On our wiki I’m trying to avoid using it as a document repository (Sharepoint) and have encouraged people to convert Word documents to a page versus simply attaching a document.

Confluence makes this relatively easy!  Hit the Tools menu and click “Doc Import”.

Doc Import

You will be presented with a simple upload field.

Upload

After browsing and selecting your document you can select the “Advanced” button which allows you to fine tune your import:

Import Options

And finally your imported document!

Imported Document

I have found importing simple docs works fairly well.  The more formatting and Word specific features (tables, etc) present the less reliable the import will be but it will still give you a head start on getting the content into Confluence.

Got one of those co-workers who just HAS to kill a tree?

Confluence can help!

OK. So Atlassian probably didn’t create this feature to kill trees – imagine  during development you can enter all your documentation in Confluence then easily dump it all out and provide it to your customer at the end! You can easily export an entire space in various formats.

Lets take a look at how easy this is to do in Confluence…

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Another quick Confluence tip.  I’m often adding pages to the wiki and want to let my team now about them so I send out a URL in email.  Often this can be very long depending on the name of the page.

Instead of using a third party URL shortening tool like Snurl or TinyURL you can get a short link from Confluence!

First click Tools then Info from the drop down:

Click Tools > Info

You will get a page with all sorts of info on your page – including a “Tiny Link”:

Short Link

You can easily cut-n-paste this into emails!

In addition to JIRA (which is our bug tracking system) I’ve been working on getting Confluence (wiki) setup as part of our knowledge management system.  We have Sharepoint but I find that a real pain to use for anything other than document storage.

As I get things setup I thought I’d post on some features of Confluence you may not be aware of – today I’ll cover how to get Confluence to send you a daily email with what has been updated.  Very nice when you are trying to grow your wiki!

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I recently overhauled my wiki – switching from Mediawiki back to Dokuwiki.  Lots of reasons for the switch but one of the big benefits is there is now a RSS feed for recent changes!

You can add this link to your feedreader and easily find out when I update something.

I’m regularly adding links that either I find, or people email me so if you are interested in Ant this is an easy way to keep up to date.

OK. The wiki may be a bit wacky for the next few days. Awhile ago I switched from Dokuwiki to Mediawiki. Mainly just to try out Mediawiki and get familiar with how it worked.

It is very powerful – but it’s a bit of a pain to update, and extensions seem a bit hit or miss. So it’s back to Dokuwiki for me! I’ve been meaning to do some housecleaning on the wiki anyway so it’s a good time to do that as well. HOPEFULLY the links won’t change but I’m not 100% sure of that yet.

I get a lot of good feedback on the Ant wiki page and also have a few more things planned to make it easier to get Ant up and running for application development. Stay tuned!

Tonight I spent a bit of time reorganizing the Ant page on my wiki. Previously I had things broken down by author but it wasn’t very easy to find things. I’ve now changed things around and organized everything by categories and hopefully it’ll be easier to navigate.

If you know of any good Ant resources I’m missing contact me or simply add them to the Ant ‘discussion’ page.

Enjoy!