Importing from Confluence

[plabarbera]

Hi there,

I need to import a Confluence space into a Flare project. Does anyone have any pointers or best practices?

I'm currently evaluating different help tools and need to import a Confluence project in order to test Flare.

[Tova Cohen]

Hi there,
My company just purchased Flare and we will be importing files from Confluence. About 800 pages of documentation when it is in PDF.

Can you tell me about your experience doing this?
What did you do to your Confluence files to prepare them to be imported?
What problems did you encounter and how did you resolve them?
Any file name conventions to recommend?
Any best practices to recommend for how to go about doing this?

I'm familiar with topic-based authoring and working with XML source. My plan is to create a flat directory structure. I'm reading as much as I can about Flare and basically trying to minimize problems we encounter because of what we don't know.

I hope your conversion went well. Thanks for any information you can share,
Tova
(Tech writer, NuoDB, Cambridge MA)

[ChoccieMuffin]

If you don't get a response from the forum, as you're evaluating Flare for possible purchase you could always try calling the Sales bods. They should be able to advise whether what you're trying to do is possible and, if so, what you have to do.

[Tova Cohen]

Thanks! I can confirm that it is possible and fast. I spent a lot of time with a trial version.
I did ask the MadCap folks and they were not able to point me to any specific experience with importing from Confluence.
And we have now purchased a license with maintenance so I will certainly make use of all the resources available to me.

We will be exporting XML files from Confluence and importing them to Flare 11.
So far, I've identified the following tasks for cleaning the source files before import:
- Remove Confluence TOC macros
- Remove horizontal line at the beginning of each document.
- Remove unused, attached images.
- Ensure that page titles and headings are descriptive and unique within the doc set.

To maintain xrefs, I believe I need to import all documents in one import operation. Sadly, I think that not all documents should be broken at Heading1s and so I'll have to pick the best setting for how to break up the incoming documents and will then have to do a lot of manual division of files to arrive at appropriate topics. Would love a workaround for that. I'll look for easy ways already documented in the forum for how to do that.

Thanks again for your response!
Tova

[tcowl]

Are there any tips on the best way to export confluence pages (not entire spaces, but just collections of topics) into Flare? I can't find procedures on the best way to do this, and don't want to mess up our existing project.

[Tova Cohen]

We decided to manually copy and paste content into Flare so I can't provide any tips about exporting HTML from Confluence and then importing it into Flare. I think I experimented with exporting XML from Confluence as well and that didn't work for importing from Flare.

While it is quick to export HTML from Confluence and then import it into Flare, the import to Flare brings with it A LOT of Confluence attributes and tags and we decided that they would cause trouble in the long run. We wanted to have a clean implementation of Flare. It took two people one month to copy all our content into Flare topics. Before that, I spent two weeks creating a plan to reorganize our content since we were going from Confluence pages that each contain a lot of material to Flare topics that each contain much less information.

When we implemented Flare, we used the Tripane target. When this decision was made, we were not aware that the TopNav target is the better target in terms of SEO. We now have a problem in that web searches for our doc do not always result in our latest Flare output, but our old Confluence output instead. There is a lot of discussion here about Tripane vs. TopNav and you should consider that. We will likely convert to TopNav, and we would have avoided some work if we had done this in the first place. But each format has its pros and cons and you should consider that carefully if you have an HTML5 target.

I did ask MadCap support about importing from Confluence to Flare. At the same time, I asked about splitting file content that contains all the text that was in a wiki page into multiple Flare topics. They did not have any information about importing from Confluence. But here is their response about splitting content into topics upon import: (this response was in August 2015)
---------
There isn't an option available currently to split HTML topics during import. This option is only available for the Word import and is based on Word styles.

Aside from manually copying and pasting the content into new topics, there isn't an easy way to break up the content once it is in Flare. Another option would be breaking the content before it comes into Flare.

A feature request for an easier way to split long topics in Flare while maintaining links has been submitted on your behalf to our Product Managers who work with our Research and Development team regarding future versions of our products.
-----
Good luck!

[sjsmith001]

Thanks! I can confirm that it is possible and fast. I spent a lot of time with a trial version.
I did ask the MadCap folks and they were not able to point me to any specific experience with importing from Confluence.
And we have now purchased a license with maintenance so I will certainly make use of all the resources available to me.

We will be exporting XML files from Confluence and importing them to Flare 11.
So far, I've identified the following tasks for cleaning the source files before import:
- Remove Confluence TOC macros
- Remove horizontal line at the beginning of each document.
- Remove unused, attached images.
- Ensure that page titles and headings are descriptive and unique within the doc set.

To maintain xrefs, I believe I need to import all documents in one import operation. Sadly, I think that not all documents should be broken at Heading1s and so I'll have to pick the best setting for how to break up the incoming documents and will then have to do a lot of manual division of files to arrive at appropriate topics. Would love a workaround for that. I'll look for easy ways already documented in the forum for how to do that.

Thanks again for your response!
Tova

Im researching the prospect of importing a Confluence Help System into Flare and I found this post interesting.
Were you successful in your conversion? Can you share any additional steps you performed other than those listed?
Anyone else out there have an success with Confluence Import/Conversion to Flare?

thanks for any information
Steve

[Folkie]

Only just spotted this, sorry.

We're about to start moving our help system from Confluence to Flare. We have the Scroll Office plugin for Confluence so plan to export our user guides to Word first, then import the Word docs to Flare.

It isn't ideal and there'll be a lot of post-import cleaning up to do (we'll get the Word docs as clean as possible before we import them anyway), but when we had our Flare training before Christmas the trainer agreed with us that it was the best way to get there.

I'm still working on configuring Flare but should be diving in and starting on the import and reformatting tasks quite soon. I'm not entirely looking forward to it, but it'll be worth it in the end - I hope!

Jane