“In use” reviews theories, methods and products the way they are actually used: in real work, with real constraints, by people who have other things to do. The objective is to focus on practical aspects.

How every review works

• The context: who used it, for what, and for how long.
• The cost of adoption: setup, training, migration, and the time before it pays back.
• What worked and what didn’t, with examples.
• A verdict: keep, adapt or drop, and for whom.

First review: two ways to keep what a team knows

I have run knowledge management with both tools, Confluence for organisations and Obsidian for my own work and small teams. They solve the same problem with opposite philosophies.

Confluence

A shared wiki in the cloud, tightly linked to Jira. Its strengths are collaboration and control: permissions by space, page history, templates, comments, and one place everybody can find. Its weak points are speed and structure over time. Without someone who owns the tree of pages, it grows into a maze, and search becomes the only way in.

Obsidian

A note-taking app that works on plain Markdown files stored on your own disk. It is fast, it works offline, and the files remain yours even if the app disappears. Links between notes and community plugins make it remarkably powerful. Its limits appear with a team: sharing, permissions and simultaneous editing need extra services or discipline, and it expects people to be comfortable with a bit of structure.

Verdict

• Keep Confluence for organisation-wide documentation, procedures and anything that needs permissions and an audit trail. Name an owner for each space.
• Keep Obsidian for personal knowledge, research and small teams who value speed and ownership of their data.
• Adapt: many teams think in Obsidian and publish the stable result in Confluence. It is the combination I use.