Documenting systems with different versions

[John Fairhall]

I am looking for inspiration.

We have a reasonably large software solution we want to document in Confluence.

The solution now has four subtly diverging branches. We need a way to cleanly document the solution for all the branches, where most of the functionality is common but not all.

I'm loathe to produce four different confluence spaces for each branch, too much duplication that will not be maintained correctly.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[EPS Software Engineering AG]

Hi John,

Maybe the app Scroll Version is the right choice. You find it on the Marketplace.

Regards,
Stephan

[Tobias Anstett (K15t)]

Thanks for bringing this up - for me it also sounds like Scroll Versions will solve that issue for you as you can

• manage multiple versions of your docs in one space
• create variants of your docs

Regarding the branching requirement - this can be solved by a branched version tree or using variants / conditional content. Depending on your use case either the one or the other makes sense – of course it also works in combination.

If you want to learn more please check https://www.k15t.com/software/scroll-versions and request a demo.

Best, Tobias (and yes, we are the vendor behind Scroll Versions)

[Bill Rudy]

John, to me this could depend on exactly what is meant by "software solution" and what the four branches are.  If I understand you correctly, this is four slightly different approaches or components of the same solution, so I think I'd simply have a top-level page describing the overall solution and the commonalities among all four things, then four different sub-pages to describe the uniquenesses for each.  Don't overthink it.  :)

Regardless, I agree that creating more than one space is inadvisable, based on what you're saying. 

[Meg Holbrook]

Hey John, perhaps you can better organize this content by coming up with a great labeling structure. In this way, you can generate page property reports of the 'branches'.

This allows users to see what the content relates to, if it crosses over, and is all still maintained in one main area. 

[John Fairhall]

I was just looking at labels. How would this work?

Say I have a page describing a function.

One of the branches does something different for the function.

Do I tag the page with labels for three of the branches, create a separate page for the branch, and tag it?

One thing we are looking for is a nice consistent way to add the diverging page to the existing confluence... under the 'main' page with a " - version X" prefix on the name maybe?