Importing from Confluence?

[chuck_agari]

2019 R2 introduce importing from Confluence, which seemed exciting/intriguing, especially when I read the paragraph in the docs about it about linking to the Confluence source and getting changes made to that source re-imported into Flare. Confluence is, I think, a decent way to share draft content for review, get input, and respond to that input. But I wonder if it's really useful linked. My first thought is that my source files in Flare have tons of variables, conditional text, and even snippets. What I don't know, and what the documentation did not address, is what happens to these when re-imports happen? Never mind that once I import in the first place, I have to go over the imported content and apply variables, conditions, etc., as warranted. And I bet I'd have to covert any images to our standards too by wrapping the imported code in a figure element. (Flare still, amazingly, doesn't have this built-in.)

Then today it occurred to me that these are issues probably faced by users who import and link to those imports from any external sources. True? If so, how do y'all deal with that?

I mean, let's say you have a variable for your product name. A draft Confluence topic has the product name, and of course it is not variable-ized. You import it as a Flare topic. You convert the flat text to a variable. Now you have reviewers comment on your Confluence page, you make some changes there, and re-import. Does your variable disappear and you have to re-do it? Curious minds want to know......

[kmorrison]

My experience with re-importing anything so far is that it simply overwrites my changes. Making detailed changes to topics that will need to be re-imported later is probably not a great use of anyone's time.

[chuck_agari]

This is kind of what I suspected. This feature is not good for, for example, using Confluence to write and get feedback on drafts or any content that is likely to be updated.

[ChoccieMuffin]

It's not really any different from any other import format in that respect.

I have managed to torture my Word imports a bit to enable me to use conditions, but that does require using a series of search-and-replace actions on the imported HTML, and then being very disciplined to NEVER edit those files in Flare after import.

[Folkie]

It would have been extremely useful for us a couple of years ago. At that time we had all of our user documents in Confluence. When we started to implement Flare we found that there was no easy way to get our documents out of Confluence and into Flare, the best method we came up with was to export from Confluence to Word (using the Scroll Office plugin), strip out some of the formatting, then import the Word docs into Flare and do a lot of formatting on the imported documents. We consulted with Matthew Ellison at the time but he couldn't come up with a better way of doing it.

Two years down the line we've just finished the work (it hasn't been continuous during that time, it wasn't that bad!) and NOW MadCap have developed the feature

[chuck_agari]

Ouch.

Here's the thing. Software is supposed to be smart. The whole reason for software to exist is to do work for us, to make our work easier, better, more efficient. So when you're going to do something like this, figure out how to make is smart. For example, if the import encounters a word or phrase that matches a variable definition, part of the initial import process might be validating that it should, indeed, be a variable, and the keep track of that decision for further updates. There's probably a lot more, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect smart software--and to raise hell when software isn't smart and should or could be.