Flare vs. Confluence

[williamgwilliams]

Sorry in advance that I haven't made a study of Confluence, but I have a manager asking me to justify why I continue to promote Flare for our help systems. There seems to be a trend in the Dev departments here toward sharing information via Confluence.

I didn't even know Confluence can be a help system that one can hook into the application UI. Can it? That is, can Confluence be used to build a system with topics, an index, a search engine, and context sensitivity? Can it be conditionalized? (Aside: Why does "conditionalized" usually get flagged as a misspelling? I see Merriam-Webster doesn't recognize it. But what word should one use for that?)

Am I risking embarrassment if I simply say that Confluence cannot be used as an end-user help system? That, by its own statement of purpose, it is team collaboration software. And if they say they highly value collaboration, I can say that Flare supports that too, though I (and my colleague) haven't used that functionality yet.

Thanks in advance.

- Willie Williams

[Nita Beck]

I actually don't have a direct answer to your question, but suggest that you throw the question to a broader audience by posting it in LinkedIn. Here on the MadCap user forums, you're throwing the question out to an audience heavily weighted in favor of Flare. I know that there are some folks on LinkedIn who have experience with both tools, and some of them may be passionate -- positively or negatively -- about either of the tools.

[BadMichael]

Yes, I can see Confluence being used as for Help. You can use Confluence's Wiki editor (not as flexible as Flare's editor) to create topics and use Confluence's built-in search to find content. Labels are used to organize content by category. If you want to edit the code of a Confluence page, you'll have to have your Confluence administrator load an optional Code Editor plug-in. And Confluence pages do not always adhere to HTML standards. Step numbering using a mix of ordered and unordered lists is very frustrating.

No, there's not a conditional text feature that I've seen.

As far as collaboration goes, is there any software today that doesn't promote itself as for "collaboration"? Confluence appears to be the flavor of the month and I see it as more of a replacement for Microsoft SharePoint than I do for MadCap Flare.