Uses for Confluence?

It gives you a single place to organize all that a software project entails - product requirements, project plans, technical documentation, design specs, sprint meeting notes. It eliminates the need to store documentation in multiple places like shared drives or file folders.

Out of the box it can be used for IT and non IT teams for information and knowledge management, project and team collaboration, wiki, blogs, self help and numerous other uses with various plugins ie diagramming with Creately plug-in (ditch Visio and save money). JIRA integration out of the box creates new and interesting ways to blend wiki content with JIRA issues lists based on JQL. With plugins like Refined Wiki UI Confluence can take on the role of company intranet, but id reccomend getting this plugin anyway as it really makes Confluence shine from a UX perspective. Look at the TCO of SharePoint compared to a JIRA\Confluence combo and you have to wonder why people still use $harePoint

Yes we use it. We have an internal intranet on sharepoint but we use confluence for all our development documentation because it has its tight integration with Jira. Works really.