Marketplace Monday: Scroll Versions

Each week, Marketplace Monday profiles one great add-on available in the Atlassian Marketplace–where you can try and buy more than a thousand add-ons for Atlassian products.

Overview

Scroll Versions adds additional functionality to Confluence for technical writers and other authors of documentation or online help. You can manage the technical documentation authoring process the easy way: right in the wiki. With Confluence and Scroll Versions, you get a powerful wiki-based authoring solution that is capable of single-source, structured content, (social) collaboration, and that scales to your needs.

A Must-Have: Concurrent Version Management

Concurrent version support is a critical feature for writing quality technical documentation. Many companies have multiple versions (or variants) of a product “in the wild” simultaneously, requiring documentation tailored to each version of the product.

The documentation release process used at Atlassian has become a best practice for managing documentation with Confluence. To manage their documentation, the tech writing team at Atlassian keeps all documentation for a product in one master space. Each time the documentation in the master space is updated to a new version (a new product release), the master space is archived to a version space. (The process is described in detail in this excellent blog post).

This process becomes challenging if you have to work on more than one version at the same time. Scroll Versions’ concurrent version management feature allows for management of multiple versions in one space. These versions can be used to author documentation for multiple iterations of software, different product variants, or even multiple languages.

How it works

In Scroll Versions, documentation administrators define versions in your space and authors select one of the versions as the “Working Version”. Subsequent changes (creation, update, removal) can be scheduled for that working version–hidden from users that are not members of the “authors” role. After changes have been made for a certain version, the documentation adminstrators can publish the changes either within the same space or to a completely new space .