Using Confluence for professional documentation

Confluence is a great medium to create and maintain documentation and keep documentation alive. It has several advantages over e.g. MS-Word.
Many organisations and companies have to comply with legal requirements or requirements of regulatory authorities regarding documentation standards. The current Confluence release does not meet all of these demands. It would be a great advantage to use Confluence (the enterprise wiki ) for the complete documentation process and not having to fall back to e.g. MS-Word for completing the documentation process. This should be achieved without destroying the purpose and idea of a wiki . There have been many postings and discussions regarding this issue (see below), maybe they can be consolidated in this posting?

What are the formal requirements for a documentation?

(In the following a version of a documentation is referenced as an artefact.)

• An artefact needs to be consistent and closed
  This means, once an artefact is closed, any (even minor) change in the artefact results in a new version of the artefact, which has to be checked for consistency again. Maybe the comment-function can be improved to achieve this requirement.
• Each artefact has to be approved
  Each documentational artefact has to be signed, approved or marked as ready by the author, auditors or any other person in charge.

• Each approved artefact must be accessible and available to be referenced
• Each approved artefact must be archivable
  Many legal requirements demand documentation to be archived for many years. This also requires the archiving of the information who has signed, approved etc. which version of the artefact.

• Each version must be printable
  Often archiving the electronical version of a artefact is not sufficient, the printed version has to be archived as well.

How can all these requirements be implemented in Confluence?

Confluence as a wiki already has many basics implemented which are needed:

• Versioning of content
• Usermanagement

My ideas to implement the requirements mentioned:

• Add function to tag page version (like tagging in CVS).
  This would allow to create a documentation baseline/snapshot by tagging all relevant page versions. Once a version of a page is tagged it can be updated  to create a new artefact.

• Add multi pages tagging function.
  The tagging should be done similar to the "Export Space" function by selecting the pages to be tagged. May the labelling function can be improved to label page version.
• Add function to approve or reject current version of page by login user.
  There is no formal approval mechanism required, only save approval or rejection information.
• Show all users who approved/rejected a page version in page info tab (recent changes or page history)
• Add function to export documentation baseline by tag to standard export formats (html, pdf, word). The exported artefact could be archived to meet any legal demands.

• Show version and tag in page.
• Add function to view and reference to tagged page version without restoring version.
• Improve search by option to search in historical versions

Discussion in Confluence and JIRA

Some gardening has been performed on these issues. To better track the importance of this issue, i've tried to break it up into distinct parts each with a single issue. There were duplicate issues created all with a fair number of votes. By combining them we can better manage their priority. Approval Contains requests about the requested page approval process Tagging Contains requests about the tagging of pages and/or spaces Historical Contains requests about working with the historical versions of pages and spaces Other Contains other similar issues that don't fall into the above categories.

There have been some discussions and issues regarding this issue:

To avoid any misunderstandings, I don't judge the quality of any kind of documentation which does not meet these requirements. Meeting these requirements doesn't influence the quality of documentation.