Is Confluence a good tool to use for public facing Release Notes?

[Sami Atieh]

Hello,

I am looking for a solution to use for my company's release notes.

Currently, we write up the release notes on a Word doc and email them out to existing clients and prospects.

Is Confluence a suitable replacement for this method? We use Confluence for Product Requirement docs currently. I noticed also that Confluence has a blog posting option. Is this another option for release notes?

Looking for advice and best practices, maybe Confluence isn't the right tool?

Thank you

[Kristian Klima · Accepted solution]

Hi @Sami Atieh 

We're using Confluence for documentation and the release notes :) 

Don't let the looks, fool you, the site is built using Confluence and Scroll Viewport for Confluence.

We can easily pull stuff from the actual docs, Jira tickets, have subject-matter experts, POs, etc. to review both the docs and the release notes in one go... Process-wise and technically it's super easy as everyone has a seat on Jira and Confluence.

Also, we can easily build TWO versions of the release notes - public and internal - using just a single Confluence page (there's an app for that...)

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

Confluence will work, as others suggested, but if you are using Jira to run your development efforts, there is an app that you should know about: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1230872/released-ai-release-notes-changelog-automation-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

[Michel Neeser · Accepted solution]

Hi @Sami Atieh and welcome!

Can your release notes be public and basically accessible to anyone? If so, a good option is a space with anonymous access if you have multiple Confluence pages, or a public link if you only have one page with the release notes on it.

If you want to restrict access to the release notes, you could use guest access to a dedicated Confluence space.

The blog posts you've mentioned are not public per se, they can only be made public with the options I mentioned above. The use case for them is mainly internal company news.

Hope this helps!

[Sami Atieh]

Thank you all for the feedback. Same question for a help center. I need a place for our how-to docs for current customers only, not for public use. I'm thinking Confluence may not be the best approach for this, has anyone used it for this purpose?

[Jens Schumacher - Released_so]

@Sami Atieh 

Scroll Viewport might be worth a look for a public KB. It has the ability to setup authenticated access: https://help.k15t.com/scroll-viewport/set-up-authenticated-access

The other benefit is that it's compatible with Released, mentioned by Aron above.