time and effort by working together. 

Share resources like how-to's, guidelines and checklists across the organization for each team to modify according to their specific needs. As they get used, discussed, and experimented with, you can iterate on them based on the feedback so that they're constantly improving. 

Confluence brings the right people together to get things done. A great idea scribbled into a notebook might never amount to anything. But put your great idea on Confluence, and it can get shared with other people who have the passion and expertise to help you turn it into a reality. 

Openness isn't just about information. It's about a sense of shared purpose and experience, even if your team is spread out across different offices in different locations around the world. With Confluence, you can make sure everyone's on the same page about security and HR, but you can also plan team outings, share the photos afterward, and immortalize your in-jokes.

It fosters a sense of community because we work better and feel more fulfilled when we all feel like part of the same team.

Other things you should know: 

• While Confluence is open by default, you can also set structured permissions and restrictions. That means that, for example, you could share a project with a client, and have them comment on it, without them seeing anything else that you're working on. Or you could make a space public so your customers can view your support content, but can't edit it. Learn more about permissions and restrictions.

• Confluence also has a mobile app, so you can use it on a phone or tablet, from anywhere there's an internet connection. Download Confluence for mobile.

• Confluence has an entire Marketplace of free and paid apps that let you add extra functionality to it, so you can retrofit it to suit a variety of specialized use cases. Check out the Marketplace.