The Atlassian Summit 2011 is over and our first a appearance at an Atlassian Summit ever was a huge success. We not only won the Codegeist Contest, but also Scroll Office, our upcomming Scroll Wiki Exporters and two Confluence 4-only plugins (Scroll Wiki Forms and the Zen Editor) gained a lot of attention.

Scroll Office 2.2: Table Styles and new Pricing Model

The new Scroll Office 2.2 is almost our of the door:  It will finally be possible to use table style and define the design of tables such as background-colors, borders and more. This has been one of the most wanted feature on our forums and we are proud to have an implementation, which will cover all use-case.

Starting from Version 2.2 we will introduce a new pricing model: The prices for Scroll Office will now start at $240 for 25 Users and will go up to $3600 for unlimited users (that is roughly 30% of the license cost of the matching Confluence license). Also, we will office 10-user starter licenses. The change in the license model is, that Scroll Office licenses will now be bound to the Confluence license. We have done this to better align with Atlassian's licensing scheme, and also we had technical issues with named users on Confluence systems using Crowd for authentication.

Scroll Wiki Exporters

Our initial product Scroll Wiki Exporter will be split up into multiple plugins - each for every export format. We do this in order to allow our users to select the functionatlity they actually need.

In the first step we will offer the following plugins

• Scroll Wiki PDF Exporter
• Scroll Wiki EPUB Exporter (Codegeist Winner)
• Scroll Wiki EclipseHelp Exporter
• Scroll Wiki HTML Exporter

We will introduce the individual plugins with all their features separately in the coming weeks/months. They all have in common a completely redesigned user interface.

All Scroll Wiki Exporters will be available from $240 for 25 users up to $3600 for unlimited users (which is more or less 30% of the cost of the matching Confluence license).

Scroll Wiki Forms for Confluence 4

The Scroll Wiki Forms are a new extension based on the new Confluence 4 editor for defining forms on pages. The intention of Scroll Wiki Forms is to keep the content on a page structured.

Confluence 4 will be released in the next 2-3 months. Soon after that we will release Scroll Wiki Forms.

Zen-Editor for Confluence 4

The Zen-Editor is an extension the new Rich-Text-Editor of Confluence 4. Built as a so-called Speakeasy extension, it hides all UI-components from the UI, except the editing area and by that lets the author really focus on what he/she is writing.

Today, the winners of the 2011 Codegeist contest were announced and we won the Best Overall Plugin category - hooray! Congrats to K15t's co-founder Tobias Anstett, who developed the plugin.

The Scroll Wiki EPUB Exporter leverages the Scroll Wiki infrastructure to export single pages or complete pages trees to the EPUB format and download it to your iPad, iPhone or any other EPUB capable format.

The Scroll Wiki EPUB Exporter is currently in beta and will be generally available later this year. If you want to try it out yourself now:

1. Download a beta from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange
2. Email epub@k15t.com to get a free 30-day trial license.

Wouldn't it be nice to take the content of your wiki offline on your iPad and read it on the plane? We have news for you...

For the Codegeist Contest by Atlassian, K15t's Tobias Anstett created a new Exporter for Confluence: The Scroll Wiki EPUB Exporter. EPUB is a standard for eBooks, and is used on iPad and iPhones. Just watch this:

If you like, it please don't forget to vote: http://codegeist.atlassian.com/entry/168739

Shortly after Atlassian announced a new license size for Confluence this week, we are also offering a 50 user license. 

That way we want to offer to our customers working with smaller teams to also be able to purchase a smaller instance from Scroll Office.

Even better, Scroll Office is already named user based, as a matter of facts, it is not linked to the Confluence license size, so big customers can also only buy a 50 users license whereas their Confluence license might be of 2000+ Users.

The pricing model is the same as before, the 50 users license costs 50% of the Confluence one. Leave a comment or visit our Forum.

We are proud to announce that Scroll Office for Confluence is out.

Scroll Office creates styled Microsoft Word documents directly from Confluence. It uses Microsoft Word files and their styling information as templates to output native Microsoft Word 2007 documents having the desired look.

This way, Scroll Office bridges the gap between content authoring in the wiki and styling in Microsoft Word: Use Confluence for collaboration and authoring and use Microsoft Word's capabilities for styling and printing professional documents.

Some facts:

• Define Microsoft Word styles for headings, paragraphs, etc.
• Create standard Microsoft Word elements such as title pages, table of contents, page headers/footers.
• Embed static text to appear in every exported document such as disclaimers or copyright notices.
• Include metadata from Confluence through placeholders.
• Support for many third party plugins such as Gliffy and Balsamiq.
• Runs on Confluence, Confluence Hosted and JIRA Studio.
• Named-user licensing.

For more information:

• Visit the Scroll Office website.
• Try it out on the public demo system (or request an access-restricted test space)
• Download Scroll Office from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange or directly install through the Confluence plugin manager.
• Sign-up for free 30-day evaluation licenses.

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)

Click here to download:

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/

We are proud to announce Scroll 1.2.

JavaHelp and EclipseHelp Exporters:

Scroll now includes JavaHelp and EclipseHelp exporter. Author the documentation for your Eclipse or Swing application and distrbute the documentation with you application.

Additional Macros Support

Better support for various macros, esp. table macros such as Adaptavist's {table} macro or the {table-plus} macro.

Configurable Fonts

For academic and commercial license holders (sorry, not for starter licenses) it is now possible to configure custom fonts, including fonts with special characters for Asian Cyrillic languages.

Other Noteworthy Changes

• Confluence 3.2 support
• More theme configuration options

Download and Free Evaluation Licenses

Download Scroll at http://www.k15t.com/scroll/download. Free Evaluation Licenses are available at http://www.k15t.com/scroll/download/evaluation/.