Creating online help / online users guide

[Michel Michales]

What kind of artefacts (plugins, templates, best practices) is there for creating online help / online users guide with confluence ?

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions]]

Hi @Michel777

First - congrats on this bold (and not so bold - logical and smart) step.

Here's a few more..

* Buy this Book from Amazon - Here's the "cliffnotes" on Atlassian blogs. But buy the book - worth every penny for your purposes, and thousands more.

* Watch this Webinar - Still relevant on process, strategy, approaches.

* Review the plugins by K15t - - one of two likely will become critical to your new Confluence Product Doc process.

* Become a fan of this blog by @sarahmaddox -

* Consider maybe a theme plugin - here's two great ones: Zen Foundation and Refined Wiki

* Convince of single purpose license, maybe - though not mandatory, having a Confluence system dedicated to your product doc allows you alot more control over your process, plugin conflicts, or even collaboration conflicts.

* Product Doc Translation needs, in Confluence - For the moment, follow @appfusions on twitter (or email @appfusions.com">info@appfusions.com) - since we have a great plugin for this coming VERY SOON - which will save Enterprise corps who have translations with docs many many $1000s..

(will update with link when avail - ETA mid-May latest - accepting Beta customers now)

Never look back.

Confluence for product documentation is the way of the future - but actually its here NOW! :)

Have fun!

Ellen

[Joerg Bencke]

Hi Michel,

i would try for the answers regarding "technical documentation". Common basis is to provide a hierarchy of pages to allow treelike search inside the pages.

Check out the confluence documentation and the blog posts from Sarah Maddox (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/~smaddox) and others, linked from there.

Bottom line : I think it is a question of style : Do you provide a given structure via a tree-style navigation or do you link and tag your articles, but keep the hiearchy low. Since people are used to browsing books, I would suggest

• starting out with the hiearchy,
• tag the important "entry-pages" to topics and
• provide additional theme-related navigationmaps or overview-pages and round it of with
• a FAQ page, answering the "worst" questions and linking to topics for further reading.