d2r: a couple of great tools

a couple of great tools

At Ning we use JIRA as our bug-tracking system (when we started a couple of years back we were originally on Bugzilla, but we switched to JIRA fairly quickly), and it's really a great tool, part of our development and release process really (I'll talk more about that in another post).

For intranet doc-keeping we have mostly been using Confluence (also from Atlassian) and it's good enough, but about a month ago I discovered Clearspace from Jive Software (the guys that wrote Wildfire, now Openfire) and we've been evaluating it since, well, really using it. It's a fantastic product, seamlessly integrating discussion boards with a wiki, simple ways to turning a discussion into a wiki doc, group and individual internal blogs, etc. Also, it has some nice features like searching inside PDFs that you uploaded.

Confluence is a bit more wonky than Clearspace, but it still does the job if all you need is a Wiki. However, for the combination of blogs, forum, and wiki docs, Clearspace wins hands down (except in one point: Wiki syntax in Confluence is better).

Regardless, depending on your needs, all great tools. Highly recommended!

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on April 17 2007 at 1:41 PM | TrackBack (0)

Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).

I know Confluence's syntax is based on Textile (I use that for marking up the posts on my blog).

It's nice, but can become pretty intrusive at times (the actual text gets harder to read). I like Markdown which is designed with readability in mind, but that means it doesn't let you markup images/tables etc (IIRC). What system does Clearspace use (or does it use custom syntax)?

I like the look of Clearspace, the design is lovely and recessive. Confluence seems a bit to heavy and clunky at times.

Posted by: Paul at April 17, 2007 4:24 PM

Glad to hear you like Clearspace. ;) We use a combination of wiki syntax we've found out there. If it's based on Textile then it's more of a coincidence. :) There seems to be a set of "standard" syntaxes out there so we tried to adhere to that.

We're looking to improve our support for syntax -- we'll have much more available in future versions, as well as plugin support for macros, etc.

Cheers,
--Bill

Posted by: Bill at April 17, 2007 5:37 PM

Thanks for the mentions! Hopefully we can work out some of the wonkyness from Confluence in the next few releases (also known as the "get rid of wonky" releases). :)

Posted by: Jon Silvers at April 20, 2007 5:04 PM

BTW, and this probably goes without saying, but feel free to drop us an email about the problems your group has encountered, or fill out a support request. I presume I understand the wonky issues, but maybe you've found a bug, too, that needs to be brought to someone's attention.

Posted by: Jon Silvers at April 21, 2007 7:24 AM