Scroll Document Versions for Confluence

Make multiple document versions to track changes
View previous versions at any time
Easily compare differences in your versions
Get a quick overview on changes and their details

Inspiration

Have you ever had the need to refer to previous versions of your content, and track important changes over time?

During customer projects our teams create a lot of documents, such as concepts, specifications, and migration docs. All of these documents go through changes – from the first workshop with the customer, through internal iterations and deliverable milestones, to the final completion document. Because of this we've frequently had the need to track these document changes, and designate them as versions.

To solve this problem we developed Scroll Document Versions.

What it does

Scroll Document Versions introduces document versioning and change tracking to Confluence Cloud – making it easy to designate, review, and compare versions of page content and page tree structure throughout the stages of a document's life.

Make multiple document versions to track change - Manage content delivery milestones, stay on top of changes, and ensure nothing gets lost when pages are moved or deleted by creating versions of content complete with page tree structure and change comments.

View previous versions at any time - Get instant access to previous versions, providing a full view of what's changed in your content, at all times. Easily reference, copy from, and export previous iterations of documents.

Easily compare differences in your versions - Choose older versions of pages and their tree structure and compare them to one another. This delivers a clear picture of the differences, effectively turning your content into trackable documents.

How we built it

At Atlassian Connect Week we developed an early prototype of the product. However, while trying to finalize it we found blockers we just couldn't accept. Thus we had to switch the entire approach to how versions of a document are created.

The project ended up twofold – on the one hand we built the Scroll Document Versions add-on, and on the other hand we ended up creating a general process and infrastructure stack for the development of our Cloud add-ons.

Scroll Document Versions' frontend is based on REACT (also using the new AtlasKit components). We tried to run most of the code client side in the context of a user. For bigger tasks such as creating a version we used AWS Step Function to coordinate a lot of AWS Lambda functions. Furthermore the deployment is completely automated with Bitbucket Pipelines.

Of course we learned a lot. But more importantly, we grew and succeeded together as a team – and now we're full of new ideas to work on. :-)

What's next for Scroll Document Versions for Confluence

We would love to see this product adopted by customers in order to get some feedback. Although we already have some additional features in mind, we want to listen to users first to identify their needs, and invest time where we can help them most. And as not all of you are using Confluence in the Cloud, we also have plans to work on a server version in the near term.