Has anyone used Confluence as a public facing knowledge base? If so, how did you deal with multiple versions of a product in your KB?

[Calvin Park]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Use Confluence as a Knowledge Base

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[TomC]

Calvin,

I just heard a presentation on a product that is built to do this in last night's local Atlassian User Group.

Check out K15t's product Scroll Versions.  I don't have personal experience with it yet, but it's so good that Atlassian uses it for their own public-facing documentation. It's made to handle just the scenario you are describing.

[Markus Raab]

I think Scroll Versions can be used for product documentation (manual) which is more static than an actual KB. 

I can't come up with a solution of using Scroll Versions for an actual KB, but I do not have personal experience with such a set up.

Did you meanwhile have more experiences with that and did you try it yourself?

[Nils Bier _K15t_]

Hi Calvin,

if you want to learn more about Scroll Versions, please feel free to contact us at K15t Software.

I'll be happy to set up a demo and show you the product @Tom Crespi mentioned.

Cheers,
Nils

// edit: I just saw that your question is marked with the tag "Confluence Cloud" - are you using Confluence Cloud? Unfortunately Scroll Versions is currently only available for Confluence Server. If you want to have a demo nevertheless, please feel free to reach out 

[Davin Studer]

The most common free method would be to create a space for each version. When you have a new version you would clone the latest version to a new space and make edits.

[Markus Raab]

Hey @Davin Studer! 

Is the solution with different spaces working for you? I am interested in finding a solution myself and would be glad to get some further input on your experiences.

We are facing the same situation - we are going to set up a knowledge base for our agents & customers. However, I am asking myself as well how to handle different major product versions.

If we follow your suggestion of cloning the latest space with all KB entries, we would end up with 12 KB spaces per year for a single product just because of different versions. 

Problem A)

How are you making the KB entries available for your customers? You can only link one KB space to a Service Desk project. Each customer would then need to have a different space linked, depending on the product version they use.

Problem B)

There are KB entries valid for more versions, and KB entries created for the most recent version but also valid for older versions.

Problem C)

Which KB entries are you going to show your agents? Only the latest space? If you manually (not from the Service Desk but from Confluence) search for a KB entry you would find many different versions of the same thing.

Maybe you have some advice and opinion about that.

Thanks

Markus

[Davin Studer]

Honestly, I've never done what you are asking. So, I'm not sure if it would work in that case or not. Scroll Versions would be another possibility to look into as it doesn't create separate spaces for versions and might fit better into what you are trying to do.

[Markus Raab]

Alright - well maybe someone has an idea. I am in contact with the guys from K15 about Scroll Versions. Hopefully they have some idea. Thanks Davin.