[Framers] Questions about tech docs in an Agile environment (may be off-topic)

[Robert Lauriston]

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 <cuc2u at hotmail.com> 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...