Situation Overview

Marketing videos say Confluence could replace your "old fileshare". I feel it has significant limitations, though. Users often create hierarchies to structure multiple files. In fileshares, you can create folders and subfolders to do that. In Confluence, users cannot create file hierarchies. Every folder created in WebDAV automatically creates a page and places it into the navigation hierarchy. Often, it's not a page users want to help them store and organize multiple files.

As Confluence prohibits the creation of pages with the same name by design, navigation entries cannot have the same name. Every organization that documents a repetitive process cannot create pages with the name of the process step. Imagine a company doing projects. In every project, one or multiple offers are exchanged. So every project has an "Offer" folder. Maybe the project has multiple phases and concepts and documents are written. Those documents are then saved in the "Phase 1 - Conception" folder. Now in Confluence it's not possible to do it this way. The next project's "Phase 1 - Conception" folder would collide with the previous project's folder.

Example - does not work:

• Project 1
  • Offers
  • Phase 1
    • Conception
    • Implementation
  • Phase 2
  • [...]

• Project 2
  • Offers (collision)
  • Phase 1 (collision)
    • Conception (collision)
    • [...]

Additional Thoughts

On the other hand, it's not needed to have a page for every folder. What would you write on the "Offer" page anyway. Nevertheless you would like to store the offers that went out to the client in a folder. Now imagine if your project's documentation is extensive and has many sub-phases. You just want to store the documents in folders but you don't necessarily need a page in the sub-sub-sub-folder of phase 1. It's enough to describe the project on the main project phase and then just store all available documents and documentation below that one project page.

Now, you LOVE Confluence's indexing feature and would like to be able to search through all your documents attached to your project pages. But you can't import your folder structure as it generates collisions.

Feature Request

For these cases and users (including myself and our whole company), I suggest adding a special folder similar to the "@export" or "@versions" folders there are now. I'll this special folder "@attachments" for now.

In this "@attachments" folder, the normal Confluence universe is suspended. Creating a subfolder in "@attachments" doesn't create a page. Also, the "unique name of pages" limitation could be suspended. Files and folders would behave like in normale fileshares in those "@attachments" folders. File versioning would still work, though, as would the full-text search and all the other special benefits and gadgets of Confluence such as rendering Word documents as HTML pages and so on.

Going to the attachments tab on a Confluence page containing "@attachments" would display the contents and enable browsing through the subfolders similar to a file browser. So people could access the files and folders through the browser via the attachments tab as well as via WebDAV.

This would really get rid of a) fileshares and b) the unique page limitation. In turn it would add the complete benefits of Confluence's powerful file handling features.

Example - could work:

• Project 1 (add your Macros and beloved Confluence features)
  • @attachments (from here, Confluence's page creation is suspended for folders)
    • Offers
    • Phase 1
      • Offers (it's even possible to have 2 folders with the same name within @attachments)
      • Conception
      • Implementation
    • Phase 2
    • [...]

• Project 2 (add your Macros and beloved Confluence features)
  • @attachments
    • Offers (no conflict, as the @attachments folder mimics fileshare functionality, there can be as many Offer folders as you like, no pages and no navigation will be created in the Confluence navigation menu for folders created inside @attachments)
    • Phase 1
      • Offers
      • Conception
      • Implementation
    • Phase 2
      • [...]

I assume this would also be the solution for a lot of people voting for sub-spaces as many create spaces due to this unique page name limitation and are looking for a way to organize their overflowing amount of spaces as a consequence.