What is Web Accessibility?

Web accessibility accounts for many variations in the abilities of users accessing websites. Not everyone has the same needs and following web accessibility principles means designing your site to have a reasonably similar and successful experience for users with all types of abilities.

There are all sorts of hurdles for people with disabilities that those without disabilities wouldn’t even consider, but accessing websites should not be one of them. Designing inclusive websites with disabilities in mind is at the core of good web design because it means your business cares about its users since you avoid excluding certain groups. Disabilities or limited abilities can even be temporary, affecting anyone.

For example, web accessibility includes accessing the site without using a mouse or touchpad – keyboard only. It might include the use of a screen reader for the visually impaired. Web accessibility helps users overcome limitations when navigating websites and includes both the design and underlying structure of your site so it works well with assistive technologies.

AI prompt templates 

An AI prompt template is a fully customizable prompt that helps technical writers produce an outcome. It contains a clear set of instructions and has a lot of context in detail. It also has configured input data and output formats. The benefits of AI prompt templates include 

• Time savings – Instead of constructing a new prompt every time, you can use these vetted and pre-defined templates to accomplish your goals quickly. This leads to productivity gains
• Reusability – AI templates can be reused multiple times by technical writers who span across multiple teams inside your organization
• Consistency – AI prompt templates provide consistency in how outputs are being generated 

What is an employee intranet?

An employee intranet is a private, secure digital network accessible only to a company’s employees. It is a centralized space where employees can access company information, share documents, collaborate on projects, communicate with colleagues, and stay informed on internal news and updates. Having an employee intranet helps improve communication, streamline procedures, and create a sense of community within an organization. Employee intranets can be customized to suit a company’s specific requirements.

What is product knowledge?

Imagine stepping into a store where you want to purchase computer hardware but have questions about the available product. Unfortunately, the sales rep doesn’t have an answer to any of your queries, and it’s possible you know more about computer hardware than they do. How would you feel about such an interaction?
The blatant display of poor knowledge about the products in that store would be customer experience. Now imagine that the reverse was the case and the sales rep answers all your questions convincingly enough to help you make the best decision for that moment.

This comprehensive response about the product in real-time and with much confidence discussing it in detail shows that they genuinely care about customer satisfaction. This is what product knowledge entails. Product knowledge is all about understanding everything there is to know about a product, from use cases to benefits and features. Every member of a sales team should have this. Anyone who needs to interact with investors or customers should have this skill. It can determine how much profit the business makes.

Types of Product Knowledge

Product knowledge encompasses different types, and here’s a look at them.

Price/ROI

Sales team members should understand the cost implications of their products and the return on investment (ROI) for customers. Customers will want to know if buying a product will be worth it, as the amount of value derived from the product will help justify the amount spent on it. Customers are often looking for products or solutions that provide a positive ROI. By discussing the cost and potential ROI, the salesperson shows that they understand the customer’s objectives and can help them achieve a favorable outcome..”

Customization

The power of a sales rep is in how much they can sell successfully. A successful sale hinges on how well you can make customers understand how well the product fits their vision and expectations. Research findings (McKinsey) indicate that embracing personalization frequently leads to a 10% to 15% revenue boost. The actual increase in revenue varies from one company to another, typically ranging from 5% to 25%, and this variance depends on factors such as the industry and the company’s proficiency in leveraging data to enhance customer understanding and closeness.
A customer-centric approach means the sales rep is trained on how products are customized for certain customer situations. Therefore, no matter what product you’re selling, you should understand how it can work for a diverse category of customers, whether individuals or businesses.

How to use it

If the sales rep needs help understanding how to use a product or how it works, how can they convey this information successfully to customers? Therefore, sales teams should be armed with ample information, including examples and case studies, on the step-by-step use of products. A sales rep for a car company should have information on the level of car sales within a specific region and the typical longevity of the cars before there’s a need for replacement.

Features

You need to understand the features of a product or service to discuss it convincingly or answer any questions from potential customers. That’s pretty much just you shooting in the dark. Every sales rep should be able to answer basic questions about their products.

If you’re a sales rep for a company that owns a booking app, you should have answers to questions like, “Can I incorporate live video interviews into the booking app?” or “Does your booking app offer reporting and analytics?” If you don’t have the answers to these basic technical questions, there’s a high chance you won’t be closing that sale.

Finding questions or support

Sales reps should help guide customers toward getting the correct answers to their questions. This also includes providing support when they need assistance or clarification on issues. Therefore, this type of product knowledge for the sales team aims to find answers to questions and provide all-round support to prospective and long-term customers.

Product road mapping

How well is the sales rep keyed into the lifecycle of the products? Sales reps need to be fully aware of the product’s evolution over the next few months or even as long as a year. Therefore, your sales team should know if you have a new product on the way and then mention this to customers to keep them as engaged as possible.

Also Read: Knowledge mapping within Knowledge management

Challenges using a headless CMS like Contentful to manage a KB

Though Contentful offers extensive content management capabilities, when it comes to managing a knowledge base, it also brings a lot of practical challenges.

Contentful is not built to focus on knowledge base management, providing a first-in-class experience; rather it focuses on the content and depends on various other services to represent the content.

Software like Document360 is purpose-built for knowledge base management and complements your content management team to manage your content effectively. The following factors may help you understand why you should consider Document360 compared to a headless CMS like Contentful.

Getting started is not easy

Contentful is a complex platform that serves a lot of content management purposes. Once you subscribe to a Contentful account, you land inside a portal that demands a lot of learning and understanding of the platform’s concepts like spaces and organizations, content models, etc. You may consider exploring such platform concepts if your organization has complex content management requirements. If you must help your content management team focus on knowledge base management, then these are overheads.

Document360, a Software-as-a-Service provides a first-in-class experience in knowledge base management. It focuses on Knowledge-based concepts and allows your team to get accustomed to the tool in no time.

Setting up to manage the KB is tedious

Getting started with Contentful to build a knowledge base is not easy. You must configure a lot of items before you even get to try authoring an article.

Knowledge base app

As Contentful is a headless CMS, it does not have a proper portal to manage the knowledge base, out of the box. You must install a knowledge base app that is still in the early-access program of Contentful. Installing this app will heavily configure the Contentful account space in which it is installed. It will create new content types, new entries, and new assets, all of which are necessary for getting started.

Netlify account

Through the knowledge base app, Contentful will just help you to get started with content authoring. For you to host the content, you must have an account with Netlify for custom previews and deployments. Netlify is the only option to choose to host your site.

You must manage all your site hosting to publish your content through Netlify.

GitHub account and Gatsby website structure

Contentful does not provide a publishing structure for your knowledge base. It uses a standard Gatsby website structure in GitHub to deploy your content. For this purpose, you must manage and customize a cloned repository to suit your requirements.

Once you set up accounts on all these platforms, there are a lot of steps to configure and integrate them like 

1. • Setting up API keys to establish a connection between Contentful and Netlify to allow content transfer and deployment.
   • Connect your GitHub account to deploy your website.
   • Configure content preview and manual deployments.

The setup is not just a one-time activity; it may need constant changing, auditing, and management. Your content team may find all these overwhelming.

Document360, on the other hand, is extremely simple to get started. As you sign up, you land your first article to be authored, and in less than a minute, you can see your article published and accessible to your end readers. Document360 covers all the requirements to structure your content, hosting, and whatnot. You simply use Document360 as another authoring tool at your service, not just limited to text editor but feature-rich, to provide efficient knowledge base management. Your content team will find themselves very native to the application.

Expertise required

Knowledge-based management is emerging as a new paradigm in online content management. There are a lot of new practices and internet nuances to be followed. Your content management team must upskill themselves to present the content about your product and services very effectively to serve your end customers and employees. With Contentful, either your content team or you will have to assign a separate team to understand and manage various other tools and their features in addition to managing the content. All these tools, including Contentful itself, Netlify, and GitHub come with their own complexities. You are always dependent on the skillset required for these.

Document360 does not require any such technical staff. It is built with content writers’ experience as a primary focus, and it is easy to adopt and use. It can be used by any technical writer who has used documentation tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Just subscribing to Contentful alone is not sufficient to manage the knowledge base. You need to factor in the direct cost of subscribing to other tools like Netlify, GitHub, etc. It does not stop there. The indirect cost of technical staff to manage these tools, maintenance, and any configuration changes. Also, challenges in one tool may have an impact on the other; you may end up coordinating with too many teams from different vendors for support and resolution. All these add to the operational cost.

Document360 is a SaaS product with different pricing plans to suit your needs. No additional skill sets are required, hence no extra cost for any technical support teams. You connect with one Document360 support team for all the assistance you may need. It is super easy.

User experience

Contentful, as a headless CMS focuses more on how you configure models for data creation and management. It has very little or no emphasis on how you present the content to the end users. It depends on other plugins, tools, and frameworks for this purpose. Hence, your content management team must switch between multiple tools frequently, making their day-to-day activity tedious. To author and manage knowledge base content, the portal provided by installing the knowledge base app is not intuitive for the purpose.

Reader site access

As you author content in Contentful, you need to review your changes in the live site where readers access your published content. Though Contentful provides preview capabilities, you may not be able to view the changes in your content as soon as you publish. It is a multiple-step and time-consuming process.

• • You first publish the changes and build the website.
  • It initiates the deployment process in Netlify and takes time to reflect on the live site.
  • The live site in Contentful follows the basic design structure of the Gatsby template. You may have to make more customizations to represent your content.

The following is the standard template in which the content of your knowledge base is represented.

You do not find necessary navigations like a category hierarchy listing to navigate to other articles or a table of contents to navigate within the article. All these need more configuration and customizations.

Document360 is very swift in deployments; within a click of a button to publish the content, your changes are reflected in the live site.

Content structure and information architecture

In Contentful, before you start authoring any content, you will have to configure content models that define what your content should be made of – for example: if it is an article, title, description, article body, what other elements it can hold, etc. You will not find it easy to define content hierarchy i.e., you do not see the proper content structure and the information architecture of the articles within their respective folders or categories.

The content listing is very flat. To build the relationship between the content is very challenging.

Content management is restricted to basic capabilities like adding an article to a category. As the volume of content grows, the hierarchy and structure of the content organization get complex. This is where the challenge arises.

Document360 provides better UX in terms of content organization and management. It is feature-rich with advanced content management capabilities like 

• • Categorization of content
  • Replication of articles within categories
  • Content reuse with templates, variables, and snippets, glossary
  • SEO management

Editor

Though Contentful has good editor capabilities, the user interface, and the experience it provides are not the absolute best for the editors. If you want to author articles with large content and elements, you will find it challenging to follow the form-like experience. The editor’s capabilities are also limited.

Document360 provides one of the best editor experiences with advanced block editor capabilities and formatting utilities. Technical writers also want markdown and HTML-based editing experience as well, Document360 provides such editor capabilities.

Article redirection rules

As we manage web content, the articles get referred to hundreds of external sites over time. One cannot avoid a scenario where the article URL may require a change after some time based on the change in context. In such cases, the backlinks to this article from other sites may result in broken links. It is not possible to fix this in a headless CMS like Contentful.

Document360 provides an article URL redirect feature that would be helpful when you change a specific article’s URL, and the same article URL has been referenced in different articles in your knowledge base.

Workflow management

Suppose you have any internal processes for the content team to follow, from drafting content until it gets published to ensure it is well-reviewed and approved.

Contentful workflows are not straightforward. You will have to install an app for this purpose, and it will demand further configuration and management.

Document360 workflows are native to the application, which helps to create various stages or checkpoints and track an article/category page from the initial draft (New article) to a published one.

Article status and review reminders help in setting and representing the status of an article and help teams keep their articles up to date by alerting team members when an article is ready for review.

Users and Security

A single person does not usually manage a knowledge base or content. There may be at least two or more people working on this. Large enterprises have different teams with proper team structures to manage the content. This necessitates user management and security.

Contentful provides the roles and user access management, but this is not in the context of knowledge base management. It is provided from the context of Contentful spaces and organizations.

Document360 on the other hand, has meticulously developed user management and security capabilities focused on knowledge base management. Some of the key capabilities expected by your content management team are listed below.

Team collaboration

Often, one or more authors will work on a single article. They may co-author the article, review it, make corrections, etc. Document360 provides in-article discussion capabilities to collaborate with co-authors to discuss the portion of the content with references.

Content Access

You should restrict access to your content management team members only to certain categories and not all. This granular level of content access restriction is not possible with Contentful. Document360 allows you to configure this at the user level and to create roles and assign access policies.

Secure access through Readers & Groups configuration

Though you can set the access level for an article, whether it is public or private, in Contentful, it is not possible. You cannot review and manage the access. Document360 allows you to manage reader roles, and content permissions, and audit the same. You may also want to restrict access or allow self-registration for email from certain domains and IP-based restrictions.

Public or private or mixed access knowledge base

Contentful does not provide the capability to configure permissions for your end users to access your knowledge base in a restricted manner. You may want all or some part of the content in a knowledge base to be public and the rest restricted to logged-in readers. Sometimes, you may want the entire knowledge base to be private such content to be accessed by logged-in readers only.

Document360 offers custom secure access to the knowledge base. You can have a limited knowledge base for internal users like employees and an open one for your customers.

API Docs

As a knowledge base, you may not only be restricted to providing general content but also API-related information about your products and services. Contentful does not provide API documentation capabilities.

The API documentation feature in Document360 provides a complete solution for creating and managing API references. With this feature, you can create high-quality API documentation that helps your users understand and consume APIs effectively.

AI Capabilities

Almost All products and services are now considering AI features. Headless CMS platforms are also experimenting with AI tools. Contentful, as such, has not released any AI features related to the knowledge base.

Document360 has already released a few AI capabilities that will complement the content writers with identifying the right title for the content, preparing precise summaries from the long content, recommending relevant tags to related articles, and helping generate proper SEO descriptions.

These features are seeing faster adoption with our existing customers.

The above-discussed features are just a few to compare Document360 directly with headless CMS like Contentful.

Overview of Author-it

Author-it provides flexibility when creating your documentation. As a CCMS, technical and non-technical users can author documentation in components that can be reused across the system. This means content is handled at a more granular level than documents – for example, as sentences, images and words.

With single sourcing, you are able to update content once and reuse it across multiple outputs, saving you time when building and maintaining documentation. As a result, Author-it can be used for large-scale documentation projects, eliminating the need for copy-paste which is an error-prone process.

Content is stored in a relational database that enables easy reuse of content, tracking when content is reused and preventing users from deleting important content. Content reuse means that terms you use are consistent across the documentation and also help with translation.

When authoring your content, you can easily insert a component so you can make sure that documentation is the same across different publications. Author-IT was designed to allow you to publish to different formats including print and digital, such as PDF, product manuals and HTML, without the hassle of manually updating content every time it changes.

Pros of Author-it

Makes Content Review Easy

Review content and make changes within Author-it platform rather than relying on a third party toolsl. You can make suggestions and leave comments, with the content owner having the power to accept or reject changes for ultimate control.

In-built Translation

People using Author-it are often interested in translation of their documentation. Content is localized by the word, not the document, so you can use Author-it to translate your content into desired languages. You have direct access to view, manage and publish translated content in the same interface. It’s easy to export translation-ready content to service providers or translators.

Automated Content Reuse

Author-it has the ability to offer authoring assistance by suggesting reusable content as you type. This means authors can discover relevant components as they compose content since every word is indexed within the CCMS. Content reuse ensures that you don’t accidentally rewrite content that already exists because Author-it triggers suggestions.

Importing Documents

Author-it’s Import Wizard allows you to import content from other sources using transformation rules and transformation profiles. Popular formats are supported including Microsoft Word and FrameMaker which means you can migrate from legacy systems.

Workflows

Author-it enables complex workflows with multiple authors being able to access content without over-writing a source file. Role-based authoring helps you to collaboratively produce documentation while having clearly defined responsibilities.

Single-sourcing

The big advantage of a solution like Author-it is the ability to create multiple outputs from a single source. This means you can reuse content, changing it once and reflecting the updates in every location that content is used. When you are working on large-scale documentation projects, this capability becomes invaluable.

Multi-channel Publishing

Author-it allows you to publish content across a variety of document types without having to manually format your content for each channel. For example, you could create content once in Author-it and reuse it across PDF, knowledge base, HTML and SCORM. When the source code is updated, its reflected across your outputs.

Variant Management

Author-it uses variant management to help you customize documentation for different teams, roles and locations. You can update an object to make important changes and this will be reflected across the documentation.

Cons of Author-it

Might be More than you Need

Author-it comes with a lot of features that you might not need if you only want to create a knowledge base for your users. With the ability to create structured or unstructured documentation and benefit from Author-it’s relational database, some users may simply be looking to create a straightforward knowledge base.

Steep Learning Curve

Users report that Author-it takes a long time to set up and learn, which results in delays in producing user-ready documentation. This also makes it hard to spread usage across teams and could prevent important collaborators from adopting the software. While a powerful solution, Author-it’s learning curve makes it an undesirable option for some fast-paced teams.

Prohibitive Cost

Smaller teams might find it hard to justify investing in Author-it due to its relatively high cost. Pricing starts at 1250 USD per month and this is only for two seats using the software. If you are a growing team with relatively modest needs in your current stage, Author-it might not be for you.

Difficult to Preview PDFs Before Publishing

Many users report that they can’t view PDF documents before they are published, which presents problems when it comes to formatting. This limitation undermines Author-it’s ability to publish to multiple formats, and requires exporting your documentation every time you want to see the PDF.

Need another platform for hosting the online knowledge base

Even though Author-it produces HTML files, you need another hosting platform that runs a webserver to serve the online version of your knowledge base. It adds another layer of complexity to your documentation tech stack and additional cost.

Overview of Document360

Document360 is software that allows you to create a knowledge base for your users. This knowledge base might be either public and self-service for customers or an internal private knowledge base for employees. You can even create a knowledge base that is a mixture of the two types, and Document360 allows you to easily authenticate users.

Users pick Document360 because it is suitable for both technical and non-technical teams. Geared towards creating content in Markdown, developers find using Document360 comes naturally and non-developers can use the WYSIWYG editor if they prefer. This means all kinds of users can find value in Document360.

With Document360, you don’t waste time wrestling with the software, and instead get up to speed with producing documentation right away. Document360 is easy to learn and does one thing well, and one thing only – help you create a user-friendly knowledge base.

Pros of Document360

Suitable for the Enterprise

Although small to medium-sized businesses gain lots of value from Document360, the software is highly suitable for the enterprise in terms of scalability and security. For example, Document360 is GDPR-compliant and SOC2-certified, so you will be able to meet European data privacy laws and be able to guarantee that your data is protected.

Localization

Document360 offers robust options for localizing your content which means you can cater to audiences in different languages. You can use Document360 to build a multilingual knowledge base using AI-machine translation built into the portal, or use it to connect to third-party support for human translation.

Markdown and WYSIWYG Editor

With Document360, you have a choice over how you author your content. You can either use the WYSIWYG editor to preview content as you write it, or the Markdown editor to write in a simple markup language that is popularly used by technical teams. Switch between the two methods by toggling the editor.

Advanced Analytics

You can view exactly who is reading and interacting with your documentation using advanced analytics. Document360 gives you access to information about the user as well as their behavior on the knowledge base. This enables you to proactively develop your documentation and meet user needs.

Private Hosting

With private hosting, it’s possible to host your knowledge base on your own private cloud server, in your preferred geolocation, which gives you complete control over your data and peace of mind over security. This means you have all the flexibility of cloud hosting combined with the security of your own private network.

Versioning

With Document360, you never have to worry about losing your previous work. Versioning means that you can view past versions and roll back changes, as well as identify who has made the updates. This keeps your documentation more secure and enables better teamwork on content.

Workflows

Team members need to collaborate on workflows when drafting, reviewing and publishing your documentation which is fully supported in Document360. Assign your users roles and track your content in the publishing process to avoid relying on third-party tools like Microsoft Word to create content.

Importing Documents

In Document360, our team will help you import legacy documentation ready to populate your new knowledge base. This prevents you having to start from scratch when building your knowledge base and Document360 also supports a variety of formats.

Cons of Document360

No Single-sourcing

With Document360, it is not possible to reuse your content as components. Documentation only exists in one place and is linked to a particular knowledge base. It’s not currently possible to share content between knowledge bases. In this regard, Document360 is not a CCMS like Author-it, and has been created for a slightly different purpose.

No Mobile App

Document360 doesn’t currently offer a mobile app for its platform so you must use Document360 through your desktop, which may be restrictive for some users. This limitation makes it hard to edit your knowledge base on-the-go, but rest assured that the user’s experience of your user-facing knowledge is always responsive.

What is the Common Space They Share?

Both Document360 and Author-it are tools designed for creating documentation. They are aimed at technical writers and other authors who need to create help content and ensure it is structured in such a way for maximum usability. More than just a website, a knowledge base is architected for presenting information and includes powerful search.

Both these tools are designed to support authoring workflows, meaning that you can leave behind the days of sending Word documents back and forth and exchanging feedback through emails. Document360 and Author-it are end-to-tools that allow you to draft, review and publish content all in one system.

With Document360 and Author-it, you can migrate content from legacy tools so you won’t have to start from scratch. Document360 in particular allows you to migrate your existing knowledge base so you can keep all your SEO traffic even while switching to a new tool.

Detailed Feature Comparison

Features	Author-it	Document360
Hosting	No private hosting	Yes
Knowledge base (public or private)	Internal	Internal and Public
Searchability	Yes	Yes
Security	Yes	Yes
Workflow	Yes	Yes
Localization	Yes	Yes
Collaboration	Yes	Yes
Customization	Limited	Fully Customizable
Editor	Yes	Markdown and  WYSIWYG
Organizing content	Yes	Yes
Import/ Export	Yes	Yes
Integrations	Yes	Yes
Audience (enterprise or mid-size)	Midsize and enterprise	Small,midsize, enterprises and Large enterprises

What is documentation version control?

Document version control is an essential feature in a documentation tool that helps systematically manage different versions or iterations of a document as it undergoes changes, updates, and edits over time. It involves tracking and organizing these versions in a structured manner to ensure accuracy, maintain a clear audit trail, and facilitate collaboration among teams working on the same document.

All these document versions will have different file names to ensure proper identification of the current iteration of the document. This feature is helpful for technical writers and product managers who want to ensure adequate document workflow management across the lifecycle of their technical specification document.

Multiple stages of the Documentation lifecycle include document creation, review, approval, storage, and retrieval. Tracking and managing how your document evolves comes with significant advantages. This includes making your documents straightforward and precise. Even minor modifications can be impactful. It all starts with the right documentation tool. This helps create a great audit trail that you can constantly monitor. It encourages transparency and accountability within your organization.

Why is Document Version Control Important?

Document version control helps to prevent confusion. Imagine multiple team members working on a document simultaneously, and no one can tell whose version is the latest or contribute without losing another person’s edit.

This will lead to chaos in the document workflow process and reduce efficiency. However, document version control is essential as an efficient tracking tool that helps multiple team members contribute to a document without the risk of overwriting or losing the content.

It ensures transparency and accountability during the content creation process. With logs showing the history of changes, everyone can take responsibility for their contribution.

This fosters a culture of collaboration that’s necessary for growth within the workplace. Document versioning can minimize the chances of human error during technical documentation, eliminating as bottlenecks that can lead to delays and miscommunication among team members.

Benefits of Documentation Version control

Document versioning has impressive benefits. This helps to minimize errors. You can also keep track of important changes, which helps collaboration.

Maintain data integrity

Data integrity is a critical aspect of any organization. You need to ensure that the information that passes through every department is up-to-date, accurate, and reliable before passing it on to users.

Therefore, one of the best ways to maintain this data integrity is to track the document for changes and fork in the information that need to be shared after reviewing. With this, you can carry every team member along, as they are all accountable to each other.

This is crucial in maintaining the security and accuracy of daily documentation processes. With version control, unauthorized or accidental edits are minimized, enhancing the accuracy and reliability of documents.

Minimize errors

As mentioned earlier, there will be chaos when everyone edits a document without a process to keep track of these changes and revert to old versions where necessary. Where there’s poor documentation, version control, low productivity, and numerous human errors will inevitably be the order of the day.

This is because there’s no way to track document versions and know the latest ones. With this, there’s a higher chance of circulating the wrong document with errors. You can’t predict how devastating the consequences can be. Imagine putting your employees and organization at risk.

However, documentation version control will help to keep this in check internally as everyone can identify the updated document and work together to ensure its accuracy before sending it out. Minimizing errors will eliminate time wasting and delays during documentation.

Tracks Changes

Tracking changes during documentation can be a literal lifesaver. Many people can relate to the error of saving the wrong version of a document and searching for an older version to correct this. Without a means to track changes and recover older versions, hours of work would go down the drain, and it would be a painful process starting all over again.

You can maintain a comprehensive document history within your organization through documentation version control. Every contributor to the document can track and trace changes and who made them without any disruption.

Document Access control and compliance

Keeping track of document history could also have security implications for every documentation process. A massive benefit of documentation version control is that the workflow process will comply with industry safety standards.

Several organizations deal with sensitive information that could be at risk of cybersecurity threats. Incorporating document version control software can provide extra layers of security through access control, user authentication, and encryption.

Therefore, there will be tighter security with an audit trail of all revisions to keep everyone abreast of documentation updates.

Optimize workflows

When versioning is implemented within the documentation portal, will optimize workflows, which leads to better productivity and operational efficiency. This is because it’s much easier for several people to collaborate efficiently on a document, make inputs, and review where necessary without any confusion or chaos.

Every contributor to the document can be tracked, and their changes can be noted within a few minutes. Therefore, version control makes it easier for multiple stakeholders to incorporate feedback without the loss of data through accidental deletion or overwriting.

It’s always great to have a comprehensive outlook on how your document evolves. With this, you can track and organize how your document is modified at each point. Knowing what goes on with your documentation always helps you customize workflows better. You can adjust this to fit your organizational objectives. You can also create a central repository to be accessed by diverse stakeholders.

Best practices for documentation version control

Increase your chances of success by implementing the best practices for documentation version control. Check out these ways to use technical documentation for communication.

Standardize document naming conventions.

Standardizing document naming conventions are crucial for maintaining clarity and consistency within your documentation processes. This will apply to new and old versions of all documents within the organization.

A file naming system boosts clarity, transparency, and organization. Therefore, you need to choose one consistent across several departments, and leaves little room for confusion. An ideal file name for your document should include:

• The version number.
• Brief information about the content.
• The date of the latest revision.

You can add a version control table for each document that records this information, including the author and a summary of changes. This way, it’s easy for anyone to retrieve and identify various documents.

Set permissions and access controls

You can’t rule out the chances of accessing sensitive data during documentation. If you deal with sensitive data, then you need access controls. This reduces the chances of leaking data that could ruin your company’s image.

Incorporate this through permissions and access controls. Apply these security measures so only authorized persons can view and edit these documents anytime. This reduces the incidence of errors through edits from unqualified persons.

Formalize versioning protocols

Where there are no rules and regulations guiding operations, the chances of workflow disruptions are significantly higher. Some documents require versioning protocols that keep track of document lifecycles, structured filing frameworks, and retention policies.
The document lifecycle encompasses every version of the document, regardless of the amount of changes made. The filing schema is the central record-keeping system that defines how the contents are grouped, irrespective of their jurisdiction.
Formalizing these version protocols sets a baseline that guides the rules of engagement. Create an official document versioning control policy that clearly states the standards guiding how everyone uses these documents.

Training

Proper training helps users understand how to use the tool correctly. This reduces the likelihood of errors caused by misunderstandings, incorrect operations, or misuse of features.

Training ensures that all users follow consistent practices when using the tool. This consistency leads to uniformity in document formats, version control, and collaboration methods.

It’s best to train all staff members on documentation tool, explore all feature and versioning processes. this minimizes the chances of human errors and makes the documentation workflow as seamless as possible.

Implement the right version control software

While you can incorporate best practices such as standardizing document naming conventions, setting permissions and access controls, formalizing versioning protocols, and training your staff, these efforts may be unsuccessful if carried out on inappropriate documentation software.

Selecting the right documentation software for your organization is a crucial aspect of this process because it will incorporate features that make this efficient and seamless. The right software will include features such as editor, viewing access, direct collaboration, version control, analytics, categorization, customization and permission control…

These are only a few internal features that will improve documentation version control for technical writers, product managers, and several other professionals within diverse organizations.

Also Read: Documentation for Testing: Benefits, Examples, and Best Practices

Popular Documentation Software

These popular documentation softwares have set themselves apart as reliable software for managing documentation seamlessly.