Using Confluence Office Connector in Mac / Firefox

zd — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:08:43 +0000

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?

ZD's random thoughts » Office for Mac

Using Confluence Office Connector in Mac / Firefox