Managing your documentation and overviews in Confluence is a far more effective method than relying on traditional shared network drives. Many businesses today still have vast amounts of critical data trapped in Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. By moving from Excel to Atlassian Confluence, you gain a living wiki solution where information is always searchable, up-to-date, and accessible to all employees.

By adopting Confluence for your overviews, you will find relevant information faster than searching through complex file structures and scattered documents. You work directly within your browser without needing other applications, avoiding the hassle of opening and closing numerous Excel and Word files to find what you need. Confluence makes simultaneous content co-production easy for multiple people, and the tool provides excellent visibility into exactly what has changed over time.

Efficient Collaboration and Version Control in Confluence

Content that is actively maintained provides great value to colleagues, and often it is valuable to share some of this with external contacts as well. In this regard, you should resist the temptation to send emails with attachments, thereby avoiding the chaos of multiple versions.

Without using a central wiki solution, keeping track of valid versions is a major challenge, and consolidating comments made during a process can be difficult—especially if multiple participants have commented on different versions of a file. You save a significant amount of time by commenting directly within a shared wiki text. By maintaining your documentation in Confluence, you preserve a full version history of all changes automatically. While native functionality for managing a set of pages as a single “version” is limited in base Confluence, this can be solved using third-party apps like Scroll Documents.

Dynamic overviews, where content changes frequently, are ideally suited for Confluence. Examples of such overviews often include:

• IT Infrastructure
• Skills and competencies
• Customers, services, and products
• Status reports (e.g., during proposal preparation with multiple contributors)
• OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

Better IT Infrastructure Overview: Confluence as a Lightweight CMDB

Every business needs to keep track of servers, applications, and system documentation. While replacing Excel sheets with specialized CMDB (Configuration Management Database) systems is often the best approach, a simpler solution can be maintaining dynamic overviews directly in Confluence. It is often wise to test if such a solution provides sufficient usability and maintainability before investing in heavier systems with higher licensing costs.

[Figure description: The figure shows a table view of infrastructure pulled from Atlassian Assets (CMDB), illustrating the benefit of a wiki solution where technical information can be combined with other elements like guides or knowledge articles.]

Skills Mapping and Certification Tracking in Confluence

Certification overviews within a business are well-suited for Confluence because needs and content change significantly over time. They can also be dynamically linked to the individuals who have completed specific certifications. Some businesses, particularly in the consulting industry, may have separate CV systems, so needs here must be coordinated to avoid duplicate data entry for employees.

Client Management and Service Overviews: A CRM Alternative

Most businesses need to maintain overviews of customers, suppliers, and partners. A wiki-based system will cover many needs regarding storing specific customer information, dialogue logs, meeting minutes, and real-time collaboration. This should be weighed against the pros and cons of using a dedicated CRM system. There are also many possibilities for integrating Confluence with an existing CRM system to cover all requirements.

Efficient Status Reporting and Project Collaboration in Confluence

In ongoing initiatives such as proposal work, investigations, or agreement drafting, the collaboration features in Confluence provide superior functionality compared to sharing Excel sheets. The solution offers a great opportunity to create a logical structure for your content, preferably as short, divided pages built into a tree structure that gives a clear overview of status and progress. The content remains searchable at all times, offering excellent opportunities for reuse later, resulting in saved time.

Managing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in Confluence

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a framework developed by Andy Grove at Intel in the 70s, popularized around the turn of the millennium by Google (and through John Doerr’s book “Measure What Matters”). OKR is an agile framework setting high-level goals and concrete results as a tool for developing products and the business further. Simultaneously, OKR is a simple approach to creating alignment and engagement around quantitative goals. It connects strategy with activities and helps the business focus on customer value. The framework is still used at Google and is increasingly being adopted by more businesses.

Overviews in Confluence are extremely well-suited for this, and can be further expanded to include progress details pulled directly from Jira. Atlassian has also recently introduced dedicated “Goal types” in the platform, providing even better support for overviewing and tracking OKR progress in a dedicated, structured solution.

Summary: How to Move from Excel to Confluence

We have now looked at several examples of overviews that make sense to house in a wiki solution rather than other tools. Confluence has a range of ready-made templates that can be used to get started quickly. Our final recommendation is to test some of these out over a period to see if it adds value to your business. We at Computas Opus are experts on Confluence and are ready to help you get started.