Documentation: Context-based help articles with Confluence

Rainer Schneider

Hello,

I would like to use Confluence as a help authoring tool and I would like to know whether I can link Confluence to our ERP software so that the user can press F1 (for example) in a specific dialogue and immediately gets the appropriate help article to this dialogue. Is that possible with Confluence? 

I hope, you can understand what I mean.

Thanks in advance.

Best,

Rainer

Kristian Klima_gtcuat

Hello @Rainer Schneider and welcome to the community.

Yes, with some coding / engineering or an app.

App option

Scroll Viewport by K15 allows you to embed specific articles directly in the product. So how it works is that Viewport creates a documentation website for you from Confluence content. Than you assign specific URL IDs to specific pages, do a bit of coding, and then the article appears right in the product. The advantage is that you only need to update the article in Confluence.

Review their topic-specific docs here.

This is their own implementation in their product (the Confluence app. You click the ? icon and the modal with the docs/tiles appears.

Coding option

You can use Confluence API and then code the modal that would pull in content directly from Confluence and/or display the confluence page as an iframe. (this is very high level but this approach works).

Differences

Viewport site is independent from Confluence permissions. To display Confluence pages in your product 'as is', you will have to sort out permissions.