We use confluence extensively at work, fantastic tool.. The line between this tool and a low end web-cms is certainly blurring. As an example, the penrose website is published on confluence and looks just like an ordinary (and quite clean) website - the wiki functionality is carefully hidden out of the way.

It seems to me confluence just needs a few things to achieve the convergence Eric talks about..

First, many (most?) wiki tools have pages are shelved in folder locations rather than using permalinks -- but in the web world there is no shelf. Tools like pebble use the 'category' concept rather than a folder. A blog entry can appear in many categories but a wiki page can appear in only one folder.

Second, I look forward to the day when Radeox engines based wikis provide a wysiwig editor as an alternative so I can give confluence to wider groups of lay users. The jotspot service apparently offers this on their blog.

Third, the blogging (news) functions in confluence seem tacked on.. It is far from good enough (yet) to replace pebble for blogging. Also, I would want to see tight integration between blog/wiki content items. Maybe a blog entrys should automatically appear as wiki pages..

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Posted by Damon Rand on 21 September 2005 01:45:35 BST #