Re: Documentation collaboration - best practices and tools used?

[Shawn <shawn -at- cohodata -dot- com>]

Hello Robert,

Part of me sees your point and I agree. But there are so many features that
Flare offers that are either:
a) Not possible in Confluence
or
b) Difficult to accomplish in Confluence.

Of course, I may not know what I am I talking about, considering that my
exposure is limited, however, my opinion is based upon the following
observations:
a) I have never any good examples of documentation that was both viewable
as an HTML and downloadable as a PDF, and/or available as a ePub.
     Furthermore, I would still love to see one good PDF manual designed in
Confluence.
b) Editing and fine tuning content seems a lot more difficult in Confluence
(wiki markup is more limited and time consuming than XHTML coding)
c) How do you... set conditional content, build global content libraries,
localization, customized bulleted lists, etc... nearly every 'extended'
feature requires a plug-in and often these plug-ins are prohibitively
expensive.

That way I see it (and again, I am willing to admit that I don't know
Confluence well enough), Confluence becomes a burden if your documentation
requirements extend past the capabilities of  'cookie cutter' wiki markup
language.

But if I could accept Confluence's limitations, my documentation woes would
suddenly become very easy.

Love for you to tell me that I am completely wrong. :)  Seriously.

Thanks,
Shawn

On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
wrote:

> What's your objection to drafting in Confluence? When your docs are in
> a wiki, supporting multiple reviewers is pretty painless. I generate
> PDF and web help directly from Confluence.
>
> My workflow is very simple:
>
> 1. draft and revise topics in Confluence to reflect changes in the release
> 2. create JIRA issues for reviewers
> 3. revise per their comments and clean up any edits they made
> 4. go back and forth as necessary, tracking with JIRA
> 5. when all JIRA issues for the release are closed, generate final doc
> for release
>
> I hope I never have to go back to using an offline, non-collaborative
> authoring tool.
>
> On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 3:29 PM, Shawn <shawn -at- cohodata -dot- com> wrote:
>
> > Ideally, I am looking for a collaborative tool that allows full editing
> and
> > accepts PDF, HTML (with images) input...
>



-- 
*Shawn Connelly*
Technical writer

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