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History of publishing with Comala Publishing

Seetha MJ

I am trying out Comala Publishing and am trying to understand if you have solutions to the following issues:

1. Publishing history
Is there a publishing history that can keep track of which pages were changed/ atleast what was the version of the page that was published each time 'publish' is pressed on the whole space. I would like to keep a snapshot of the changes with each publish.

2. Publishing comments
I am trying to use Comala Publishing to baseline document versions. So in the draft space, i make all changes and when i press publish, i was hoping for a comment box where i can type e.g. "version 0.1". Upon pressing publish, all pages that are synced will have comment "version 0.1" or "signed off version 1.0" in their version history in the published space. That way i wont have to add version comment "signed off version 1.0" on all pages in the draft space before a publish.

Are there any alternatives to solve the above issues?

Thank You
Seetha

Accepted answers

All comments

Mike Rink

Hi Seetha,

Thanks for trying out Comala Publishing! I am the Product Evangelist at Comalatech, and Publishing is one of our apps.

Unfortunately the functionality you're looking for is not currently a part of the app; it's not designed to be a snapshot or versioning app, but it's designed to give you greater control over your publishing.

If you're looking for an app that is more about version control, you may want to look at K15t's Scroll Versions product.

Let me know if I can answer any other questions about Comalatech, Comala Publishing, or our other apps.

Seetha MJ

HI Mike

I have tried Scroll Versions but that did not work for us for more than one reason. Which is why when i found Publishing i thought that could work for us. what i am essentially after is a list of what has changed on each publish. Is that achievable through Comala Publishing?

roman_l0djep

Hi Seetha.

Would you mind sharing why Scroll Versions didn't work for you?

Cheers,
Roman.

Mike Rink

Hi Seetha,

Thanks for the feedback on Publishing. We are going to create some internal Jira issues to explore these enhancements, snapshots+page history and versions, and if we decide to implement the features we will definitely reach out to you.

Gorka Puente {Appfire}

Hi Seetha,

There's one way you can add comments to published pages (tag pages). If you use Comala Workflows together with Comala Publishing, you can add a workflow that adds a comment to pages before these are published to another space.

You add an action to write a comment "version 0.1" when the documentation is ready, you can publish it with the previously added comment (using Comala Publishing).

Let me know if this setting works for you!

Gorka

Seetha MJ

Thank you Mike. Please keep me posted. that would help in putting up a business case for the purchase of Comala Publishing.

Hi Roman,

One of the major pain points was the administrative overhead with a steep learning curve. We needed a simple and flat 'versioning' solution that users who have been using Word for ages can easily shift to. Merging is another good feature but not easy to understand for Word gurus. While Scroll does provide good macros and configuration settings, we will need to create a new position, solely in charge of administration of projects through version control.

Other points (not major) were how versioning works on space level and not page tree level. Scroll also creates dotted files for each version and if we choose to remove versioning for a space / uninstall it, the space looks very confusing with multiple dot pages. (I might be wrong but that is what i noticed in my 1 month trial)

Seetha MJ

Hi Gorka,

Good to know that Comala Workflows allow this but i think this should be available on Publishing too. You are making changes to a space, you need to add a summary section or something explaining the publish.

Also it will not be justifiable to purchase Comala Workflows just to place comments when Publishing.

Do you have a package deal where we can purchase both products ?

Regards,

Seetha

Gorka Puente {Appfire}

Hi @Seetha MJ,

I agree, if you just use the comments functionality in Comala Workflows, it doesn't worth it. And I'm afraid there's not a package to buy both products.

We have created an internal feature request to add summary/comments when publishing spaces. We'll contact you with any further news.

Kind regards,

Gorka

roman_l0djep

Hi @Seetha MJ,

thanks for your reply. I totally understand that Scroll Versions app requires some learning to get into the app. I have experienced this myself when I joined the team.

We are currently working with our designers to improve the UI and explain features and capabilities of the app better. There are a lot you can do with Versions, but the user experience could be much better for users to actually use them.

We hope you could do another trial of Scroll Versions this year when the UI changes are implemented. Feel free to sign up for a newsletter on our website to be notified when this happens.

Cheers,
Roman.

Update

Just little update from me. I have re-read your original question and it seems that the ability to take snapshots of your documentation to later compare with the current documentation is what you need. If this is the case, we have an app called Scroll Documents that allows you to do just that. It's currently available for Cloud only, but we have plans to bring it to Server.

Seetha MJ

HI Roman,

Thank you for the update. I took a look at Scroll Documents and it seems to fit the bill for our need. I would love to understand what the difference between scroll versions and scroll documents is though. Is it that the version can be done on document level instead of space? that would be very useful . Infact this demo here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H3lytU80OQ is very promising.

Ours is a Confluence Server installation and cannot try it out. If there any way we can try out the capability in a demo cloud environment? Do you have a timeline of when you might release the app to Server? If it is soon, I might be able to convince my team to wait for it. Please let me know.

Cheers,

Seetha

unknown

Hi @Seetha MJ,

I'm Tom from the Scroll Documents team at K15t Software. Thanks for the positive feedback about the get started video!

As my colleague Roman said, at the moment, Scroll Documents is only available for Confluence Cloud – but we're actively working on creating a server version. I can't provide an exact date for the release of the server version, but I can say that this is a major priority in our product roadmap. You can follow this Jira issue to get automatic notifications as we progress with this.

From what you have described about your scenario, I'd say that Scroll Documents looks like a really good fit for your use case.

In Documents, documents are defined as any page and that page's descendants. This means that unlike Scroll Versions – where versioning always takes place on a space level - you can version trees of pages as small or as large as you want. You can find more details on what a document is in our docs.

You also mentioned that you'd like to compare changes between versions. The document version viewer in Scroll Documents makes this simple, with content highlighting and page tree icons that clearly show what content has been removed, changed and added. You can get more information in our docs.

You also mentioned that you'd like to leave a publishing comment when you save a new version. With Documents, you can simply type an explanatory comment when saving a version to make it clear what changed from the pervious version.

I hope this provides some further explanation about Scroll Documents, if you have any further questions I'll be happy to answer them!

Cheers, Tom.

Seetha MJ

Hi Tom,

I would really like to try the Scroll Document to determine if it I should wait for it. Do you have a demo environment / instance where I can try this out?

As far as timeline goes could i atleast know a rough estimate? Will it be within this year? half year?

Cheers, Seetha

unknown

Hi @Seetha MJ,

Great that you'd like to try out Scroll Documents!

We don't have a demo environment set up – but if you want to try it out, it's a really quick process to get your own trial of Confluence Cloud and Scroll Documents set up. Our help centre contains a guide on how to do just that.

Regarding a possible release date: unfortunately, we really can't say when Scroll Documents will be released by, because right now there are simply too many possibly variables that might affect the length of the development process. I'm really sorry that I can't give you more information than that.

Cheers, Tom.

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