Using Confluence Office Connector in Mac / Firefox
A lot of you have been using Confluence from Atlassian, which is a great tool for content collaboration. In order to get users involved in the process of collaboration, the system has to be made simple enough to use. Cumbersome software drives normal people away.
One key point is the ease of editing wiki pages. Few of us can remember all the wiki markup tags correctly. Atlassian has addressed this problem by introducing the office connector. With the help from this connector, you could use your native Office editor to edit wiki pages. To make things even better, Confluence provides Office connector support on multiple OSes, including Windows, Linux, and Mac, which talks to Microsoft Office, Open Office, and/or NeoOffice.
Sounds exciting? Yes, except the default WebDav Launcher plug-in from Confluence does not work under Firefox 3.5 (I am using 3.5.7 as of this writing). Luckily, there is a fix for it. You can download the latest Firefox add-on from here.
Another issue for Mac users. Apparently only NeoOffice is support in Mac OS X. Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 does not work. I tried to change the doc handler to Office for Mac in the WebDav Launcher, but Word always open an empty page. Could this mean WEBDAV is not directly supported in Office for Mac?
Hi ZD,
I work at Atlassian and I’m the creator of the Office Connector. I wanted to say thanks for the feedback. Sorry to hear that you had trouble with the webdav plugin for FF 3.5. I’ll look into it. Which version of Confluence are you running?
Regarding Mac support, it is surprisingly hard. Office 2008 does not support WebDAV but the Mac OS X operating system allows you to mount a webdav repository as a disk. However, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The Mac support is something I’ve worked hard on as part of my 20% time (we get 20% of our work time at Atlassian to spend on our own projects). I’ve had some success but it’s not ready for prime time.
-Ryan
hello ryan,
my company is really looking forward to get a real osx implementation. we do have win, linux and mac running and we may consider working with confluence in the future.
thanks for your efford!
-andy