Thanks for the reply, I'll look into putting in an official issue request for it in [2] you shared but just to add on a bit...on our end we're really not developer oriented at all (I've put up a VisualSVN server quite a few years back and then put up a Gogs server about 3 years ago) and I'm pretty much the only person that uses it.
Our CS offerings are pretty minimal so even though I would love to see usage expanded there as well (teaching/using Git for instruction) the reality is it would be lucky if 50 students made use of Git during a given schoolyear since the offerings are that limited right now (and we don't generally get a lot of signups for those classes). It'd be awesome to expand our program and also create some sort of tie-in with Silicon Valley companies somehow (we're a community college in Southern California in a rural community so job opportunities for tech locally are really slim...so unless we built some sort of partnership for remote opportunities where people could stay local and have a good remote job people basically have to leave to other communities in different parts of the state to get work).
So going back to the staff side...I'm just trying to get our own IT staff onboard with using Git and hopefully start integrating more DevOps type things into our workflow, but it's difficult when you don't have the right tools available (or there's a pretty big cost to them). For example, I love the idea of us starting to create private containers but we need a container registry to do that and that's something GitLab could help us out with. The other main thing is the issue boards which I think we'd be able to make good use out of as well, but can't really test out those ideas at the present moment easily.
For Confluence, I don't have a ton of experience with it...the main thing is that at least one of the other community colleges that's a bit of a tech leader in the state is using it for their documentation stuff and the state's CCC Tech Center is using it too so that makes folks think it's the best solution to try out. To be honest right now though we're not doing a great job on documentation currently, even though we have a lot of other "low-hanging fruit" type options to be able to try out and just document things currently if we really wanted to do so (so what I'm saying here is that I don't think getting/implementing Confluence would actually solve our documentation issues here...but it would be nice if GitLab had a piece that you could point at as equivalent to Confluence that way people could be more comfortable with using it as a whole solution, rather than looking at that one capability as "missing" and discarding the entire solution because of it).
A response shared by the other college using it mentioned the following use cases that they used Confluence for:
- Team Project Sites District-wide (new and ongoing software implementations)
- “Bookshelf” Searchable district-wide software documentation library (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.)
- Technology “Knowledge Base” – district-wide searchable problem/resolution, FAQ
- District IT Policies and Documentation
- Development Team Private Documentation (Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.)
- Operations IT Team Private Documentation
- And more!
In terms of web application development, I'm the only staff member really doing that currently...pretty much all the rest of our "development" work consists of our analysts writing database queries, with the occasional database view/procedure being written, but that's the team that I'd like to have to start using version control a bit.
Our Ops side of the house still needs a lot of work to get into the "DevOps" mindset, and I've been limited in the stuff that I can try out and experiment with as well (e.g. I've wanted to experiment more with Docker, but since we're a Hyper-V shop primarily understanding Microsoft's support of Docker has taken some time...plus moving into production is another stage, etc. and I basically have to sort out those new approaches on my own).