I'm tremendously excited because we shipped a new plugin with Confluence 2.3 that fulfills one of our longest-held ambitions for the product.
We've always thought that one of the best uses for Confluence is to replace the cluttered, disorganized Shared Drive that every team has lurking around. You know, that one server where everyone throws their junk: old versions of contracts, out-dated logos, Christmas party photos from 2002. Confluence can replace that messy drive with a manageable, web-accessible home for that content. It definitely offers advantages: it's searchable, it's versioned, it's contextual and it's linkable.
However, sometimes it's still something of a hassle to use Confluence this way. In order to edit an attachment, you must first download the most recent version from the web, then edit it, and finally re-upload it via the browser. We knew we could make that whole experience better, so we decided to put WebDAV capabilities into Confluence.
Thanks to the new plugin, Confluence can now function as a full WebDAV server. You can mount your Confluence instance as a networked drive in Windows, OSX or Linux and interact with it just as you would any traditional file system. The plugin represents each Confluence space as a hierarchy of directories, just like the operating system does.
The attachments in Confluence appear as regular files. You can double-click to edit them and each time you save Confluence will create a new version of the attachment. You can drag and drop new attachments and they'll be added to the page. And you can delete attachments just like files and they'll disappear. Best of all, you can do bulk operations: Add 100 attachments at once, move a whole tree of pages, or simultaneously drag multiple pages to a new parent.
I've attached a short demo movie (3 mins, 5.6mb Quicktime) where we access Confluence default Demo space using WebDAV. You'll see how to connect, how to edit a page, and how to add or edit attachments.
We've already found this plugin very useful, and have been hearing raves from the customers who have already begun using it. It shipped with Confluence 2.3, but it is disabled by default for security reasons. If you want to use it, you'll first need to enable it using the plugin manager. (There has already been a new version released with some important fixes, so you may also wish to upgrade to version 1.0.1 using the Plugin Repository.) Give it a try and tell us what you think!
11 Comment(s)
Count me in on the raving crowd. Versioning file server is exactly what i use confluence for and with the full-text indexing and labels no-one will ever look back on traditional file servers.
But the default disabling has a dark side too. After every restart one has to reactivate the plugin again, not exactly nice.
By lhe at February 7, 2007 1:03 AM
Hmm, actually, that sounds like a bug. We should remember plugin-state across restarts. Can you file a bug for us?
By Jonathan Nolen at February 7, 2007 10:32 AM
Kudos, Jonathan. I've sent this post to a few friends who use Confluence in enterprise environments and the response has been a unanimous cheer of applause. This is very cool stuff.
By Michael at February 8, 2007 11:29 AM
This is great news! This adds a level of flexibility that will be greatly appreciated within our organization.
-Greg Miller
Agilent Technologies
By Greg Miller at February 8, 2007 12:06 PM
One of the issues we've faced with converting other wikis to Confluence are people wanting to add structure to their page hierarchies even when none existed before. Using WebDAV looks like a great way to re-order page hierarchies.
By Brendan Patterson at February 9, 2007 5:52 PM
I see this solving the issue of managing Confluence attachments in a easier way. How can it replace the file server? Let's say you are working on a Project and you would like to store the files related to your project in a directory structure of 3 or 4 level deep. How do you replicate this structure with in Confluence?
By Chaks at February 13, 2007 7:19 PM
I have been looking for a solution for a similar kind of problem that allmost all IT companies face today. I have explained the problem i detail here (http://angraze.wordpress.com/2007/03/01/software-sharing-server/). Does it solve this problem in anyway?
By Amit Agarwalla at March 18, 2007 3:22 AM
I'm using 2.4.x with Webdav enabled.
With a windows client I can doubleclick and open a variety of files, mostly of the 'office family' (vsd, xls, doc, etc.)
I can't seem to open Mindmanager .mmap files at all. There is no rt-click open dialogue, nor can I doubleclick them.
How do I get around this?
By mark at May 4, 2007 12:37 PM
How does WebDAV work with the Checkout Attachment Plugin? Conceptually when a user has checked out an attachment no other user may be able to edit or delete it.
Thanks
By Doods Perea at January 12, 2008 2:11 PM
I suppose I must be doing something wrong, but I can't convince windows to open this up as a mapped drive. It treats it as a Web Folder, which has none of the functionality you describe (you can't even double click on a folder to navigate - it requires right-click and Open). also, no apps can use it because the path is "http://..." not "z:\..." so notepad, word, etc dont' work. i've tried clients like BitKinex but those treat it much like FTP and require you to bring files down locally, then modify, then reupload. Outside of the Mac OS, what can you do on windows to make this feature useful?
By Anonymous at March 14, 2008 12:42 PM
Please, is there any reason why I can't make a WebDAV connection to the demo server?
I tried both
http://confluence.demo.atlassian.com/
and
https://confluence.demo.atlassian.com/
-- using both Finder (Mac OS X 10.5.4) and Windows XP.
By Graham Perrin at September 7, 2008 4:05 AM