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Having worked at a large company before that had their own instance of Confluence Questions (i.e. Atlassian's SO clone): it was incredibly useful. As a new empl

by Vinnl 7y ago

Having worked at a large company before that had their own instance of Confluence Questions (i.e. Atlassian's SO clone): it was incredibly useful. As a new employee, it allowed me to relatively quickly find the relevant people, or even to come across answers by them to questions people kept running into over and over again. As I became responsible for an internal library used company-wide, I pushed for the Q&A site to be our primary means of communication, and would always refer to it after answering questions from people contacting me directly. I saw the same pattern repeat itself for many new hires. Otherwise I think your observations are spot on.

caf 7y ago
Yeah my experience is that large places that use things like Yammer it ends up getting used as basically a Q&A site.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  Yammer is more like a private Facebook. StackOverflow is a technical trove. Distinctly different goals.
  - caf 7y ago
    Right, I understand that, but my point is that how it actually gets used is in largely a private-stackoverflow-substitute capacity, even though that's not really its intended use case. That's where the 'desire lines' go.
benbristow 7y ago
Perhaps for a large company with multiple offices etc, sure. For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc. in a relevant channel to your question.
- edanm 7y ago
  I mean, I assume that they don't actually care about small companies, they don't have much money anyways. In these scenarios, they tend to act as a "loss-leader" for marketing purposes, mostly.
  - caspar 7y ago
    FWIW Atlassian's perspective is generally more like "they don't have much money yet, so let's get them while it's easy to get them". Small companies grow into big companies, and small single-team deployments tend to spread into big whole-company deployments - but small customers are much easier to get than large customers :) Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but all words are my own.
- bigfailwhale 7y ago
  Because even in a small company, searching past content and conversations in Slack is a pain. The information gets lost. There is no reference back, so people just end up asking the same questions again, which is both super annoying and a gigantic waste of time.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  Yes, companies large enough where you might not know who you'd need for help with a problem within your first week is exactly the use where SO shines, in my opinion.
bradleyjg 7y ago
The company I work for uses internal SO and I think it’s pretty useful. There’s a culture to push people to turn useful slack answers into SO q&a so that they are useful for others. Also, our internal search engine searches over it (as well as the wiki, jira, etc.)
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
It is simply not possible for Confluence Questions to be considered a useful product by even the most generous definitions. The reason is simple: it only supports exact-matching text search _on titles_. There are a host of other usability problems that are so bad that they render a giant negative impact on information retrieval and actively steer Q&A traffic to repetitious and ephemeral tools like Slack. But the lack of a functional search engine indexing the Q&A content with a high-performing notion of search relevancy is such a show-stopping, egregious defect that even all the other egregious flaws can be ignored by comparison. It’s not a subjective debate at that point: just a factual defect of such severity that any misguided reports of the tool somehow miraculously being even marginally useful for someone have to be ignored. I thank my lucky stars that Stack Overflow offers competition to this with a real search engine. [0]: < https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions-for-Confluence/Can-t-search-in-Confluence-Questions/qaq-p/265103 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions-for-Confluence/... > I am on a committee in my workplace that deals directly with Confluence customer support to roll out changes to our internally deployed Confluence & Jira instances, and I know first hand from dealing directly with Confluence that they _intentionally_ only support exact matching _on the titles_ for searching in Questions. Really appalling.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  I haven't used Confluence Question, but I use Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket every day, and search is also the limiting factor of all of those product. Jira search is useless, you have to use filters and memory of dates to get a set of issues small enough for you to search manually. The search in Confluence can best be summed up as "Here's a PDF". For some weird reason Confluence can search PDF sort of okay. It's typically not what you want, but because Confluence can search PDFs better than normal Confluence pages, PDFs are what you get in 75% of your searches. Atlassians continued failure to deliver a half decent search feature in any of their products is fascinating. I honestly don't mind their products, they're fine for our needs, except you can't depend on search.
  - stevesimmons 7y ago
    Search on Bitbucket is similarly broken for any cases more exotic than an exact word match. So in practice, it's useless for source code.

by Vinnl 7y ago

caf 7y ago

Yeah my experience is that large places that use things like Yammer it ends up getting used as basically a Q&A site.

smitty1e 7y ago
Yammer is more like a private Facebook. StackOverflow is a technical trove. Distinctly different goals.
- caf 7y ago
  Right, I understand that, but my point is that how it actually gets used is in largely a private-stackoverflow-substitute capacity, even though that's not really its intended use case. That's where the 'desire lines' go.

benbristow 7y ago

Perhaps for a large company with multiple offices etc, sure. For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc. in a relevant channel to your question.

edanm 7y ago
I mean, I assume that they don't actually care about small companies, they don't have much money anyways. In these scenarios, they tend to act as a "loss-leader" for marketing purposes, mostly.
- caspar 7y ago
  FWIW Atlassian's perspective is generally more like "they don't have much money yet, so let's get them while it's easy to get them". Small companies grow into big companies, and small single-team deployments tend to spread into big whole-company deployments - but small customers are much easier to get than large customers :) Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but all words are my own.
bigfailwhale 7y ago
Because even in a small company, searching past content and conversations in Slack is a pain. The information gets lost. There is no reference back, so people just end up asking the same questions again, which is both super annoying and a gigantic waste of time.
Vinnl 7y ago
Yes, companies large enough where you might not know who you'd need for help with a problem within your first week is exactly the use where SO shines, in my opinion.

bradleyjg 7y ago

The company I work for uses internal SO and I think it’s pretty useful. There’s a culture to push people to turn useful slack answers into SO q&a so that they are useful for others. Also, our internal search engine searches over it (as well as the wiki, jira, etc.)

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

It is simply not possible for Confluence Questions to be considered a useful product by even the most generous definitions. The reason is simple: it only supports exact-matching text search _on titles_. There are a host of other usability problems that are so bad that they render a giant negative impact on information retrieval and actively steer Q&A traffic to repetitious and ephemeral tools like Slack. But the lack of a functional search engine indexing the Q&A content with a high-performing notion of search relevancy is such a show-stopping, egregious defect that even all the other egregious flaws can be ignored by comparison. It’s not a subjective debate at that point: just a factual defect of such severity that any misguided reports of the tool somehow miraculously being even marginally useful for someone have to be ignored. I thank my lucky stars that Stack Overflow offers competition to this with a real search engine. [0]: < https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions-for-Confluence/Can-t-search-in-Confluence-Questions/qaq-p/265103 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions-for-Confluence/... > I am on a committee in my workplace that deals directly with Confluence customer support to roll out changes to our internally deployed Confluence & Jira instances, and I know first hand from dealing directly with Confluence that they _intentionally_ only support exact matching _on the titles_ for searching in Questions. Really appalling.

mrweasel 7y ago
I haven't used Confluence Question, but I use Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket every day, and search is also the limiting factor of all of those product. Jira search is useless, you have to use filters and memory of dates to get a set of issues small enough for you to search manually. The search in Confluence can best be summed up as "Here's a PDF". For some weird reason Confluence can search PDF sort of okay. It's typically not what you want, but because Confluence can search PDFs better than normal Confluence pages, PDFs are what you get in 75% of your searches. Atlassians continued failure to deliver a half decent search feature in any of their products is fascinating. I honestly don't mind their products, they're fine for our needs, except you can't depend on search.
- stevesimmons 7y ago
  Search on Bitbucket is similarly broken for any cases more exotic than an exact word match. So in practice, it's useless for source code.