Re: Tools

Subject: Re: Tools
From: Nina Barzgaran <nina -dot- barzgaran -at- barzgaran -dot- at>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 19:51:51 +0100

Hello,

I have worked with Confluence for over 7 years now, nearly 4 of them using it as a Help Authoring Tool.

I cannot recommend it as a 'HAT':
for anything you want to do that is remotely connected to the common help authoring tasks, such as re-using content, snippets, variables, review workflow, version management (as opposed to a file/page change history) or custom CSS styling you need plugins.
After some time, it lands you, simply put, in plugin hell, because the plugins even from the same vendor sometimes are not completely compatible.

I'd recommend doing some research on *cloud-based Help Authoring Tools*.
There are quite good ones out there, that offer a fine collaboration interface and in addition almost anything you could wish for in help authoring.
MadCap Flare, which is my tool of choice, if I have a choice, even recently extended their cloud-features for the MadCap Central platform.

Depending on the budget and (expected) size of documentation, other tools might be more appropriate.
I can only say: beware of Confluence for help authoring!
It's great as a wiki and collaboration platform, which it was designed for. Period.

Nina

Am 28/10/2020 um 16:00 schrieb John G:

Use Confluence as your help authoring tool. We do that for thousands of
pages of documentation, for multiple applications, in multiple languages.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 2:48 PM Deanna Korth <deanna -dot- korth -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

Hi,

My company is looking to purchase a tool that will accept inputs from:

- XML
- Confluence
- Word

and that will output to:

- HTML5
- Word
- PDF
- Confluence

We (they) want Confluence to be the source of truth because the engineers
are used to writing documentation there. The kicker is keeping the help
authoring system in sync with Confluence. Can you recommend a solution or
tool?

Thank you,
Deanna.
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Nina Barzgaran, M.A.
Technical Communicator
Linzer StraÃe 434-436/3/23
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