Atlassian Confluence vs. IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management

Atlassian Confluence is a great tool for housing important information and resources across the organization, as it's very easy to search and find content across different teams and departments. The search function is mostly very accurate and the additional tagging with keywords also helps in the search experience. It's also good at tagging other team members, which triggers an automated email to them. Atlassian Confluence also has an extensive template library for all kinds of purposes like project management, etc., which saves time overall.

Incentivized

While working on a complex project it is important all the needed change requests are handled in an effective manner, this tool helps us do exactly the same, it had great features to manage those change management tickets, making sure to merge the change with existing workflow, prioritize the requests centrally so there are no duplicates. Easy to collaborate across different teams and colleagues across the aisle.

Incentivized

• Its integration with Jira for tracking development and the bugs and work linked to detailed Confluence documentation.
• We use it extensively for writing Software Product Requirement Documents, feature specs, architecture designs, and retrospectives.
• Our company follows compliance very seriously, so it helps in streamlining all documentation for ISO27001/27017 compliance and security-related information.
• Its integration with various tools allows us to create flow diagrams which are often required to make client and customer understand the overall flow of interactions across various modules of the design architecture

Incentivized

• There are a couple of areas where IBM Rational DOORS is quite strong. First, it is part of the IBM CLM solution so the artifacts developed in this module can be easily available for other functions like development and QA. They can link with their stories and test cases and team leads and managers can use traceability matrix to find out where there are gaps in coverage.
• Comprehensive configuration management functionality (concept of multiple streams and global configuration) is available, which can be helpful if you need to implement configuration management scenarios for your product or project. For example, a certain version of a requirement can be linked with one story and another version of same requirement can be linked with another story. This is the unique feature which other current tools in the market don't provide.
• It's highly customizable so you can configure the project areas based on your need. You can have your own requirement types, and you can define templates to speed up the process. Comprehensive review functionality is there as well.

Incentivized

• You need to watch over the structure of the content yourself. if not you can get information added anywhere so nobody can find it.
• Top search field is hard to set to only search a section of pages.
• You really need to think your structure through before starting. a guide when setting up at the start could help in that perspective.

Incentivized

• Too complex for projects or businesses that don't really need the detail. It is basically overkill.
• If you are new to IBM Rational tools, it may be a medium learning curve. You'd also need lots of training from your people, since, as usual, this tool shouldn't be managed alone.
• It may seem old fashion compared to Jira and the current control tools used in IT industry.

Incentivized

I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.

One of the downsides for us was the capabilities of the native build tools were lacking. The project management and work item tracking capabilities are great and I would recommend the tool to anyone. There is a definite learning curve with RTC as a source control system, and the streams are a concept unique to the product

Incentivized

It's very intuitive for most things, making it easy to jump in and start creating pages and collaborating. This makes it ideal for onboarding new members to the team. There are a few areas that could be a little smoother, but overall it's a great experience.

Incentivized

The UI is terrible and not intuitive. Users need training in order to complete tasks. Much like SAP, it's not the clearest tool. The tracing feature is especially complicated because you must write the scripts yourself. There is a learning curve. Also, even the setup, installation, and logging in each time takes a considerable amount of time.

Incentivized

I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.

Incentivized

We never worked against the tide while using Confluence. Everything loads considerably fast, even media components like videos (hosted on the platform or embed external videos from Youtube, for example). We are not using heavy media components a lot, but in the rare occasion we happen to use one we have no problems whatsoever.

Incentivized

This rating is specifically for Atlassian's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from Atlassian. Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.

Incentivized

It does a basic job and has the potential to complete some robust reporting tasks, however, it really is a clunky piece of software with a terrible user interface that makes using it routinely quite unpleasant. Many of our legacy and maintenance projects still use DOORS but our department and company use many alternatives and are looking for better tools.

Incentivized

Overall, I am very satisfied with the initial implementation (and the subsequent upgrades and implementations made over the years).

This product has never rose to the level of being an major issue at an executive level. It has quietly and valiantly done it's job for our company!

Incentivized

No problems

Incentivized

Atlassian Confluence is a super handy hub for sharing ideas and keeping all your docs in one place. While Jira Service Management is more about handling tickets and support issues, Atlassian Confluence really makes teamwork easy. I feel Atlassian Confluence is user-friendly, integrates smoothly with other Atlassian tools, and helps everyone stay in sync. It's great for brainstorming, and project planning as well. Overall, it is a great way to boost collaboration and ensure all team members are on the same page.

Incentivized

The established experience contained in most IBM Rational DOORS installations is only compensated by the high flexibility of Atlassian JIRA. The markets state that Jira is less expensive in the setup. There are many manufacturers that support IBM Rational DOORS to have the big tiers as their customers. Jira has problems in that growth. Jira has more features compared to IBM Rational DOORS. For example in cloud support, IBM Rational DOORS relies on improved external services while Jira abstracts in the most modern way. Jira experts have a different professional background compared to that of IBM Rational DOORS. They are indeed from different engineering generations. There is little interchange in personal and ideas.

Incentivized

This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.

Incentivized

• Merging instances has saved search time - We used to have several instances of Atlassian Confluence, which means they're separate and so can't communicate with each other. We've since merged into one instance and now with the help of the search feature can find the documents you're looking for in seconds rather than several minutes.
• Cross linking product assets streamlines following paper trails - Being able to click on a BitBucket link from a Confluence page which then links to a JIRA ticket means you can follow paper trails really easily; seconds rather than several minutes.

Incentivized

• RTC helps automate incident management workflow which improves our work efficiency. With the integration with Geneos and GSD, we can one click create RTC incident tickets from Geneos with most of the information copied from Geneos automatically and then link the details to GSD for privilege account management if needed.
• RTC provides a holistic view on ad hoc production activities. We use RTC for production management. Whoever needs to get access to production due to non-planned activities (planned change is managed in GSD) has to raise an incident ticket or service request ticket in RTC so as to get production privilege accounts.
• RTC is also being used to review and approve the usage of privilege account which help us to meet audit requirements. For example, if a user made some database change using privilege account under incident number xxx, an entry will be added in RTC and sent to account owner or production support manager to review and approve.

Incentivized