Scroll Versions and Scroll Documents Compared
In this article, we'll discuss how Scroll Versions and Scroll Documents differ, what they have in common and what feature differences you can expect when converting from one to the other.
Why Convert to Scroll Documents?
With Atlassian’s upcoming end of life for Server products, many Confluence users are thinking about migrating to Cloud or Data Center.
Just like Atlassian, we're placing our focus and future development efforts on Cloud. For this reason, we've marked Scroll Versions and Scroll Translations as legacy apps and don’t intend to bring these specific apps to Cloud. Our primary efforts now and into the future will go into Scroll Documents, our Cloud-first app for advanced content management in Confluence. Since its launch in 2019, we've worked hard to make it the more powerful and more user-friendly alternative to our legacy apps.
If you're planning to migrate to Cloud, you will have to convert to Scroll Documents. If you're moving to Data Center, we also highly recommend a move to Scroll Documents. With this app being the focus of our development and updates, your team will be able to benefit from these changes and improvements.
Why Compare the Apps?
It's essential to understand how these apps differ and what features they share, as they are not entirely the same. Scroll Documents is not a Cloud version of Scroll Versions. It's a whole new versioning app that was built to work specifically with Confluence Cloud.
It’s important to learn about these differences before you decide to use Scroll Documents so you can make the right choice that fits your team’s needs.
Feature Comparison
Below, we've laid out a side-by-side comparison of features between Scroll Versions and Scroll Documents:
The current information reflects the feature state as of .
The feature comparison below is updated regularly as we continue to develop Scroll Documents.
Feature | Description | Scroll Versions | Scroll Documents | Details |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Versioning | Create and manage different versions of your documentation in Confluence. | Available | Available | Both apps provide functionality to create and manage versions of your documentation, there are some fundamental differences between them. To learn more about this read: Manage Versions |
Variants and Conditional Content | Create and manage different variants of your documentation. | Available | Available | Both apps provide functionality to create and manage different variants of your documentation, but there are some differences between them. To learn more about this read: Manage Variants and Conditional Content |
Publish in Confluence | Publish the documentation from your authoring space to another space. | Available | Pending ⏳ | Scroll Versions supports three different mechanisms to publish content within Confluence: Publish to a new space, Publish to an existing space, and Publish within the same space. Scroll Documents does not yet support all these mechanisms. To follow the progress we recommend watching this Jira issue: To learn more about this read: Publish Versions and Variants |
Publish to the Web | Publish your documentation and its versions to a publicly available Help Center using Scroll Viewport | Available | Available | Both apps integrate with Scroll Viewport on Data Center and Cloud. To learn more about this read: Publish Versions and Variants |
Publish to a Document | Publish your documentation and its versions into different file formats with Scroll Exporters. | Available | Available | Both apps integrate with our Scroll Exporters on Data Center and Cloud. To learn more about this read: Publish Versions and Variants |
Publish to a different Confluence Instance (Remote Publishing) | Publish your content to a different Confluence instance. | Available | Unavailable | We are not planning to implement this functionality in Scroll Documents. On Cloud you can use Scroll Viewport to publish your documents to a publicly available site without giving your readers access to your Confluence instance. On Data Center you can export with our Scroll HTML Exporter and upload the export to a separate server. |
Content Reuse | Reuse content within and between versioned spaces. | Available | Partially available | While reusing content within the same space is possible in Scroll Documents, with Scroll Versions you can set up an Include Library to reuse versioned content from one space to another. These Include Libraries are supported by the conversion tool, but the reuse will work differently in Scroll Documents. Learn more about how this works: Reuse Versions |
Workflows | Manage your versioned content with an inbuilt basic workflow. | Partially available | Unavailable | Scroll Versions has an inbuilt workflow which can be used on versioned pages. These workflow statuses will not be converted over to Scroll Documents as the app does not yet have its own workflow. However, there are other ways you can manage an author and review process with Scroll Documents. To follow progress, we recommend watching this Jira issue:
To learn more about this, read: Compare, Track, and Review Versions and Variants |
Duplicate Page Titles | Manage duplicate page titles within the authoring space. | Available | Partially available | Both apps support duplicate page titles within the same space to some extent. With Scroll Documents, you cannot have the same page title twice in one version within Confluence. However, if you use Scroll Viewport or the Scroll Exporters to publish your content, this is possible. To learn more, read: |
Page Keys & Context Sensitive Help | Assign Page Keys to specific pages that can be used to link to that page. | Available | Available | Page Keys have been renamed to Context Keys and are available in Scroll Documents and Scroll Viewport for Cloud. To learn more about this, we recommend reading: Assign Context Keys |
Scroll Roles | Apply additional permission control for specific features in Scroll Versions. | Available | Partially available | In Scroll Documents, you can manage your author and review workflow by utilizing space and document restrictions. For more information, see: Compare, Track, and Review Versions and Variants |
Scroll Search | Filter for specific versions, or variants in advanced search within Confluence. | Available | Partially available | The Scroll Search feature is not available in Scroll Documents. Instead, you can search for specific pages in Confluence using the version and/or language prefixes in your search query to locate a page in a specific version and language. |
Java API | Integrate Confluence other Server apps with Scroll Versions. | Available | Partially available (Data Center only) | - |
REST API (unofficial) | Use REST resources for process automation. | Available | Pending ⏳
| Scroll Documents does not yet have any APIs available for public use. |
Next Steps
Dive into the following articles to learn more about what you need to know when converting from Scroll Versions to Scroll Documents: