How to use for documentation (versions, reuse of content, manage content and changes)

Question

Is there a good way to manage user documentation content that includes the document and doing a search when changes come up such as software changes or features to application when using for multiple APIs and also include versioning, and with updates and manage approvals and who the owner is along with business owner and product owner?

Nils Bier _K15t_ · Answer

Hi @Sandy ,

As @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- mentioned, Confluence comes with a built-in versioning functionality on page level, which allows you to jump back and forth between specific revisions of a single page. Additionally it now also offers the possibility to apply a status to any given page.

However, user documentation usually consists of a set of pages (e.g. a subtree in Confluence lingo), so a space- or subtree-wide versioning concept might be necessary.

This is were our app Scroll Documents comes into play, which allows you to create a version snapshot of multiple pages with the click of a button. The app is built for the user documentation use case specifically.

With the app activated in a space, you can continue to create the content using default Confluence functionality, and once you want to release a new version of your docs, you simply create a version using Scroll Documents.

It's fully integrated with our other Scroll Apps, so making any version publicly available to the web (using our app Scroll Viewport), or exporting it to various export formats (using our Scroll Exporters) is super easy.

If this sounds useful to you, we'd be happy to give you a deep-dive into our Scroll Apps, and discuss further how our apps could solve your requirements here.

Please feel free to book a demo here.

Cheers,
Nils

📖 BTW - if you want to use Confluence as your documentation tool you might want to check out Rock The Docs - our hub for Confluence best practices.

Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Answer

The Better Content Archiving app is a great tool for managing content ownership (one or many owners for a single pages and page trees), tracking documentation updates through custom notifications, implementing custom page status and periodical reviews, and others.

Parts of your question are a bit vague for me, but I see our app would be a great fit to your needs.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Confluence versions pages automatically, with a complete history of change, and now has an owner field (this is quite new, implemented because people did not understand that the author field is not the owner)

Managing change is a different matter though - Confluence is designed to be a wiki, a collaborative tool where people can edit whatever they need to, and work together on changes.  It does not have processes that inflict change control on documents.  But there are apps that can be added that impose it - I've only ever used Comala's products for that (and enhancing metadata like business and product owners)