New to Confluence Group

[Sue Wilson]

Good morning and Happy Monday from Pennsylvania, USA!

I am NOT new to Confluence, but am new to this group.  

I've been a Confluence Admin for 15+ years and really love what Confluence has to offer!

I have done everything from implementing a new company-wide Confluence site from scratch to remodeling existing sites to massive clean ups and security updates (think space/page restrictions). 

I've worked with extremely zealous folks chomping at the bit to rid themselves of word documents, Sharepoint sites, and lost documentation. And, I've worked with folks who were extremely reluctant to use Confluence, preferring the old tried & true methods vs new & different.  Fortunately, I was able to win them over with a few quick tutorials on all of Confluence's features and functionalities.

I'm here to help answer questions when & where I can AND to continue my own learning.  After taking a recent bite-size learning on Confluence shortcuts, I realized I still have much to learn myself.

Thanks for listening (or, well, reading) and have a great day!

[Ruby]

Hi, Sue!

What are your favorite resources for introducing colleagues to the Confluence way of thinking and organizing when implementing it for the first time?

[Jay Maechtlen]

I'm a techwriter. Many of my readers don't have access to our Confluence site, some have access to our SharePoint site, and some have neither.

 While I mostly like Confluence, I don't see a good way to compose and generate the PDFs I need short of Word. (ok, in concept, something similar - but Word is in hand and good enough.)

I don't see a reasonable way to create the graphics I need (mostly screen caps with added callouts and such) and a way to generate the pdfs with bookmarks without asking the client to add various add-ins.

And why spend money on addins when the tools we have work fine?

Importing Word docs is ok-ish if I do a lot of prep work, convert all the graphics to images and make sure the borders are baked into the images. And it is tricky to get links within a doc to work. IIRC, I have to add anchors and to links to those anchors. Tedious and error prone.

Using the Office doc macro works ok, aside from losing direct search. PDF embed likewise.

I don't see a single great solution, and I don't see anything better than just embedding the pdf in a conf page and distributing it via SharePoint and email to the users.

And several of our manuals are well over 100 pages, as point of reference.

Thoughts?

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

It shouldn't be this difficult.  However, it often is and I feel your pain.

I will comment on your "Why spend money on addins when the tools we have work fine?" question.  It's because the tools don't work fine.  The marketplace addons are there because there is a use case that isn't being covered.

[Jay Maechtlen]

I should clarify - "why spend money on Confluence add-ins when our current toolchain, while not perfect, is sort-of good enough?"

We'd have to show a clear improvement in usability/performance and/or  a real reduction in required effort to justify the expense.

And again - it has to support the user base that doesn't have access to Confluence.

Bother.

[Jay Maechtlen]

I should specify that we have plenty of users for whom Confluence is perfect. It is a small body of external users (mostly vendors) that don't have access to Confluence. It is a subset of users who need my manuals, but an important audience.

[LaToya Muff _Snyk_]

This is a dream. Can you suggest any resources/training to help better learn the tool?