Confluence 2.9 - now with extra Office Support
Those cool (well, for java guys) dudes at Atlassian have beefed up their Office support in Confluence, their enterprise wiki system. From their press release:
Confluence users can now edit wiki pages directly from Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint, via an exclusive new plugin called Office Connector, free to all existing Confluence customers. Office Connector, originally created by Benryan Software, was acquired by Atlassian in June.
Atlassian - Social Media Releases - Confluence 2.9 Released
In addition, their SharePoint Connector for Confluence (which has been available as a beta release) has now been officially released. Check out their sharepoint connector here.
In other news, Alfresco has announced that their beta release of Alfresco Labs 3 will support the server side integration hooks in Office so that users can interact with alfresco straight from Office, without installing any Office plugins or the like.
It is awesome that organisations like Atlassian and Alfresco are taking this approach of integrating with the Office system rather than ignoring the powerful and familiar application that many users live in. I think that the more you can do the "meta-work" on a document inside of the document editor the less context shifting you need to do and the more productive you will be. Then again, if I didn't think that, I probably wouldn't be in this job!
