Four ways Confluence could be better

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Years ago, I used Con­flu­ence and then recent­ly used it again at a client site. I liked it when I first used it but feel dis­ap­point­ed that it does not seem to have evolved. Here are four ways that it could be improved.

What is Confluence?

In case you have not used it, Con­flu­ence is a soft­ware prod­uct that makes it easy to col­lab­o­rate across an enterprise.

Import content from PDFs and Word files

On a past project, I import­ed many old­er Word files and PDFs into Confluence.

The Word and PDF files were very dif­fer­ent from the new tem­plate found in Con­flu­ence so I resort­ed to copy­ing con­tent from the source file to the new tem­plate. Even if I first copied con­tent into a text edi­tor (like Notepad), Con­flu­ence fre­quent­ly changed the fonts or font sizes. Re-apply­ing a para­graph style with­in Con­flu­ence to the word or sen­tence did not fix the issue. For­tu­nate­ly, there’s a workaround.

Con­flu­ence Source Edi­tor is a free app that reveals the code on a giv­en page. If all else fails, you can strip out the extra code that is chang­ing the fonts. 

Using Con­flu­ence Source Edi­tor, I can hone in on a cer­tain word and strip out the code that sur­rounds the font. Here is an example:

By strip­ping out the span text, Con­flu­ence then dis­plays the text nor­mal­ly. As some pages can be rid­dled with this extra code, search­ing for and remov­ing it can quick­ly become tedious. 

My sug­ges­tion: Con­flu­ence should address these for­mat­ting issues so that tech­ni­cal authors do not need to fix con­tent this way. At the very least, this Source Edi­tor should be includ­ed in Con­flu­ence with­out hav­ing to search for and install the app.

Search and replace functionality

I worked for a client that rebrand­ed itself, mean­ing that its old name need­ed to be updat­ed on dozens and dozens of Con­flu­ence pages. For author­ing tools like Mad­Cap Flare, the search fea­ture can eas­i­ly comb through mul­ti­ple topics. 

Con­flu­ence includes a search and replace tool but it’s only for page by page. This means that some­one updat­ing the clien­t’s name needs to open the page, going to edit mode, find an instance of the old name, and replace it. This is a very time con­sum­ing process.

Con­flu­ence does offer apps that will per­mit you to search across mul­ti­ple pages with­in a space but they’re not free and you need to research, pay, and install the one that you’d like.

My sug­ges­tion: Atlass­ian, the com­pa­ny that makes Con­flu­ence, needs to include a free search and replace tool as part of its core prod­uct that can scan mul­ti­ple pages with­in a space.

Weak conditional text support

If you’ve used tools like Mad­Cap Flare, you under­stand the pow­er of con­di­tion­al text, which you allows you to sin­gle-source and include or exclude spe­cif­ic sets of infor­ma­tion. You can apply a con­di­tion to a char­ac­ter, word, sen­tence, para­graph, or entire sec­tions of content.

Con­flu­ence includes a form of con­di­tion­al text sup­port but it’s hard­ly robust. Using an app called Scroll Ver­sions, writ­ers can cre­ate dif­fer­ent ver­sions of con­tent and then asso­ciate the con­tent with a “vari­ant.” If you need to cre­ate three dif­fer­ent ver­sions of a para­graph, you can pub­lish three ver­sions using the Scroll Ver­sions app. The main chal­lenge with the app is that it forces users to pick which ver­sion they want to read using a drop­down in Con­flu­ence. Here’s an exam­ple in which a user might select among mul­ti­ple prod­uct versions:

My ver­dict: Although it’s bet­ter than noth­ing, Con­flu­ence’s sup­port is pret­ty weak com­pared to Mad­Cap Flare or oth­er tech­ni­cal writ­ing tools.

No built-in support for variables

In case you haven’t used vari­ables, here’s a def­i­n­i­tion from Mad­Cap’s online help: “Vari­ables are brief, non-for­mat­ted pieces of con­tent (such as the name of your company’s prod­uct or phone num­ber) that can be edit­ed in one place but used in many places…” If you need to update the vari­able, you only need to change it in one place and the change is auto­mat­i­cal­ly made every­where the vari­able appears.

Prod­uct names, cor­po­rate address­es, sup­port phone num­bers all tend to change from time to time. Using vari­ables makes a change super easy. There is an app called Easy Con­flu­ence Vari­ables that may pro­vide some of this func­tion­al­i­ty, although I haven’t had a chance to use it.

I like Con­flu­ence. But if tech­ni­cal writ­ers are going to embrace the tool, Atlass­ian needs to invest more effort in improv­ing it. Besides Con­flu­ence, are there oth­er wikis worth investigating?