SharePoint and Confluence Connectivity Options (v 1.0)

Owned by Almuth Boehme [Communardo]
Aug 18, 2016
3 min read

There are several options for connecting SharePoint and Confluence from a site infrastructure standpoint.

Terminology

Before discussing the options, we need to describe the structure and terminology of SharePoint and Confluence.

SharePoint Terminology

SharePoint has the following concepts:

  • Farm
  • Web Application
  • Site Collection
  • Site

In SharePoint a Farm is the top level entity. An enterprise may have a production Farm and a dev/test Farm for their intranet. You typically do not have multiple farms to cover something like an intranet except in circumstances such as regional sepration across the globe. The same applies to an extranet or a public facing website. There can be many servers within a farm and they can perform different roles such as a search index server, a web front end server, database servers, etc.

A Farm can have multiple Web Applications. A Web Application is usually a security boundary since it maps to an IIS web site which can have some added control over access. For example, one web application may allow anonymous access and another may not.

A Web Application can have multiple Site Collections. A Site Collection is simply a collection of Sites. It has a single top level (a.k.a. "root") Site. Each Site can have any number of child Sites.

You may have a Site Collection per department or you might have all departments in the same Site Collection. If you use My Sites, they have a separate Site Collection per user.

Confluence Terminology

Confluence has the following concepts:

  • Installation
  • Cluster node
  • Space
  • Page

An enterprise may have several Confluence Installs (similar to a SharePoint Farm). Each Confluence Install can be hosted in a single server or on several cluster nodes.

A single Confluence Install can have multiple Spaces. A Space can have multiple Pages. The Pages can be organized in a hierarchical fashion where one Page is the parent of another Page.

Connectivity

Now that we have the terminology down, we can discuss how SharePoint and Confluence connect to each other.

SharePoint Connecting to Confluence

SharePoint connects to Confluence through its web parts and through search. You can point a single SharePoint site to a single Confluence installation. You can point as many SharePoint sites to Confluence as you like regardless of whether they are in the same or different farm, web application, or site collection. They can be pointing to the same Confluence installation or different Confluence installations.

One limitation is that the Confluence web parts within a particiular SharePoint site must point to the same Confluence installation. They can point to different spaces or pages within the Confluence installation, however. If you have several Confluence installations, you can have one SharePoint site point to one Confluence installation and another SharePoint site point another Confluence installation.

The issues that address this limitation are documented as CSI-131 and CSI-144.

The above also causes a limitation with integrated search where SharePoint can only show search results for a single Confluence installation from a single SharePoint search site. However, you can have multiple SharePoint search sites and each one could show results from different Confluence installations.

The issue that addresses this limitation is documented as CSI-109. Note that issue CSI-238 would replace the need for CSI-109.

Confluence Connecting to SharePoint

Confluence connects to SharePoint through its sp-list macro and through a search link. You can point a single Confluence installation to one or more SharePoint sites or site collections. The search link is separate from these settings and can only point to a single SharePoint search results site/page. If you have multiple installations of Confluence, you can point each one to the same or different SharePoint site collections.

Licensing

Once you have determined how you are going to connect between SharePoint and Confluence, you can determmine how your software will be licensed.

Each Confluence installation must be licensed with Atlassian. Cluster nodes are licensed separately. A 4-node cluster needs four Confluence licenses. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) must be licensed with Microsoft whereas Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 is free (but you lose the the integrated search and potentially single sign-on capability).

The SharePoint Connector for Confluence must also be licensed with Atlassian. You must have a single license for the SharePoint Connector for Confluence for every Confluence installation (or cluster node in an installation) that integrates with SharePoint. If you have one Confluence installation, you only need one license for the SharePoint Connector for Confluence even if several SharePoint farms, web applications, etc. are connecting to your Confluence installation.