Re: Tools

[John G <vwritert -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi Nina,

We have been using Confluence - yes, augmented with lots and lots of
add-ons - without a lot of difficulty; certainly nothing like what seems to
be your experience.

We are a team of 25 (which includes two people doing technical support for
Confluence and other ancillary applications) and have been using it for 5+
years. While it has its quirks - what tool doesn't? - we find that it suits
our needs and is pretty easy to use. I've been a tech writer for 40+ years
and I quite like it. All of our development teams and many other internal
users use it all the time with few problems.

Chacun à son goÃt.

JG

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 3:03 PM Nina Barzgaran <nina -dot- barzgaran -at- barzgaran -dot- at>
wrote:

> 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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