Has the usability of Confluence and Jira improved over the years? Those were key products in use at ThoughtWorks when I was there about 4-6 years ago. I can tell you that most people hated working with them.
A few months ago, I wanted to insert a double backslash into a Confluence wiki page. This isn't as odd as it sounds; Windows network file paths begin with \\Foo\. Since backslashes are of course an escape char, you usually have to use \\\\ to get \\ to output. But, in Confluence, this outputs two newlines. Yes, double-backslash is the symbol for a newline.
Counter-intuitive, yes, but no worse than that so long as there's another symbol you can use for when you do need a double-backslash. But, the thing is, there isn't. When Confluence was first designed, they used up their only escape char with their nonstandard newline symbol. This is, their support staff informed me, a deep-rooted and unchangeable aspect of how Confluence works. It's not a bug, because it will never be changed.
This should give you the gist of what Atlassian is like.
Sorry you had a problem with Confluence. I can tell you that there is a project running right now to make the editor a lot nicer to work with. Not sure on the delivery schedule (I work on Bamboo so its not my product) but I believe it is on its way.
The \\Foo\ example I gave was poorly chosen, because they put in a kluge fix so that anything that resembles a Windows file path will pass through unparsed. You cannot use \\ in any other circumstance, which is why \\Foo failed.
This does not work. Nothing obvious will. This is an acknowledged issue that they are opting never to resolve. Here's a relevant issue on their bug tracker that has been open for four years: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6405
It wouldn't be nearly as infuriating if it weren't caused by such a terrible design decision (using doubled backslashes for line breaks when the backslash is your only escape char) in the first place.
Personally I love Confluence and Jira. I've brought them in to multiple companies replacing things like Wiki products, Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, SharePoint, etc... and it's always been a step up. Are they perfect? No. But so far they're the best apps in the space I've ever used.
Ever tried Sharepoint search? I actually wrote a Sharepoint spider to find a single document because of the stupidity of the default Sharepoint search (old version, but the biggest problem was that it relied on MS Word document metadata instead of document text)
