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I've been using Confluence Server for two years. It's very easy for
engineers to learn how to review, comment, and edit.
Getting your templates right is the biggest challenge, just as with
most authoring tools.
The Source Editor plug-in is indispensable. Sometimes the WYSIWYG
screws up and that's the only way to fix it. The source is very
similar to Flare source.
The quality of the native PDF export is unsatisfactory so I use the
K15t Scroll PDF Exporter add-on for that. I wrote a few macros to
tweak page breaks.
I generate web help with K15t Scroll HTML Exporter. That feature's
still in beta, supposed to be done for the next release, but it seems
to work fine already.
We probably will never use Confluence to host web help directly,
Atlassian's licensing model makes that prohibitively expensive.
Confluence Cloud does not support any of those plug-ins, so as far as
I'm concerned it's not usable as an authoring tool. It's fine for
in-house publishing.
On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Laura Phillips
<laurap -at- pluribusnetworks -dot- com> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Are many companies using Confluence as the main tool for getting product information to customers? Since it is collaborative, what is the buy in necessary from the engineering group? Is that crucial to the success or failure of using the tool?
>
> Is it worth the effort to learn it and then subsequently maintain it?
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