Last year, I started pushing really hard for campus-wide wikis at USC, and I eventually came to the conclusion that Confluence was the best choice for what we needed. To my great delight, as we rolled out, the positive reaction and uptake by all-levels (including very non-technical users, and across students, faculty, and staff) was great. It looks like the system is at about 700 users, 300 spaces, and 8000 pages (an average of 27 pages per space!). With that permissions performance fix, it looks like it should hopefully be able to handle the 50K-user target without too much of a problem. I can’t wait to see how that turns out.

Now, I haven’t been doing recent competitive analysis, so I don’t know how Confluence 2.0 stacks up against the latest developments by XWiki, SocialText, and Jot, but it’s certainly a quantum leap over the Twiki used in Yahoo. The new features of Confluence 2.0 are pretty astoundingly good. They’re in some ways obvious, but at the same time, it looks like that the majority of them haven’t been done by anyone else yet.

• The configurable RSS feed builder, which allows construction of attention streams is a pretty huge deal. It can also be fed back into the site very easily. All it needs is AJAX filter capabilities…
• Confluence’s Dashboard gets even better with favoriting of spaces and pages. This update also makes it possible for the Dashboard to scale for users that have hundreds or thousands of spaces available to them. Twiki has a little personal sidebar, but that’s quite anemic and almost not worth by comparing.
• The last big feature is also pretty ginormous, which is tagging, or as Atlassian is calling it, Labels. In addition to global tagging, they also implement namespacing for personal tags (my:) and have a slick AJAX tagging interface.

These features (oh, a WYSIWYG editor as well) make an already amazing product even better. I’m hard pressed to think of core functionality that it’s missing. OK, not really:

• Better Mail Ingestion/Interaction
• Subspacing, also clean URLs when hierachies are used
• Instanced templates (inheritance)/better components system
• Structured entries (input/process/output; see also templates)

And some “wouldn’t it be nice” things:

• Customizing Dashboard
• Better way of delineating spaces you can see because they’re public vs where you’re explicitly made a member
• Personal space, profile components, more comprehensive input/interaction aggregation
• Better child-node re-ordering/re-parenting