Sharing knowledge within your company can be hard. Employees are often scattered across different departments and locations, working on different projects, and constantly creating pockets of tribal knowledge.

When someone has a question, they’re not sure who to ask, or how to find the answers they need. The journey to find an answer usually includes searching through emails and instant messages, or a tap on your neighbor’s shoulder. You might find an answer, but generally not before interrupting a few colleagues and going down some dead ends. The real problem is that once you find an answer, it often ends up trapped in an email thread that doesn’t benefit the next person with the same question.

Today we’re excited to introduce the solution: Confluence Questions 1.0, a question and answer platform and a new add-on for Confluence. It’s the best way to share knowledge with your team and across your company.

Look, search, ask

We use Confluence and Confluence Questions extensively at Atlassian, and we’ve developed a philosophy around finding information we need: Look. Search. Ask.

Organize knowledge with topics

Confluence Questions has been critical in making this philosophy a reality. Every Atlassian’s first instinct when he or she needs to know something is to look for it in Confluence. Confluence Questions organizes knowledge into topics, which makes it easy to find information or discover something new.

Topics

Find anything with one search

If you can’t find what you’re looking for by browsing, your next instinct is probably to search. Questions and answers appear in Confluence search results alongside pages, blog posts, and attachments, so you can easily find what you’re looking for no matter the format. You can also limit your search to Confluence Questions. With dynamic recommendations as you search, you can avoid duplicating questions and answers.

Instead of getting asked the same question five times and answering it five times, we just answer it once.”

Grant Gochnauer, Vodori co-founder

Questions_Search

 Confluence Questions makes it easy to ask straight from the search results page in Confluence or within Confluence Questions.

Get the best answers

Getting the best answer means asking a complete question, which can be difficult over email or chat. Confluence Questions makes it easy to include images, videos, tweets, code snippets, text formatting, and more to help you get your point across.

ask

Anyone can vote up the answers so the best ones rise to the top, unlike the long-winded conversations found in the forums of ten years ago. Whoever asked the question has the power to accept the best answer, which means people can find the information they need faster. “The accepted answer is certifying that the answer is real and it’s valid,” said Gochnauer. “You don’t have to wade through all the other information.”

Build your organization’s brain

Uncover experts you didn’t know you had

Every company has people who are experts on various topics, but often times their knowledge stays hidden. Confluence Questions helps bring these experts and areas of expertise to light. As people ask and answer questions and vote on answers, they earn points and a place on the experts leaderboard. You can easily find experts on specific topics within your team and company by checking the experts leaderboard on any topic home page to see who is a guru.

experts

Fill in the gaps with dynamic FAQs

If you’re already using Confluence for collaboration and documentation, you know how easy it is to create pages for project plans, meeting notes, product requirements – pretty much any subject you can imagine. At Vodori, Confluence Questions helps teams make sure they don’t waste time collecting useless information. “A lot of times, questions identify gaps – we don’t have this material at all,” said Gochnauer. “It allows people to fill in gaps based on priority. We may be putting in a bunch of information that no one even cares about.”

Macro

Include questions on Confluence pages to create a dynamic FAQ. Let colleagues ask and answer questions to fill in the knowledge gaps, provide feedback, or make suggestions.

Put your knowledge to work

Confluence Questions makes it quicker and easier for everyone to find the knowledge they need to get work done and share their expertise with others. Vodori has noticed a sizable impact after just a few months: “It makes knowledge more accessible,” said Gochnauer. “If people were hesitant to capture information before, they don’t have to be anymore.”

Try Confluence Questions today

Don’t have Confluence?

Try a free trial of Confluence and Confluence Questions.

Existing Confluence customers

OnDemand: Add Confluence Questions to an existing Confluence OnDemand instance from within the product. Learn how.

Download: Add Confluence Questions to an existing Confluence instance from Atlassian Marketplace.

Confluence Questions 1.0: Share Knowledge with Q&A