Re: most effective method for SME review?

[Helen OBoyle <hoboyle -at- gmail -dot- com>]

To get DocBook-like (our source files are mostly-compliant with an old
version of DocBook) content into Confluence for review, we use custom
stylesheets that let us have more control over the output than the Scroll
plug-in does.  For example, a reference topic generates two pages -- a
detail page, and a summary table page.

The Confluence storage format is really quite tolerable to target, if you
are XML and XSL literate or have access to someone who is.  It's XHTML
rather than HTML... doesn't like <p> tags without </p>'s and so on.  We
then use WebDAV through Windows Explorer or a copy script to load the
generated Confluence storage format files into the Confluence tree,
although we really "should" be using a REST-based utility to do it for
performance and other reasons.

We don't round-trip back from Confluence into our source files.  As far as
our reference docs go, it is a publication and review platform, not an
authoring platform.

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 3:31 AM, Tom Johnson <tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com>
wrote:

> I have Confluence as well as that Talk plugin. This is probably the one
> method that I haven't tried. How do you get your content in and out of
> Confluence to facilitate the review?
>
> I could output my content as HTML and paste it into the source of a
> Confluence page. To make any edits to the content, though, I'd need to make
> them in my source and then regenerate the HTML back into the page.
>
> This workflow seems problematic. Suppose someone makes a comment that says
> "grammar error here..." Here's are my options:
>
> - If I fix the grammar error on the Confluence page itself, I can't just
> copy that generated HTML output back into my source. So I'd have to make
> the update in two places -- in Confluence and in my source.
>
> - If I fix the error in the source and regenerate the HTML output, and then
> paste that generated HTML back into the Confluence page, it will remove the
> Talk annotation.
>
> How are you getting around this problem? (If you're authoring and
> publishing natively in Confluence, this workflow might not be an issue.)
>
> Tom
>
> ---------------------
> blog: idratherbewriting.com
> twitter: tomjohnson
> email: tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com
> cell: 408-540-8562
>
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 9:00 AM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
> wrote:
>
> > Inline comments in Confluence (a newish feature, though previously
> > available using the Talk plugin). It's quite similar to shared review
> > in Acrobat, which I often couldn't get to work on a shared file.
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 2:12 AM, Tom Johnson <tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com>
> > wrote:
> > > What has been your most effective method for reviewing docs with
> subject
> > > matter experts? I feel like I've tried everything and haven't really
> hit
> > > upon the best way of doing it.
> > >
> > > Some approaches I've tried:
> > >
> > > - comments forms on web pages
> > > - direct edits of source files on Github
> > > - in-person visits at my desk
> > > - email
> > > - JIRA tickets
> > > - Word docs
> > > - comments on PDFs
> > > - Google docs
> > > - Beegit
> > > - focused meetings
> > > - over-the-shoulder sessions
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