Yeehaw, what a week it's been! Confluence 4.3 launched - can't wait to get hold of that for the updated tables functionality alone - and more Jira training than you can stuff into a Mary Poppins bag.

Now that we've got Jira rolled out through the entire company, I'm looking forward to seeing how I can use it with both Confluence and my technical writing. I'm wondering just how much benefit there'll be from using the Jira macros in the wiki, and how these allow the two system to collaborate.

More on this as and when.

More Work, More Benefits 
As a technical writer I'm used to researching, writing and publishing user guides. In the pre-wiki days this was a relatively straightforward process involving MS Word, graphics, tables, reviews and PDFs.

In a wiki it's more complicated: there's more to do. Despite this, I still believe wikis are the way forward for a lot of user documentation.

Although my writing processes still encompasses the steps listed above (minus using Word - now I either write directly into the wiki or I write in Notepad), it also includes a number of other things such as:
  • adding labels/tags (for searching and grouping)
  • adding links (to and from related topics)
  • using a wide variety of macros (to re-use content, create TOCs, searchable fields etc etc).

And there's more. For example, I now have to monitor work from other depts that they've added to the user info. I have to research the tools (macros and plugins for example) available because I want to see if we can use these to improve what we're delivering and how we deliver it. Although we don't mess around with the content and formatting just because we can, we also have to test new ideas out to see what benefits these bring. 

All of this adds work and yes, it does make the whole process of creating and delivering user content longer and more complicated. 

But the benefits to myself as a techcial writer, and the company and clients in terms of better and more usable content far out way the negatives. 

It's an investment in time and effort that rewards everyone - and you can't say fairer than that can you?
Cheers.
 
Hyper-Hyperlinks - Connecting Content
One of the great things about using Confluence for technical writing is that you can connect related topics using hyperlinks. 

These allows users to see these connections and navigate through your documentation in a logical way - and they're super-easy to create.

In fact this underlines one of the main advantages of having your content in a wiki: everything can be joined up. Although other documentation systems allow you to do this, the wiki makes it ridiculously easy to do so.

Not only that, you can find the links to any page really, really easily. In fact, you can do that in two clicks. See last week's blog for more info on how you can do this.

To add a link, all you have to do is select a word, then use Ctrl+K to open the Insert Link window.

From here you can:
  1. run a search for the appropriate page
  2. select from a list of recently viewed pages
  3. select and attachment
  4. insert a web link (URL)
  5. use the Advanced settings.

Although I use the first and fourth ones a lot, my favourite is the recently viewed pages option. This is simply because it's almost inevitable that I would have just been looking at the page I'm going to link to (to check it's the right page of course). 

As this page is normally at the top of the list, all I have to do is select it and press Insert. So with the very little effort that is required to click the mouse three times, I've created a link and can get on with something else.

Now then technical writers, the question is, how much easier can this get?
Cheers.