Baselining Confluence content
Asked by Francis:

Hi,

Is it possible to baseline content in Confluence? My company uses the Agile methodology for software development and my writers follow Agile for documentation as well. Our products and documentation are updated and released every 2 weeks. The product version number does not increment with each such sprint. Instead, we apply a new release label (for example, R130301 for the first release of a product in Mar 2013). Version numbers are incremented only once a year or so (say, from 2.0 to 2.1).

In this scenario, we'd like to be able to apply a baseline for each release label, instead of creating a new space for each release label?

Does Confluence support such baselining?

Thank you,

Francis


Answers:
author: Ege Su ?nan
body: Hi @Francis

As OBSS , we developed a solution for " Baseline ". You can create baselines of your documents based on a date and time. The created baseline set allows you to easily access document versions of that time.

Here is the link to download [Baseline for Confluence](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/tr.com.obss.plugin.confluence-baseline-plugin). You can also read the documentation of the product.

Thank you for your interest!


author: JamieA
body: \> Does Confluence support such baselining?

Not very well, natively anyway.

Take a look at <https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.k15t.scroll.scroll-versions> and <https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=179440960>

comments: author: Francis
body: Hi Jamie,

I guess what I am looking for is versioning at two levels:

1. The versioning capability that was demonstrated in the demonstration video of Scroll Version (incrementing from v 1.0 to 1.1 and 1.2 and so on).   
2. A CVS-style "tagging" capability. This, to my mind, is true baselining. Consider a space that had 20 pages for a release in Jan 2013. In Feb, I updated 2 of those pages and added 3 more. However, the remaining 18 pages from Jan were unchanged in March. Come release time in Feb, I want to be able to tag/baseline all 23 pages (in their varying states) as the deliverable for Feb. And so on and so forth for March, April, and so on.

Concomitant to the idea of baselining is the ability to go back to a previous baseline. For example, in Apr, I should be able to check what the contents of the Feb deliverables looked like. Is that possible? If this feature is available, it will save us the trouble of creating a new space for each 2-week sprint. We would like to create new spaces only for changed in product versions and not intermediate sprints that lead up to a new product version.

I've tried to be detailed as possible about my use case. Please let me know if I've managed to muddle the scenario in the process :/

Thanks,   
Francis


author: JamieA
body: Hi Francis,

I would very much like to be able to browse a confluence space at "a point in time", where such a point could be represented like a release tag. This would make product docn much easier to deal with.... unfortunately it's not possible

\> For example, in Apr, I should be able to check what the contents of the Feb deliverables looked like. Is that possible?

It's painful, you need to do it on a page by page basis, or write that yourself using a plugin. Confluence is not great in this respect.

\> I've tried to be detailed as possible about my use case. Please let me know if I've managed to muddle the scenario in the process :/

Not at all, it's just not really my forte, although I understand your requirements, I think have the same ones. The tech docn writers on Atlassian would be a good resource if you can get hold of them. Although I've played with the scroll versions plugin I'm not that familar to it, so I'll have to let other people chime in.

cheers, jamie

<br />


author: SarahA
body: Hallo Jamie and Francis

I'm one of the Atlassian technical writers. :) Jamie is correct: Confluence does not support baselining natively. The version control is strictly at a page level. We've devised procedures to use spaces for managing major versions, as you've already noted.

The Scroll Versions plugin is the best solution, as far as I know. It does allow you to see the documentation set as it was for a given version. You can even re-publish that version at any time, either to the current space or to a new space. I think that this would solve your baselining requirements.

I hope this helps!

Cheers, Sarah


author: hamlinmark1
body: Very disappointed to find none of these solutions available for cloud version. Not to mention additional cost of all these plugins.

We've got an immense amount of value out of confluence, but baselining, private Bitbucket repo integration, and many other basic features all missing. Has me feeling i'm growing out of this product.

The space solution sounds messy but i will look again.


Tags: baseline