Case Study: Technical specifications publishing

Our client, one of the leading providers of consumer and business mobile products with a long history of innovation and technology leadership, wanted to implement a streamlined mechanism to allow them to publish technical documentation to their developer community, and at the same time, maintaining the editorial quality and confidential information secured.

The engineering department had been using Confluence extensively for their architecture, development and technical specifications documentation. A subset of those documents is meant to be available to their public development community. Before being published, the documents required a number of approvals, some of which had to occur in a staging instance.

Our client adopted the Ad hoc Workflows Plugin as the tool for managing the approvals, and sponsored the required enhancements for remote publishing.

Three Collaboration environments

In order to ensure the quality and intellectual property confidentiality, our client required three Confluence instances: the Engineering instance, where the content is produced, the Staging instance where the content is reviewed for editorial and contextual quality, and their public development community wiki.

Editorial Review

Before a specification is published, several levels of reviews are required, by the Author, Subject Matter Expert (which is to be selected depending of the area) the Engineering Editor and the Editor in Chief.

The workflows

The main workflow in the Engineering instance is associated to a label, so users can enable it by just adding a label. When the document is ready for review, the Author selects which of the Subject Matter Experts is to review the document, selecting from a list provided by the plugin.

The Subject Matter Expert receives an email notification indicating that the document is ready for review. When he/she approves the document it is handed then to the Engineering Editor, when he/she approves, then the document is published to the Staging instance.

The Editor in Chief would then review the document, and if he rejects it, the rejection is communicated to the Engineering instance and the Subject Matter Expert and Author receive an email notification.

When the document is approved by the Editor in Chief, it is published to the Public instance.

Remote publishing

The Remote Publishing Plugin was created as an extension to allow publishing content to remote instances using the Confluence remote interface. A sample remote publishing workflow is available through the Workflows Exchange