Monthly Archive for April, 2006

We recently (i.e. it was finished 5 minutes ago) had a group assignment at uni that required 4 of us to collaborate and write a 3000 6000 word paper together. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to dogfood and see how Confluence fared in normal usage.

After about two weeks of constant use, it hasn't done *too* badly. A couple of days ago, it decided to keel over and basically not respond to requests. I have a feeling the application server (Tomcat) was starved for RAM and on top of that was using the in-memory HSQL database. Moving to PostgreSQL seems to have alleviated that.

Some comments about using the software to collaborate with others:

• The good
  • Drafts come in very handy, and it's useful to know when someone else is editing the page.
  • We could format the document as we wanted and insert tables and images to get a feel for how the document would look in the end.
  • The page history and version comments were great for tracking what changes had been made.
• The bad
  • We really, really need to have some sort of "inline commenting" that can be added when viewing pages. It would be extremely useful when working with others. I can't count the number of times I had to edit the page and insert a big fat warning with the words "This sentence is crap.", when it would have made more sense to select the actual text and add a comment.
  • The WYSIWYG editor has a tendency to insert and remove newlines as it sees fit. I'm sure there's some sort of weird reasoning behind it, but it gets quite annoying to trawl through a page diff to see that 5 of the 6 changes are where whitespace has been moved around. Ick.
  • Merges can be a bit nasty. It's not always clear what has changed and who added what. Obviously the medium is a bit limiting (you can't exactly have a 3-pane merge window, ala IntelliJ IDEA), but it'd be nice to improve that.
  • I find the page history to be handy, but also quite cumbersome at times. What I'd really like to see is a way to compare a certain block of text (a paragraph) between arbitrary versions, as well as an "annotated view", like FishEye and IntelliJ IDEA.
  • The Word (HTML) export is handy for doing final formatting, but it ended up crashing Word on my Intel Mac and looking real funny in Word on Windows. We ended up copying the text from the page into Word and working from there. (In an ideal world, you could mount the Confluence instance with WebDAV, edit a rendered version of the page in Word and have it converted back to wiki markup.)