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I actually really like Confluence specifically because it's WYSIWYG -- not for myself, but because by being accessible, other (non-developer/technical) people a
by gregmac 11y ago
I actually really like Confluence specifically because it's WYSIWYG -- not for myself, but because by being accessible, other (non-developer/technical) people actually use it. I hate having to deal with the mess that is every shared network drive at every company ever, or even worse, email attachments.
Personally, I'd be happy with just Markdown if it was just a group of devs, but that is a rarity. At my company now, we have tech support, IT, (non-technical) account reps and even to some extent HR and finance using it, and to get that to happen, it was essential to be very easy. There's still a handful of users that attach Word or PDF documents to a page, but at least it's accepted that the wiki is still the canonical location to get any type of documentation, company policy/forms, etc. Baby steps.
So well Confluence does have its warts, getting buy-in into non-technical departments trumps those.
Conversely, I've never seen a non-WYSIWYG wiki actually successfully deployed and used by non-technical users (as contributors) -- anyone else?
- unethical_ban 11y agoWell, the wiki my team needs is one that is used by tech-people only. IT security team. We had Dokuwiki, which worked alright (except inline images were a bit tedious). Confluence is just tacky, too much whitespace, whizzywig editor is slow and buggy (less so than 2yr ago). And the old fogeys on the team that hate documentation still write their notes in a notes.txt file on our team share. Having a "beginner friendly" wiki didn't help anything. Oh, and our dokuwiki was HA on day one, with backup scripts zipping and SCPing a backup to an offsite server. Confluence took MONTHS to get HA as an enterprise solution.
- s_henry_paulson 11y agoHaving inline images be easy was the first thing that sold me on Confluence. I mean you're already doing documentation, adding tedious tasks to it just makes it worse. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, done. Your "old fogeys" thing is a managerial/personnel problem, it has nothing to do with the software. And this is the first time that I've heard "too much whitespace" be a complaint. You want to be distracted from the content?
- unethical_ban 11y agoMaybe too much whitespace isn't right; it's too much clutter. I don't know how to describe it; I'll attribute my indecision on being under the weather. Let's stick with "clean": I like Dokuwiki's layout, categorical hierarchy and linking system better than Confluence. I agree that team members not adhering to doc standards is a human problem.