Knowledge Management with Confluence

A Web-based system that lets you add, share and find content with powerful tools for building a good knowledge base in your organization

Sunday, December 18, 2005

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Not all information can be classified within one set of category, and each individual department or operational area within your organization would have its own needs and types of information. Although Wiki is sufficient for handling such information, the drawback has been that ordinarily you've had to create separate Wiki sites for each operational area. Also, mere marshalling of this knowledge is not sufficient-workers need to collaborate and discuss things as well as have a way to search through this data. That's where software like Altassian's Confluence come into the picture by integrating search, Wiki and mail into one seamless interface. As such it differs from other general-domain solutions in that it offers specifically tailored modules for enterprise needs. Let's take up the features of Confluence and see how it scores.

How it works
A full-fledged Confluence implementation is a collection of Wiki sites, each with its own documents and customizations. Each of these sites is called a 'space'. From their dashboard, all users of the Confluence system can view and search for content across these spaces. The system can also be used to publish newsletters and keep employees in touch with the happenings in the company. Such news can be updated by each space separately and then published by the integrated RSS module- users can subscribe to these individual RSS feeds and combine them at their end to receive news of all the internal happenings in a customized newsletter.

Confluence bundles a lot of plugins that can be turned on or off from the built-in plugin manager space

An innovative use you can put the software to is for archiving your e-mail. If you CC your mail from any mail account to the Confluence system, it gets archived and also becomes instantly searchable with all its attachments. This also means you don't need separate management for knowledge in the Wiki and in the e-mail systems. Storing knowledge in any format is useless if you cannot locate it. Confluence offers users a hierarchical as well as a chronological system for ordering information. Its index can also report pages that are linked to, but are not there.

Installation
Confluence is available for both Linux and Windows. We have used Win 2000 in our setup. Before continuing, you may also need to download and install J2SE (1.4.2) from java.sun.com. Follow the steps in the box to set up the environment variables for Java. After downloading Confluence, unzip the file into a folder on your hard disk. We unzipped it into C:\CONFLUENCE. Although Confluence can run as it is at this point, let's tweak it a bit.

Configuration
From the Confluence folder, open the file 'Confluence\ WEB-INF\Classes\confluence.  init.properties' and set the 'confluence. home' parameter to a directory of your choice. This directory is where Confluence will store its configuration information, indexes and mail attachments. Next, open the 'Confluence\Bin' folder and use the 'startup.bat' batch file there to start the application. For convenience, you can create a shortcut to this batch file on your desktop. Now to license it for use, fire up your Web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:8080. On the Web page that appears, there's a box where you can paste the license key you received when you downloaded Confluence (if you didn't, you can use the button above the license key box to get it again). Now, scroll down the page and select 'Standard installation' to continue configuring the software. Fill in a few details such as the administrator's e-mail address and password, and save it. Now, you can start using Confluence.

Administration
Now you can access Confluence implementation from anywhere on your network using the IP address (or name) with the ':8080' at the end of it. To administer it, you need to login as 'admin' with the password you gave when you selected 'standard installation' above.

The homepage shows a default workspace on the left, and on the right is a dashboard with various items like recent updates, task lists and e-mail archive. Let's now set up a few things. Click on the 'administration' link on the top right of the Web page. On the page that appears, click on 'Mail Server' under 'Configuration'. Set up the parameters of your mail server here. Next, click on 'Backup' and configure the schedule for backing up the Confluence database. Synchronize this with your regular disk backup for convenience. You can explore and configure other options too.

Creating users and groups
On the same administration page, you can manage users of your Confluence system. Scroll down the page to access the 'Manage Users', 'Manage Groups' and 'Global Permissions' options on the left side of the page. Click on the 'Manage Users' link and you will get a page where you can create new users by specifying the user name, password, full name and e-mail address. To change the global permissions like granting rights to user to create his own workspace, you use the 'Global Permissions' option and set up permissions for confluence- administrator users and normal confluence users.

Advanced configuration
After configuring users for the system, create workspaces according to your requirements. Click on the 'Create a Space' icon, specify a name and a description of the workspace. Descriptions are important since Confluence can host many workspaces and this will help users in locating the right one for their needs. To manage the workspaces, click on the globe icon next to it on the list. For each workspace, you are shown seven tabs-Pages, Attachments, Mail, News, Templates Advanced and Space Admin. These tabs set up the behavior of the work space. For example, to restrict users or users groups from viewing, creating and exporting content from a workspace,  click on the 'Space Admin' tab and under the security option select the 'permission' link. You can set up the users and their rights for the space from here.

Using Confluence
In order to use Confluence as a normal user, just login to it using the name and password assigned by the administrator. Each user gets their own dashboard with links to different Confluence modules, upon login. He can then view the information, upload pages to the knowledgebase and archive e-mail with attachments. Confluence is a complete knowledge management application that can be fully customized according to your organizational needs. The software cost varies depending upon the license type (commercial, academic) and user number. A 500 user commercial license costs $4000. Compared to other free CMS software like Mambo, Drupal, PostNuke and PHPNuke, Confluence has all their functionality for a fully functional enterprise Wiki and knowledge management portal and a little more.

Sanjay Majumder

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