On Monday June 14th K15t Software made its first appearance at the Single Source Forum in Munich. The single source forum is a conference for the technical communication community in Germany. This year's focus was on software documentation and how make documentation work for highly customizable software.

Tobias Anstett, co-founder of K15t Software, talked at the Single Source Forum 2010 about "Variability in the Documentation Process using Wikis". He defined the terms variability and variants in the context of documentation and presented the reasons for the creation of variants in documentation such as product variants, internationalization and audience-specific presentation of content.

For example he went into detail about structuring content in Confluence:

Structure plays a important role for usability but also when it comes to re-use of content. Confluence allows you to structure your content in different ways. First spaces can be created to differentiate between e.g. different products, departments or types of documentation. Speaking from experience a space should always be used for a single documentation. Inside a space pages respectively hierarchies of pages can be used to introduce a global structure which can be further imporved by using headings of differnet sizes on the page level itself. Authors should always think about the granularity of content they create. Using a page for single sentences might improve context sensitive re-use of information by others but impair the readability and maintenance of the documentation in the wiki. Another concept which is more related to re-use than to stucturing is the ability to tag or label pages. Labels can be used to introduce semantic information which improves search but also the creation of filters for e.g. exporting with Scroll.

(download)

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k15t-at-the-single-source-forum-2010-cjcAqaFbmgFIBDJopdcj.zip (95 KB)

Here are the slides (German only):

Click here to download:

Vortrag_PDF_SSF10.pdf (650 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Vortrag_PDF_SSF10.pdf (650 KB)

STUTTGART, GERMANY. K15t Software has announced the Office Edition of their Scroll product. The Scroll Office Edition is a limited version of the Scroll Wiki Exporter for publishing Word 2007 documents from Confluence. The Scroll Office Edition is available as a public beta as of now, and will be generally available in Q3, 2010.

“Word has been the top feature request from our customers so far”, Stefan Kleineikenscheidt, Managing Director and founder of K15t Software, said. According to Kleineikenscheidt, the Scroll Office Edition offers two main advantages in comparison to the standard Word export provided by Confluence:

The Scroll Office Edition provides easy support for look and feel customizations. Customers can upload existing Word templates into Confluence and Scroll Office will re-use predefined styles such as Standard, Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. to create a properly formatted document.

Second, users can select which pages to export. Before starting the export, they can select to export just the current page or also include the child pages. This way user can split up their documentation into smaller pages and build a hierarchy in Confluence to improve collaborative writing and management of their documentation.

Kleineikenscheidt also mentioned additional improvements under the hood. “Users will notice the significant performance improvement when outputting documents”, he said. Also, the load and memory consumption is greatly decreased. To achieve this, the Scroll Office Edition is based on the re-written Scroll core and the Atlassian plugin v2 architecture. Tobias Anstett, CTO and co-founder of K15t, explains: “The new Scroll core processes pages in chunks, rather than loading the whole document in memory. Additionally the Word export itself is inherently faster than previously developed exporters, which were based on XSL. All upcoming exporters will be built on the new core and existing ones will be adapted to it.”

The beta version of the Scroll Office Edition is available free of charge in the Atlassian plugin repository, which allows for one-click installation through the Confluence admin console. “We would like to invite all Confluence users to download and test-drive the beta and provide feedback and discussion our discussion forum”, Anstett said.

The Scroll Office Edition will cost 50% of the cost of a Confluence license with the same user limit, but it will not be bound to the Confluence size. In other words customers will be able to use a 25 user license of Scroll Office Edition on a 2000+ license of Confluence. Existing customers with support and upgrade contracts may upgrade to Scroll Office Edition free of charge.

More Information about the Scroll Office Edition and K15t Software GmbH is available from http://k15t.com/