No matter what industry or function you’re in, it’s never been more important to collaborate effectively.

It goes without saying that the recent rise in remote working has created challenges for businesses and employees alike. For enterprise-level organisations trying to facilitate collaboration and communication for thousands of team members - many of whom are working asynchronously and flexibly - the struggle is real.

So what can managers do to maximise collaboration and communication within their disparate teams? One solution is a product already in many organisations’ toolkits: Confluence.

What’s Confluence got to do with enterprise collaboration?

Confluence is a mainstay of the booming global collaboration software market, which is projected to grow from USD 15.25 billion in 2020 to USD 40.79 billion by 2028, according to the Team Collaboration Software Market 2022 study.

Confluence prides itself on driving collaboration in teams of all sizes thanks to its flexible and adaptable nature, with built-in templates, integration capabilities, and a powerful editor. It was built for teams, and with the Premium version’s unlimited storage, team calendars, and enhanced analytics, enterprise-level businesses are extremely well catered to. If you’re looking for a single solution to align your team and work better together, this is it.

Troubleshoot your collaboration woes with Confluence

Challenge: Knowledge sharing

Remote working can make it harder to share knowledge. While modern technology makes it easy to virtually exchange documents and ideas, it can lead to information becoming lost in multiple channels and platforms. If you’ve ever lost minutes of your day sifting through emails, Slack messages, meeting notes and Trello to find exactly where a coveted piece of information was shared, you’ll know the pain of not having all the relevant information stored in one centralised place.

Solution: Confluence

Confluence is the ideal tool for creating a knowledge base. Use it to build a central repository for document storage and knowledge sharing, and organise spaces to reflect your organisational structure so that users can easily find what they need. Reduce context-switching by setting up integrations with your other organisational tools and apps to pull in all the information and documentation associated with projects and pages.

Look for add-ons to help keep your knowledge base as organised and tidy as possible. Community Forums for Confluence can help to highlight important information and link related pages and topics, while Content Formatting Macros for Confluence can keep content tidy and uncluttered with tabs, footnotes and cards.

Challenge: Team engagement

No matter how strong your company culture is, there will always be challenges when it comes to engaging remote team members. Whether it’s juggling time differences, the lack of personal connection between remote team members, or context switching between different workplace tools, there are many distractions that impact engagement when you’re working from home.

If you notice team members aren’t contributing to group projects as much as you’d like, or aren’t responding to team and company communications, you might need an engagement solution.

Solution: Confluence

By bringing knowledge bases, wikis and daily workspaces all under the Confluence umbrella, you reduce the number of products your team has to switch between. Confluence’s collaborative editing functionality means multiple team members can work on documents together in real time, while the commenting, tagging and sharing options encourage users to engage not only with Confluence content, but also with each other.

While Confluence isn’t quite one platform to rule them all, it’s close. It can be integrated with Jira as well as other popular products like Google Drive, Slack, Gliffy, Microsoft Teams, and of course the ever-powerful ScriptRunner for Confluence. And to push your team engagement even further, why not add forms to Confluence pages to proactively seek feedback, opinions, suggestions, and consensus?

Do more: Use cases to get the most out of Confluence

Wonderful wikis

A Confluence wiki is the ultimate enterprise collaboration tool. Its open-editing nature means everyone can contribute, making it ideal for projects and documents that evolve over time. Keep stakeholders informed on product developments, encourage sharing between departments, and collate relevant information (such as HR policies, updates on social events and meeting notes) in one place. Just be sure to set user permissions accordingly!

Definitive documentation

Did you know Confluence was originally designed to be a documentation tool? Documentation helps users and teams not only get the most out of products, but also troubleshoot any issues they have. These days, you can use Confluence to create both internal and external technical documentation. When there’s more than one team member working on documentation, Confluence’s real-time editing abilities, comments, and flexible user permissions make it the perfect platform for this.

Add a touch of magic: Collaborate in Atlassian Cloud with Adaptavist apps

Businesses migrating to Atlassian Cloud can collaborate with ease thanks to Confluence Cloud’s refreshed, clean, and simple user interface. Take things a step further by adding apps from the Atlassian Marketplace to enhance and extend the native functionality of Confluence Cloud. Now your team will have all the tools they need to create, contribute to, and consume brilliant Confluence content.

Adaptavist’s Confluence apps help keep content well-structured, aesthetically appealing and interactive, whether that’s on server, data center, or the cloud. Here are our top picks to get your team members collaborating:

Content Formatting Macros for Confluence

A suite of macros that push Confluence beyond its standard functionality. Add buttons to encourage engagement, tabs to organise content and tooltips to add references and notes.

Try it for free here.

Forms for Confluence

Add forms to Confluence pages to collect feedback and process data. Forms are ideal for running surveys, asking for feedback and submitting requests.

Try it for free here.

Community Forums for Confluence

Make it easy for users to find relevant information and navigate between pages with Community Forums for Confluence, an app that acts as a social forum to create a discussion space for users.

Try it for free here.

ScriptRunner for Confluence

Part of the ScriptRunner family, the Confluence version is a powerful app that lets admins automate, integrate and extend Confluence.

Try it for free here.

Get set to engage your users and encourage more collaboration in Confluence

Whatever your organisation uses Confluence for, there are plenty of tips, ideas, and apps to help make it a more engaging and effective business collaboration tool.

For more detailed tips and use cases, download Adapavist’s ultimate guide to using Confluence for enterprise collaboration here.