Sorry for the hassle. Though it's not your issue, we needed to clean up all the different identity systems we had created over the years (Bitbucket, HipChat, Atlassian cloud, Atlassian services). Nothing nefarious, and we have literally spent years planning to make it as seamless for customers as possible.
If you have any issues - contact support@atlassian.com.
As the CEO of Atlassian, I'm obviously biased, but you should really check out Confluence. With 10s of thousands of companies using it for this exact purpose we have deep experience solving this type of problem.
Confluence provides templates for things like retros. It allows embedding of files, videos. Concurrent editing currently being rolled out.
Big thing with collaboration is ensuring things are public by default, which is not the case with Google docs and others.
You need it to be WYSIWYG for non-technical people to use, which rules out GitHub Wiki and others of that ilk.
Happy to answer any other questions about usage if you try it out.
Confluence is great, it just gets incredibly expensive rather quickly. Self-hosting the $10 version is probably the best route, however, it's fairly resource intensive and seems rather cumbersome (damn you, java) if you have issues.
I've recently discovered Markdown-plus. It is so much nicer (for me) to use than Confluence. It uses mermaid for it's diagramming. The ability to generate my diagrams from code like markdown is huge for me. I can share everything through github with my team like I do code. I paid $15 for the OS X app, but I'm pretty sure it's all free in other forms.
For others reading - we have hundreds of examples like this - single person companies that have grown inside the Atlassian ecosystem.
From people like Bob Swift, who grew his company and was then acquired, to companies like Gliffy and Balsamiq Mockups who built multi-dozen person companies on the back of the Atlassian ecosystem.
They're not exactly relevant examples because they were introduced a dozen years ago when the landscape was completely different. Among those introduced in 2014, I haven't found people who live off their sales. I'd love to know whether there are such recent successes.
Would love to understand more about this. I doubt it has anything to do with us going public. I can understand some of your other points (though I'd love to spend the time to explain our perspective if you would like), but "user-hostile" in bitbucket I don't understand.
Happy to engage further if you email me. scott <at> atlassian.com.
Don't know about him, but for me: Confluence 5.6.3 and JIRA 6.3.6 (with Agile 6.6.11) and Bamboo 5.8.1 on an air-gapped secure network.
It's bad. We mostly blame the use of Java.
It looks like we're sticking with JIRA for now.
Confluence is kind of on the way out. We have numerous wiki servers. The big one, and all the new ones, run MediaWiki. We aren't running around converting. In addition to performance issues, the lack of standard (sorry, but MediaWiki sets the standard) wiki markup syntax hurts badly. The situation for importing a table is laughably awful, with stuff (CSV, tab delimited, space delimited, space padded, etc.) apparently needing to be first imported into a spreadsheet. The lack of category support (as seen on MediaWiki) is pretty much a deal breaker by itself. Instead you force something like a directory structure. Well, MediaWiki categories can be nested, but pages can also go in multiple categories. Confluence lacks that.
Bamboo... first of all, OMG the web interface is slow. I'm told that the licensing gets crazy past 10 build boxes. This causes issues with access controls, particularly when air-gapped (disconnected) networks are required. We need multiple instances just for that. Add in the need to build on several different versions of each OS, and it gets really really painful. I think we may be ditching this one, but it's duct taped together well enough for right now.
We believe that JIRA Service Desk is the best for most use cases, and we're committed to aggressive pricing.
Let me know if I can help out at all.
Scott Farquhar, CEO Atlassian