Sharepoint - SharePoint vs Confluence Wiki

This is a tough one. It's unreasonable to expect that the SharePoint team would be able to build a better wiki than people who only build wikis. They're not going to build a better blog engine than people who specialize in building just a blog. So the "SharePoint wiki is better than XYZOpenWiki" argument is probably one you are going to lose.

I think you have to sell this on the basis that it is a complete solution that integrates all the other amazing stuff in SharePoint, because if you take everything in SharePoint together there is nothing out there that comes close. Look for features like managed metadata and search and Office integration that are going mean that the wiki's will be integrated into a more powerful collaboration platform.

Even when you convince them that SharePoint is a better platform for supporting their wikis for the above reasons, you have another problem. All their content is already on this other system. You are going to have to think about how you can make it easy for them to migrate their content over to SharePoint.

I worked on a SharePoint project where somebody had started a FlexWiki site and I couldn't get them to move over. Once these things get established they are very difficult to dislodge. Good luck.

You can also use the two together. I played around with the SharePoint Connector for Confluence when it was in beta about 3 years ago and it looked pretty solid. I was able to get the benefits of the Confluence wiki from within SharePoint through some web parts (the SharePoint 2007 wiki was horrible) while also being able to use SharePoint for what it is good for (not wikis). Atlassian had also created some macros for use within Confluence that allows you to show SharePoint content within the wiki page. They've clearly done a lot of work. There was no problem at all with authentication either.

Confluence sort of does some document management (ie attachments) but it's not what it's good for. You can't lock a document when you open it for editing for example, although I don't know if the latest update to Confluence does things differently.

In short, Confluence is a great wiki. SharePoint is a great document management / collaboration tool. And from what I've seen, you can use them both harmoniously.

Sharepoint wikis are just not enterprise worthy. We gave a lot of feedback to Kevin Davis, the former PM for wikis, about how poor they were. I was excited they were taking feedback about the feature but it seems that none of the suggestions the community made got rolled into the product.

If users need a robust wiki, then trying to pigeon hole them into Sharepoint is going to be a miserable failure. As the good doctor says, content migration is going to be the other problem as well.

Sometimes you have to pick your battles and if the users are doing anything beyond basic wiki functionality in Confluence, you're best bet is going to be linking to that wiki in Sharepoint and pointing search to it to index the content.