Can you set by OpenNLP <START:01-06>19-88<END>S. Poortman on top pleas

When having Jira, Confluence and Bitucket server installations on isolated environment (eg behind firewall) the help links are failing. XML packets and ability to point to that documentation instead of docs.atlassian.com would improve usability.

A PDF will not be an option in this case.

As it has been several years since we stopped providing XML exports of our Confluence documentation, and knowing that we have no plans to start providing these exports in future, I'm resolving this issue.

Hi @rachel.robins,                (btw, why does @mention) not work in your JIRA instance?)

You have just changed the status of this ticket to "Resolved" and "Done".

This would imply that XML documentation will now be available again.

Is this what you are communicating with closing this ticket,

or did you just do a house-keeping cleanup for not ever considering this common request to proceed providing documentation in XML format?

If it is the latter, JIRA has the resolution of "Will not fix".  This would make the situation much clearer than "Done".

I also like to ask to continue the XML version of the documentation to be installed in a local Confluence installation, as we see a number of slow page loads, especially from Asia and Japan, may it be due to network issues and/or geographic distance.
Having a local documentation on our own servers there will help a lot to increase user acceptance in those regions.

Please rethink your plans and try to at least provide the "normal" User's Guide as documentation in XML format for loading it into a space on our Confluence instance.

Thank you and Best Regards,

Andreas Genth

Well, this is getting annoying...

Hi Rachel,

Any more info on this subject? We are running the XML help for Confluence v5.4 and we are just about to deploy 5.7, the help contents just doesn't link up with what our users are seeing on screen.

Thanks
Scott

Hi jiracn, we have no plans to stop providing the PDF documentation

In China, the network connect to internet of oversea is very slow and unstable. so the pdf documentation is must be provided.

Thanks

Henry

Also agree on the comments. Still have privately managed networks that would use the XML documentation sets for help reference. Thanks! Tyson

Hi Rachel,
+1 for Hans-Peters comment "I like to ask you to continue providing..." and confluence.atlassian.com is not available within a few private networks.
Regards
Andreas

I've never used the XML exports.

However I do like atlassian250's idea of using it to, "look behind the scenes". I do this quite often with code from various vendors/sources and it is of great help.

In a perfect world, every possible option would be well documented. But we all know that is rarely the case.

Adding a customer comment (June 2014) from:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Stash+Documentation+Directory?focusedCommentId=604275606#comment-604275606

"What are Atlassian's plans for downloadable PDF files for products in the future? I work in a large organization with multiple large installations of JIRA, JIRA Agile, Crucible, Fisheye, Stash, and Confluence, and none of our networks are connected to the Internet, so we must have the PDF versions."

Adding a customer comment (July 2013), from:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Stash+Documentation+Directory?focusedCommentId=389284026#comment-389284026

"We utilize them on our firewalled confluence instance (with no internet access). Currently running version 5.1.4 of Confluence and 2.6 of Stash. Basically we regularly import all of the current version of documentation into our confluence instance as we upgrade each tool that we use (jira/confluence/stash/bamboo etc).

Our developers find it easier to have the documentation available internally rather than have to go out to an internet source. This saves them a significant amount of time by allowing a tighter integration."

Hi Rachel,

thx for providing another xml download for 5.5. As the online documentation at Atlassian is not always available or slow, this is the only way to provide a fast and reliable access to the docs for our users. This also allows us to translate certain important pages for our users inside the same space.

Kind regards,

Jan-Peter

Thanks for all your comments and feedback. I have created an export of the Confluence 5.5 docs to tide you over while I see if i can come up with a solution that will be workable.

http://downloads.atlassian.com/software/confluence/downloads/documentation/Confluence_5-5-0_CompleteDocumentation_XML_Confluence-space-export-231403-30.xml.zip

Russell, some other products have already stopped providing XML exports (Bamboo and newer products like JIRA Service Desk and Confluence Questions have never provided XML exports).

In our case, we're not as bothered about the Administration help links, we just want our users to be able to click on their help links for user tasks.

Administration documentation links working would be nice but not essential for us.

Also, will it be the same story for Jira/Fisheye/Crucible? We use all of those products too with locally hosted documentation in our Confluence.

Hi Rachel, thanks for coming back to me.

As our users are very new to the application they are looking for as much help/ guidance as possible. This could include basic setup through to complex macros, JIRA Reports help and Requirements Blueprint assistance. A Users and Administration guide would be the perfect solution for our need.

Could this be an area that could be considered for continuation?

Hi Scott and Russell, Thanks for your feedback. Can you tell me the type of content your users would mostly be looking for in help? Is it mostly confined to the Confluence User guide (help using more complex macros and that sort of thing?)

We would also like continued support for XML downloads.

We have the same problem as Scott, our instance is totally air-gapped from the internet and therefore users cannot easily access help docs when they are doing things in Confluence.

Unless you can provide another solution to the problem which allows users to click on the help links and get useful output?

Good Morning,

I would like to ask you to continue providing the full XML downloadable format of the User Guide going forward, the main is reaosn is we have a total air gap solution for our Confluence, when going to the 'Online Help' we get the 'Server not found' error message because of the air gap.
We have only recently taken on an installation of Confluence and because of the ease of importing the XML to it's own space would hope it would continue. Having to download PDF files and store these seems a little archaeic after having XML downloads.

Also because of the air gap the 'online help' link will never work if we can't host the XML locally.

As Hans-Peter has said above, as a bargain, the three areas of content outlined are what we would be most interested in.

Regards
Scott

I like to ask you to continue providing the documentation in XML format for loading it into a space on our (customer's) confluence instance.
The reason is because accessing the Atlassian documentation web server is sometimes VERY slow, may it due to

• network issues
• geographic distance
• temporary CPU overload of the Atlassian Server
• technical issues on the Atlassian Server (usually displays messages like "This web server experiences issues currently, try later".)
• maintenance / planned downtime of the Atlassian Server, etc

When the user presses the ? or Help key or clicks any link which goes into the DOC space, it should respond quickly with the required page, and not end up in a long wait or even an access error.

Another use which I typically take out of storing the DOC space locally is to create our customized "what's new" page, e.g. summarizing all changes between Confluence 4.7 to 5. 4 (our upcoming migration). "What's New" for 5.4 is not helpful for us, because I need to communicate all changes of 5.x (excluding those which we do not implement). Having the text and screenshot in the local database makes it easier to create our own communication page.

Having a local help space makes us independent of your web server load and network issues, so I would prefer to be able to set up a local atlassian documentation in the future. Please rethink your plans!

Here's a bargain:
To allow you to reduce your effort to some degree, I'm mainly interested in this content:

• User's Guide
• Administrator's Guide
• Release Notes

If you could at least provide these 2 page trees, this would be acceptable to me.

Regards,
Hans-Peter

Hi atlassian249, Thanks for your feedback. Looking 'behind the scenes' is not a use case I had considered, and there may well be better ways we can share this information with you in future. In the meantime there is a lot of information in our docs about how we do some things : https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF53/Developing+Technical+Documentation+on+Confluence+Wiki

In terms of providing a 'light' version of the exported docs, would you be looking for specific content (for example basic user guide content), or more just a sandbox export you can play and experiment with?

Dear Atlassian Team,

I understand the reasoning behind this decision. There are two reasons why we have copied the documentation locally:

• Faster access
• "Looking behind the scenes".

We use confluence also for creating our own technical documentation. To this end, it is great to have access to the page sources in order to check, how you (as experts) solved certain things. This works of course also for the online version. On top, we also "peeked" e. g. at your space style sheet - especially the additions for PDF export - which turns out to be very valuable. You did a great job in customizing these.
If you remove the full dump, it would be at least handy to have some minimal version of the documentation space as something like a styling template for technical documentation.

Best regards