Comment by nwatson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwatson | Hacker News Reader

I like Evernote for a lot of personal stuff, though that's one of the "worser" systems OP lists. Atlassian's Confluence does very well at being a wiki and though you're hostage perhaps to your original layout / organization, at $10/year for self-hosted it's a very good deal. It can store and index PDF, Word, Excel, etc., documents very well. I don't think it does handwriting recognition.

If I were to evolve the product category I'd use Confluence as a basis.

In fact I'd want to toy with using Confluence (+ Postgres backend) as the basis for any I.T.-related product -- write plugins for user input, generate all reports to Confluence. I'm not sure what licensing restrictions might be but Confluence provides a lot of useful UI for $10/year (structured + unstructured) for any customer, and building on top of that seems like a no-brainer. Perhaps this is what others do with Drupal and other CMS products, though ... I'm not familiar with that model.

I'm surprised to read this. Confluence is the most unpleasant "wiki" product (its lack of support for redlinks prevents me from really considering it a wiki) I have ever used. Its built-in hierarchical structure for pages is excessively intrusive and undercooked at the same time, and the search is so bad that I have had it fail to pull up pages when I typed in the literal, complete title.

Like most Atlassian products, its only apparent notable quality to me is that it integrates with other Atlassian products, as well as being a semi-functional platform on which to pile plugins and customization. It's possible that there's a good Confluence install out there, probably administered by the same people who run that really nice JIRA instance that people claim to have used once.

Confluence is... okay. I think Atlassian have successfully managed to sand down a lot of the sharp corners on older wiki-type packages that tend to act as a barrier to the non-technical types - from my perspective, that seems to mean that my non-technical colleagues can be persuaded to contribute to documents held in Confluence markedly more easily than to contribute to a MediaWiki instance that we previously had.

So, while Confluence itself as a piece of software makes me grumble more often than not, I'm more than happy to trade that off against the easier sell to others.

Jira is awful too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com