I used Confluence Server plus Scroll PDF Exporter and HTML Exporter plugins for three years (just for authoring, not for hosting docs), then migrated to Paligo last August.
The big plus of Confluence was that reviews were really easy. The biggest minus is that Atlassian doesn't fix bugs, so I had a dozen or more kludgy workarounds. (Confluence Cloud is not usable for authoring customer-facing documentation.) I switched to Paligo because we wanted review workflow management and versioning / reuse. I could have added those to Confluence with Comala Workflows and Scroll Versions, but Paligo was cheaper since I'm the only writer. If we had more, I'd probably have stuck with Confluence. Paligo has been great about fixing bugs and customizing things to suit our needs. Basically you get the kind of content management system and developer support that only big companies could previously afford. Reuse is elegant and easy. Paligo is similar to FrameMaker, Flare, and most other single-source authoring tools in that your SMEs aren't going to be writing or editing in it. However, while Confluence is simple enough that anyone can write and edit (the limited formatting choices make it a couple of orders of magnitude less problematic than Word or Google Docs for non-expert users), only a couple of my SMEs ever did. The rest just used comments. Switching to DocBook wasn't that big a deal, it's fundamentally similar to using paragraph and character styles in Word or FrameMaker or HTML, except that the editor will allow you to nest things only in certain ways. I learned the hard way that some of the tags such as classsynopsis and procedure are more trouble than they're worth, at least for my purposes. On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 11:22 AM, cuc tu <[email protected]> wrote: > ... my manager suggests we look for a scalable tool just for our small > writing group. I've heard some suggestions we look at Confluence and this > thread has been my first exposure to Paligo. All the solutions look the same > to me and are all equally as mysterious as what benefit they actually > provide. I can understand the concept of structured content, and even DITA, > but have no insight into the nuts and bolts of their use, overhead, and real > returns. Sometimes the marketing seems to get in the way... _______________________________________________ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to [email protected] Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to [email protected]
