Arunkumar Kumaresan, Author at Document360

Process Implementation – A Comprehensive Guide

Arunkumar Kumaresan — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 07:55:02 +0000

Every business revolves around repeatable processes that ensure the successful and streamlined running of the company. Any company, big or small, must implement processes that allow all the various employees and departments to coordinate together to help customers.

Although process implementation may not seem like the most exciting topic in the world, we’re going to show you why you need to implement new processes to ensure that your business will flourish. Likely, as Head of Ops, you’ll be responsible for overseeing the processes for the entire organization and be best placed to implement improvements.

Processes shape the entirety of the company and must be coordinated between departments in order to be effective. Correctly evaluating the state of processes within your company, as well as creatively envisioning a new plan is key to successful process implementation.

What is Process Implementation?
Benefits of Process Implementation
Steps to Successful Process Implementation
Best Practices of Process Implementation

What is Process Implementation?

First, what is process implementation? It’s when businesses proactively adopt new and improved processes to streamline operations, from conception of the process to execution, evaluation, and adoption. Although one person, such as the Head of Ops, might be responsible for coming up with and implementing new processes, everyone in the organization must buy in to process implementation to achieve tangible results.

All businesses will have processes, but not all will be required to improve them. Only the most competitive and agile businesses will recognize the need to refine and develop their processes in order to ensure that every action taken is necessary and adds value.

Example of Documentation process

Implementing processes requires the correct documentation and software for employees to collaborate. Processes are usually carried out by more than one person and have far-reaching effects across the organization. Transparency is key in process implementation, and documenting processes increases the chances of adoption.

Benefits of Process Implementation

Now, we will look at some of the main benefits of process implementation within your organization.

Structured Workflow

Your workflows will become more structured when you implement processes. Instead of conducting tasks on an ad-hoc basis, employees can learn what is expected of them, which will also help train new hires. Processes provide cover for employees who are on leave or absent for some reason, and your operations will become more consistent and repeatable.

Effective Resource Utilization

You can utilize your resources more effectively when you know which processes you need to put in place. Instead of wasting resources on processes that are redundant, you can redistribute them to where they are needed. You’ll be able to see where processes are being duplicated across the organization and be able to streamline them, ensuring the right people are taking care of business.

Improved Quality by Reducing Errors

Making processes explicit and implementing new ones means that you can improve quality by reducing errors. Documenting your new processes step-by-step shows your employees how to complete them and defines exactly what constitutes success. If a process is error-prone, you can refine it to make it better and ensure that employees are well-equipped to do their jobs.

Compliance and Risk Mitigation

When employees have new processes to follow this can increase compliance and reduce the risks inherent in conducting business. Following regulations is more feasible when each step is documented for employees, and enables them to question authority if they believe a process is wrong. Safety rules and regulations can be observed when employees understand exactly why a process must be conducted in a certain way.

Promotes Adaptability and Innovation

Employees can adapt more effectively and innovate more successfully with process implementation. Instead of relying on processes that are fixed and immutable, businesses can evolve in a direction that suits their customers and their business models. Employees and departments can respond to consumer demand and market changes if processes are flexible. Regularly reviewing processes means you can stay competitive and agile.

Enables Businesses to Scale

Smaller businesses may be in less need of formal processes but if they want to grow then process implementation is essential. Taking business processes from informal and ad-hoc to standardized and repeatable means that businesses can scale their operations while retaining what was effective about their smaller model. Processes need to grow with the business instead of restricting change.

Steps to Successful Process Implementation

We will now look at the key steps you must take in order to successfully implement new processes in your business.

1. Establish Specific Goals and Objectives

First and foremost, you need to establish the purpose of your existing processes before you can understand how to improve them. Clearly defining what you want to achieve with your processes, gathering examples and working through the data help you to develop new processes that can later be implemented. If employees understand why a process needs to be overhauled they will be more likely to follow it.

2. Develop a Process Implementation Plan

A process implementation plan means you can outline your new processes in much more detail and find out whether your implementations are viable. It’s essential to understand how the process will be carried out, who is responsible, and what the intended result should be. You need to make it clear how you will improve any existing processes and how this will enhance output.

Components of a Process Implementation Plan

Here are the top components of a process implementation plan for you to include, in order to provide your business with a roadmap for change.

Aims and Objectives

Start off with the aims and objectives of your plan so you know what you want to achieve. Existing processes must be inadequate in some way so you should know how you will improve them, and what success will look like.

Structured Timelines and KPIs

In order to increase the chances of success you must include structured timelines and KPIs so you will know when you should have achieved your goals by. Setting a limit on when it will be sensible to have achieved your goals is key to successful implementation since you have a target to aim for.

Risk Mitigation

Identifying the relevant risks in implementation means you can avoid potential pitfalls. By anticipating possible risks, you can increase the likelihood of success and improve the allocation of resources to prevent mistakes. Develop a contingency plan that you will execute if anything goes wrong, and your business will be in safe hands.

Allocation of Resources

Allocating resources appropriately means you will ensure that each process you implement is adequately staffed and funded without running to excess. Refining your processes means you can conserve and redistribute resources to where they are truly needed, instead of guessing about the budget and manpower that you might need.

3. Map Out the Risks

Before you embark on your process implementation, assessing risks in a map is essential so that you don’t waste time and endanger the business. It’s entirely possible that your new processes will be detrimental to the business so you need to accurately map out where problems might arise so you can circumvent them. Risks are usually something you cannot control such as loss of staff, market changes or budget limitations.

4. Acquire the Necessary Tools and Resources

While processes are carried out on a day-to-day basis and don’t necessarily require specialist equipment, sometimes you’ll need particular tools to document processes and share them. Process documentation tools like Document360 enable you to document step-by-step processes in a user-friendly knowledge base and share with restricted access to your target audience.

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5. Delegate Responsibilities and Tasks

You can’t carry out your new processes alone. You’ll need to share the processes among your colleagues and ensure that everyone knows who is responsible for what. Different departments may need to coordinate on processes and change their operations depending on what the new processes require. When each person has responsibility for different processes and knows who to delegate to, this reduces the risk of rework or tasks slipping through the cracks.

6. Provide Training to the Team

It’s likely that training will be required before your team members are ready to step into their new roles. Rolling out Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) means that colleagues can learn what is expected of them and you must ensure they have access to the process knowledge base containing the step-by-step guides. Employees must be onboarded into the new processes to ensure that they adapt their existing ways of working, which can only be achieved through thorough training.

7. Execute and Oversee the Progress of the Implementation

Once you’ve implemented the plan, you’ll need to oversee the progress made and ensure that employees have adequate support to adopt their new processes. Bringing a plan to life makes it likely that you’ll need to refine the plan to suit changing circumstances and adapt to new requirements. Reviewing your efforts and evaluating your progress against your initial objectives are crucial for measuring success, but also being flexible enough to respond to change.

Best Practices of Process Implementation

Once you’ve implemented your new processes, you’ll be pleased to hear there are certain best practices you can follow to increase your chances of success.

Alignment through Communication and Feedback

Although you may be Head of Ops in charge of implementing the new process plan, you’ll want to continuously gather feedback and communicate clearly with your team members to ensure a free flow of information. Change can be hard and employees need to understand why they are being asked to adopt new processes when they may have previously been satisfied with their ways of working. What is good for the business is good for employees since it ensures your long-term survival.

Utilizing Process Documentation Software

As we’ve already mentioned, you’ll absolutely need to document your processes when implementing your new plan across the organization. Using a tool like Document360 means you can easily capture your processes with a user-friendly interface that allows you to write in Markdown, or WYSIWYG. AI supercharges your ability to create context-rich, structured content that provides easy access for your users.

Employee Involvement and Training

Involve employees in the development of your processes and ensure they are trained in its implementation. Your employees will also be able to tell you which processes might be unworkable and be able to advise on more viable alternatives, so ensure that those on the ground feel heard. Employee involvement also increases the likelihood that your new processes will be adopted as employees will feel part of your initiative.

Continuous Monitoring and Adjustment

Implementing new processes isn’t just a case of setting it and forgetting it. Continuous monitoring and adjustment is required if you are to adapt to a changing environment and ensure that your processes serve the needs of your employees and customers. You may be conducting a broad review of every process, but it’s the smaller changes that add up to make a big impact over time.

Wrapping Up

Implementing new processes in your organization requires careful evaluation, forethought, and caution, in order to avoid disrupting existing business operations. Your organization has survived well enough until now, but updating your processes has the potential to achieve massive productivity and efficiency gains as well as an increase in profits.

Using a plan can help you implement your processes more effectively as well as regularly reviewing and evaluating your strategy. Team members can be your best source of feedback as you revise and update their ways of working to drive business growth and improve every area of operations.

By wasting fewer resources on outdated processes, that’s more money you can spend on improving the business and creating loyal customers. Implementing new processes requires documentation with useful tools such as Document360 so everyone in your team can learn what they are.

An intuitive SOP Software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

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Document360 Vs Traditional Authoring Tools ( DITA XML)

Arunkumar Kumaresan — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:49:18 +0000

You might be wondering what the difference is between a tool like Document360 and using the DITA XML structured authoring system. After all, they are both used to create documentation for users, so is there really much to choose between them?

Well, the answer is that there are some fundamental differences between the two. First of all, while they are both a way of creating content that helps users, they require contrasting approaches in order to be able to achieve this. Document360 is a complete tool that you can use to produce documentation, while DITA XML requires a number of different implementations.

We hope to be able to show you that while DITA XML has some advantages, ultimately you’ll want to choose Document360 for your documentation needs. Their use cases usually vary, and software like Document360 is highly useful for teams who don’t want to spend lots of time learning a new architecture and markup language.

Overview of DITA XML
What does DITA offer?
Pros of DITA XML
Cons of DITA XML
Overview of Document360
Key features of Document360
Pros of Document360
Detailed Feature Comparison

Overview of DITA XML

First of all, what does DITA stand for? It’s “Darwin Information Typing Architecture”, while XML stands for “Extensible Markup Language”. So DITA XML is not a tool but a language used by other tools to publish structured documentation. DITA is an architecture based on the original XML.

DITA XML is a markup language for structured authoring that IBM originally created for internal use but released to the public in 2005 via the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). While DITA is essentially free to use, it usually requires specific tools that enable you to manage and publish the content, such as DITA Open Toolkit, which is also free and open source. There are other proprietary options available.

If you’re familiar with other markup languages like HTML, you will likely be able to understand DITA XML. DITA is a way of structuring your content so as to be able to manage it more effectively, publish it using specialized tools, and easily make updates to your content in the future.

What does DITA offer?

If you decide to use DITA XML, you can benefit from the following features.

Topic-Based Authoring

DITA recognizes that content should be created in “topics”, which means that documentation is marked up at a granular level so individual “topics” can be reused across different products and documents.

Information Reuse

As just mentioned, information can be reused as needed, so your team does not rely on copy-paste for multiple similar products or outputs.This completely minimizes the likelihood of errors and outdated content as topics only need to be updated once, with changes reflected everywhere.

Specialized Information Types

Concepts, tasks and reference are the specialized information types that DITA uses to structure topics with content models. The concept relays information about a product or a feature; the task outlines a step-by-step process, and a reference usually contains data.

Conditional Text

When you use specific tools to implement DITA, you have access to conditional text, which means you can display certain parts of the text when certain profiling conditions have been met. This makes your documentation much more dynamic and personalized.

Multichannel Publishing

DITA XML suits organizations that want to publish to multiple channels, which is supported by the content reuse feature and means you can adapt content for different mediums. For example, it may be possible to create product descriptions, technical documentation, and marketing copy all from the same basic topics with minimal variation.

Extensibility

When you implement your DITA architecture using a tool like DITA Open Toolkit, you can add extensible plugins to improve the range of your publishing outputs depending on your needs. This means that DITA XML can be customized for particular organizations while retaining its essential features.

Industry Standard

DITA XML is an industry standard used widely in software and beyond. While only some people are trained in DITA, you will likely be able to find practitioners to support your DITA projects.

Pros of DITA XML

DITA can be beneficial if you have lots of similar products that only require slight differences in documentation – for example, you could have two versions of the same camera with only a small variation in features and specs. It’s possible to reuse most of your content for these products and DITA enables you to achieve this.

At the beginning, when you’re first trying to pick up DITA, you need not rely on specific premium tools to learn this language. DITA was released to the public in order to make the whole field of technical writing much easier for practitioners and introduce an element of standardization.

The great thing about DITA XML is that it was designed specifically for documentation and technical writing, so you can be assured that you are using it for the purpose it was intended. While DITA XML does take effort to adopt, you will reap many rewards in benefits. If you can understand HTML, then you can understand DITA.

In theory, DITA XML saves you money because you don’t have to create as much content as you can translate reusable content simultaneously. This means you don’t have to pay a translation service to translate as much content if you use DITA XML.

Also read: 13 Most Popular Tools for Technical Writing

Cons of DITA XML

Ultimately, DITA is a different technical writing paradigm compared to simpler documentation tools. You will need to spend time learning and applying the DITA structure to your documentation. If you want to use DITA, you will have to employ professionals who are trained in it. It can be difficult to transition to a DITA environment, and you may have to outsource your content.

In theory, DITA is free, but you may need to turn to proprietary tools to get the most out of it. This may negate the reason that you turned to DITA in the first place, as these tools can be costly and lock you into their platforms when you start using them.

Organizations and technical writers sometimes find that the user experience of open-source DITA tools could be better, leading them to switch to more streamlined, proprietary software. This negates some of the cost-savings that initially motivated them to choose DITA. Additionally, DITA originally had 40 tags to learn but this has now increased to more than 140, making this a difficult tool to learn.

You’ll also need to be aware that if you don’t implement an appropriate map (plan for how your content is to be used) then you’ll end up with a mess. Contributions from multiple authors may lose the initial thread of the DITA map and then you’ll be unable to use DITA XML to its full potential.

Overview of Document360

To help with your documentation needs, we created Document360. Document360 is a powerful tool that takes the complexity out of content, with the ability to build detailed knowledge bases that provide help to your users.

When you get to know Document360, you’ll discover how much easier it is to structure your documentation and launch knowledge bases that appeal to different types of users. With Document360, adding metadata with AI enables you to markup your documentation contextually.

In fact, Document360 is the obvious answer for teams who want to create documentation at speed and host it on an accessible online knowledge base. Content authors, reviewers and publishers can collaborate on workflows that assign everyone a role in building the documentation.

Key features of Document360

Document360 offers a completely different paradigm and approach to documentation when compared to DITA. DITA XML is exclusively limited to those trained in the standard, whilst a knowledge base such as Document360 is democratic and accessible.

DITA was formed when storage costs were too high, and that’s why there was an emphasis on content reuse within the organization. With DITA, technical writers need to think modularly in producing documentation, which takes a lot of time to come to consensus on information architecture.

However, storage costs have now come down to $0. That’s the new paradigm in which Document360 shines, where you create multiple versions of documentation so that technical writers can work in parallel. Also, Document360 is built for the digital-first world. Gone are days of PDFs where you print and read, making Document360’s online knowledge base a much better option.

If you’re interested in creating documentation with a minimum of fuss, then Document360 is your solution. By using Document360’s rich text editor, confusing tags are concealed from authors, allowing them to focus on the content. On the other hand, if you prefer to work in Markdown, then Document360 offers that too.

Document360 enables you to manage many different versions of your documentation, especially if you need to work with various releases while still maintaining the original product. This works similarly to DITA XML, except you don’t have the hassle of managing many different topics. You similarly fork your knowledge base to working with GIT repositories. With Document360, creating documentation need not be a chore. You can use customizable templates and themes to speed up the creation of new content since it is likely your authors will need to adhere to a specific style guide and structure.

Schedule a demo with one of our experts to take a deeper dive into Document360

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Pros of Document360

If you choose Document360 then you’ll be able to see how easy it is to manage your documentation for multiple products. Since recently releasing Document360 2.0, our software is equipped with advanced AI features that allow you to cut the time it takes to create user-friendly documentation.

Document360 has many of the advantages of DITA without the downside of learning a complex open-source system. For example, structured content gives you the ability to tag content semantically so users can manage content and find what they’re looking for.

As a dedicated knowledge base solution, users can focus their efforts on creating great content instead of managing too many topics and tags. With three distinct editors to choose from, including Block, Markdown, and WYSIWYG, organizations can enjoy the flexibility that Document360 offers.

Detailed Feature Comparison

	Document360	DITA XML
Content reusability	Content can be saved as a template and reused across your knowledge base.	Directly designed for content to be reused as topics across different projects.
Translation management	Document360 provides translation extensions to help you easily translate your content.	Translate only the content you need and reuse it multiple times to bring costs down.
Structured content	Structured content is achieved through multiple editors and tagging.	Content is fully structured so that it is separated from the formatting, removing the need to create entirely new versions.
Authoring workflows	Roles and permissions can be assigned to authors who want to progress content through publishing workflows.	Using DITA means authoring workflows are restricted to the tools you choose for implementation.

Wrapping Up

If you’re weighing up your options between Document360 and DITA XML, know that with Document360, you have an end-to-end solution that requires no training. Document360 has been specifically developed for teams with complex documentation needs but removes the hurdles associated with learning a new documentation architecture.

When you learn DITA XML, the possibilities are broad but the hours, days, weeks or months you spend amassing knowledge of this new architecture is all time not spent on creating documentation for your users. Projects are easily derailed when key professionals leave your team and customers suffer as a result.

Document360 fits comfortably into the existing structure of your team, enabling documentation to become a priority and helping you become even more customer-focused. Collaboratively authoring and publishing documentation easily should not be a barrier when it comes to serving customers.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

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The post Document360 Vs Traditional Authoring Tools ( DITA XML) appeared first on Document360.

Detailed Comparison: Salesforce Vs Document360

Arunkumar Kumaresan — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 05:49:08 +0000

Organizations looking to manage their online documentation or knowledge bases for their products and services, to support their customers and employees, are left with too many platforms and tools in the market. Knowledge bases help organizations to improve productivity by making important information readily available to their customers and employees. This is broadly categorized under Customer Relationship Management or Customer Service.

There are few platforms that provide a suite of services for sales, customer service, etc. One such major player is Salesforce, a CRM platform that hosts a Service Cloud that businesses can leverage to provide service and support to their business customers. One of the offerings inside Salesforce Service Cloud is Salesforce Knowledge, which is positioned as an effective knowledge management system that helps solve issues or answer questions from external customers as well as internal employees, by using articles.

Are you considering knowledge base capabilities in Salesforce as one of the options for your business? We recommend you read this article and understand why you can alternatively consider Document360, an industry-leading solution for building your knowledge bases.

Do you use Salesforce for your CRM, and Customer support?
Challenges using Salesforce for your knowledge base requirements
What should someone look at choosing Document360 than Salesforce for knowledge base?
Final Remarks

Do you use Salesforce for your CRM, and Customer support?

If you are using the Salesforce suite of products and have explored Salesforce Knowledge, and are still not very much convinced of using it for your day-to-day knowledge management but looking for better alternatives so that the knowledge base can be integrated into your Salesforce account to equip your support agents with a robust knowledge base while serving customers, you can consider Document360.

You can also read here the discussions, on why many businesses that use Salesforce knowledge are considering alternative knowledge base platforms that can still integrate with the Salesforce ecosystem.

Document360 comes with a Salesforce extension to ensure you do not miss out on any capabilities in the native Salesforce Knowledge and public site.

Access your knowledge base built using Document360 through your Salesforce customer relationship platform to provide customer support.

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Challenges using Salesforce for your knowledge base requirements

Salesforce is one of the largest software companies in the world, offering several customer relationship management (CRM) services, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud. Though it is feature-rich and has a depth of domain context for the services it provides, over the years, the platform has grown so big it and has become complex for small teams and businesses to use and manage.

Building a knowledge base in Salesforce can be a complex and challenging task. There are several factors and specific challenges associated to be considered.

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

Salesforce Knowledge is not built to provide the best user experience to author the content; it is constrained by the existing application architecture and design that doesn’t provide a not-so-good knowledge management experience.

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 Salesforce Knowledge.

Getting started is not easy

Salesforce is a complex platform that serves a lot of content management purposes. Once you subscribe to a Salesforce account, you land inside a portal that demands a lot of learning and understanding of the platform’s concepts. You may consider exploring such platform concepts if your organization has complex content management requirements. If your organization has complex content management requirements, you may consider exploring such platform concepts. Document360, a Software-as-a-Service, provides a first-in-class experience for knowledge base management. It focuses on knowledge base concepts and allows your team to get accustomed to the tool in no time.

Setting up to manage the KB is tedious

There is quite a bit of configuration you must setup before you even get to try authoring an article.

Lightning experience cloud

This is a re-imagined Salesforce platform experience to build any applications in Salesforce. Some of the initial set up requirements are –

Enable Lightning Knowledge in the Knowledge Settings.
Manage users or groups to have the necessary knowledge of user permissions to manage articles.
Set up the Knowledge App inside the Salesforce service account.
Define Data categories to organise your articles.

These are only a few of the setup considerations for the knowledge app to be used by the content management teams. This could only help content creators and the users within your organization to use the content, support agents managing customer service tickets can access the articles and link them to their tickets.

Digital experience cloud

This is a new platform to improve and connect all aspects of customer experience. If you want a customer-facing site where your articles should be available for your customers, either with restricted or public access, you will have to configure this platform. You need to set up a lot of things before you can show the knowledge base articles to your customers. Some of them are –

Enable Digital Experience in your organization, you must still create, configure, and then activate a site before it is live and available to users.
Create a community-facing site in the digital experience platform.

Object Manager

Configure the Knowledge object to define your authoring section. This will need managing fields, associating them to record types, and assigning them to page layouts. Only with these settings will you be able to create articles for various purposes like FAQs, Training Manuals, etc.

Website structure

Construct the necessary pages with relevant placeholder structures to display your articles.

Home page
Topics detail – to list all the articles inside a category.
Article details – to showcase your article.
Configure Field and Section visibility to define what content to be shown and restricted in the knowledge base article to different reader groups.
Article Type to Topic mapping is required to map your knowledge data categories to meet the hierarchy you want to use on the public website.

All these setup (not completely covered above, there is a lot more to be done to get started) are not just a one-time activity; they may need constant changing, auditing, and management. Your content team may find all these overwhelming.

Understanding Salesforce application ecosystem and concepts

Salesforce has its CRM as the core offering, and they have expanded to multiple products over the years. Salesforce Knowledge is aligned with other structures of its ecosystem, which demands following the concepts to build any application.

Objects

Any content in Salesforce is defined as objects, that are database tables that allows you to store data specific to an app in your organization account. For this knowledge base purpose, the Articles are defined as a ‘Knowledge’ object.

Data categories

Data categories are used to classify, find, and control access to a particular set of articles. You will use this to map articles to categorize them.

Record types

Record Types are a way of identifying many records of one type for an object. In this context, this defines the structure of an article. While creating an article, you will choose a record type, to create an article of that structure. For e.g. If you want to create articles of FAQ and Manual structure, you will have to create a record type for each.

Page layouts

Page layouts control the layout and organization of buttons, fields, custom links, and related lists on object record pages. They also help determine which fields are visible, read-only, and required. Use page layouts to customize the content of record pages for your users.

Permission sets

To define the access permissions of users and groups, for a user to access the knowledge base, a lot of settings need to be understood and configured to ensure relevant information is provided and others are secured.

Guest user profile

It is a hidden and default profile for a guest user to access knowledge base articles without login. Defining permissions for this profile is, again a tedious job.

Though Document360 has similar but less concepts, it is not as complex as Salesforce Knowledge. These concepts blend easily with the authoring experience. It 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.

Get your knowledge base online in 5 minutes

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Expertise required

Knowledge-base 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.

Salesforce Knowledge comes with a lot of complexities;, either your content team or you will have to assign a separate team to understand and manage the platform and its features in addition to managing the content. You are always dependent on the skillset required for these.

Your content management teams are not trained in Salesforce.

You will require a Salesforce Admin or expert consultant to manage the setup and changes.

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.

What should someone look at choosing Document360 than Salesforce for knowledge base?

Ideal User / Customer profiles

While choosing the content management tool, we need to be aware of the following:

Who will be using the tool to manage the content?

In this case, the content management team. They should feel very comfortable with the author and manage the content. The tool should provide necessary team collaboration and permission capabilities without complexities.
Salesforce Knowledge is cluttered, missing many features, and not user-friendly due to the complexity of its ecosystem.

2. Who will be consuming the content?

A knowledge base is created for both internal and public-facing purposes. Support agents will use the internal knowledge base to look out for solutions for the cases they handle, and employees may refer to the articles for organization-related information. Customers and guest users will access the public-facing site.
Configuring and setting up a public site through the Digital Experience cloud is another complex activity with Salesforce Knowledge.

Document360 can provide a better customer experience on the site, a productivity boost for the contributors, and a great SEO or marketing advantage, while authoring and making the content available for its consumers.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Just subscribing to Salesforce Cloud alone is not sufficient to manage the knowledge base. When it comes to licensing with Salesforce, it gets complicated. You will require a full license for your contributors, then a knowledge user license for a group of people, a Digital experience cloud license for your public site and login-based pricing for private access.

Apart from the pricing, choosing between the Essentials, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions with the Service Cloud makes it more complex. It needs a lot of research to finalize which edition suits the best for your purpose.

It does not stop there. The indirect cost of technical staff to manage these tools, maintenance, and any configuration changes. Also, challenges in one service may have an impact on the other; you may end up coordinating with too many teams 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.

Structure of the user interface

Editing content

Though Salesforce positions its Lightning version to provide a re-imagined experience, the user interface is still not intuitive or provides a modern assistive experience. The UI is still outdated forms-based design, that does not offer enough real-estate on the screen for the authors to write content. The experience it provides is 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.

Content structure and information architecture

In Salesforce, before you start authoring any content, you will have to configure content related objects and settings that define what your content should be made of – for example: if it is an article, then you should configure record types, data categories, 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 creating an article of a record type. As the volume of content grows, the hierarchy and structure of the content organization get complex. This is where the challenge arises.

You will have to create data categories, their mappings, and visibilities, and assign them to Knowledge. Once you have configured them, you can assign them to the articles.

Creating articles is also a challenge. By default, you have a record type to create articles of FAQ type i.e., to have a question-and-answer style. Also, creating one article with multiple question-and-answer sets is difficult. To have more sets in the same article or create an article of a different type, you will have to –

Create fields & relationships.
Then, create page layouts.

Once the page layout is defined, the same must be assigned to the record types against each user profile to enable which user has access to which record types.

Creating content and managing the structure, are all too complicated; they and it is not easy to visualize the content hierarchy. One must have a proper training and expertise on the platform.

Document360 provides better UX in terms of content organization and management. It is simple to use, 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

Creating categories of articles for various purposes is intuitive and simple within the authoring space. This makes the classification of articles under categories and visualizing the hierarchy very easy.

Reader site access

Salesforce Knowledge provides access to knowledge articles to the public readers or customers through the Digital Experience cloud platform. A separate license, configuration and set up are required to enable the reader access to the public knowledge base site. The permissions to enable unauthenticated guest users to read the article is cumbersome to get the Guest User Profile configured. Defining SSO, custom subdomains are also difficult. You cannot review and manage the access.

Next, you must configure the mapping between the Data Categories and Topics to classify the categorization of articles on the public site. The combination of the assignment between these two may result in how same article is categorized in the lightning experience for internal purposes and in the public site. This is again two different concepts under another section called content management to be well understood.

Document360 provides a seamless experience to author and publish articles. You need not undergo a complex configuration process to set up the reader site and define access.

It provides a private access level for the internal knowledge base, public access for the customer- facing sites, and mixed mode. It is very intuitive.

You get all the capabilities to manage the knowledge management all-in-one place in Document360 compared to the Salesforce Knowledge, where you must switch between multiple sections of the platform.

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.

Content management capabilities

Versioning

One of the main requirements of any content management activity is to manage versions. Salesforce Knowledge allows versioning at the article level. But this is not enough, you may need to manage the version at the project level in addition to the article level. This is necessary to launch a completely new version of a set of articles or even a knowledge base. This is not possible in Salesforce Knowledge. Whereas modern purpose-built knowledge base software, like Document360, provides such capabilities.

Article redirection rules

As we manage online 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 Salesforce Knowledge.

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.

Translations

Another important capability in content management is to deliver content in multiple languages to address the readers from different locales. While language management is possible in Salesforce, it is a complex process to set up and translate the articles. You have to follow a workflow to get this done.

Whereas in Document360, the support for multiple languages and translations is advanced with assisted machine translation services. With a click of a button, you can get your entire article translated in no time.

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.

Salesforce Knowledge doesn’t have a concept of workflows, reviews and approvals are not straightforward. 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.

Salesforce Knowledge provides the user profile and access management, but this is not in the context of knowledge base management. It is provided from the context of Salesforce site settings.

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.

Working in a team

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 Salesforce Knowledge. Document360 allows you to configure this at the user level and to create roles and assign access policies.

Public or private or mixed access knowledge base

Salesforce Knowledge 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 documentation

As a knowledge base, you may not only be restricted to providing general content but also API-related information about your products and services. Salesforce Knowledge 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.

Ready to take your API documentation to the next level? Book a demo with Document360 today!

Book A Demo

AI capabilities

Almost All products and services are now considering AI features. Salesforce products are also experimenting with AI tools. Salesforce Knowledge, 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.

After the introduction of ChatGPT, customers are adopting this new wave of technology to its full potential. The Large Language Models (LLMs) that underpin ChatGPT have been evolving rapidly to cope with consumer trends. To adapt to the emerging customer trends and take advantage of technological capabilities, Document360 has a potential AI Assistant, Eddy. Eddy will provide answers to customers’ questions utilizing the LLM technology based on the knowledge base project it is pointed to.

These features are seeing faster adoption with our existing customers.

The above-discussed features are just a few to compare Document360 directly with Salesforce Knowledge.

Final remarks

While Salesforce Knowledge offers knowledge base content management, it is particularly valuable in scenarios where you already have Salesforce products in use and leverage the ecosystem. However, it also requires careful planning, development resources, and ongoing maintenance to overcome the challenges.

Evaluating your specific needs and resources is essential when considering Salesforce Knowledge.

Document360 is one of the most sought-after tools if you are looking for a comprehensive knowledge base solution. Your cost of customer services can be significantly reduced by allowing your users to leverage self-help using a knowledge base that offers quick responses to their queries.

Moreover, it enables you to create a knowledge base that streamlines internal communication between different teams. You can use Document360 to manage your knowledge base without relying too much on IT experts.

Once you explore Document360, you will appreciate the rich features that simply empower your content management teams.

The post Detailed Comparison: Salesforce Vs Document360 appeared first on Document360.

Headless CMS Contentful vs. Document360

Arunkumar Kumaresan — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 11:53:54 +0000

Organizations looking to manage their online documentation or knowledge bases for their products and services to support their customers and employees are left with too many platforms and tools in the market. One of the practices followed is to use headless content management systems (CMS). If you are one such organization thinking of using one of the headless CMS – Contentful, to manage your online knowledge base, we recommend you read this blog.

You can use such specific platforms and leverage the headless CMS; you may be inclined to have several advantages. You should assess if using such platforms, which are not focused on knowledge base, really outweighs using ready-to-use software like Document360, which could help you to establish and maintain your content in no time at a lower operational cost than depending on multiple products and skills required to manage the headless CMS.

Introduction

Businesses are widely considering improving their customer and employee experience. In this thriving era of digitalization, people seek information through omnichannel support. Businesses prioritize making information available online about their products and services.

Organizations already use one or more content management systems to generate and manage content online. Some may evaluate more tools and platforms. They tend to choose a platform that could serve one or more purposes. Sometimes organizations select a platform for its broad scope but use only one of the offerings. This situation often ends up using a platform or a tool not built extremely focused for that particular purpose, in this case, a self-service knowledge base.

Many organizations that have adopted Contentful – a headless CMS to manage their extensive content management requirements are quickly realizing the challenges of managing their knowledge base. What is a headless content management system?

A headless CMS is a content management system separating content creation and management from the presentation layer. Unlike traditional CMS platforms, which tightly couple the content and how it is displayed on a website or application, a headless CMS stores and delivers content as structured data, typically through an API (Application Programming Interface). The “head” in “headless” refers to the front-end or presentation layer, while the “headless” part means that this front-end is decoupled from the content management system.

Contentful is a headless CMS, that follows a concept called content modeling for you to define content creation and distribution.

Challenges using a headless CMS like Contentful to manage a KB
Setting up to manage the KB is tedious
API Docs
AI Capabilities

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.

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

- 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.

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.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

GET STARTED

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.

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.

Users 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

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.

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.

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.

Final remarks

While headless CMS offers flexibility and control over your Knowledge Base content, they also require careful planning, development resources, and ongoing maintenance to overcome the challenges associated with decoupling content from the presentation layer. It is particularly valuable in scenarios where the same content needs to be delivered to multiple platforms and devices with distinct presentation layers. However, it also requires more development effort to create custom front ends, making it well-suited for projects with specific design and user experience requirements.

Evaluating your specific needs and resources is essential when considering a headless CMS for your Knowledge Base.

Document360 is one of the most sought-after tools if you are looking for a comprehensive knowledge-based solution. Your cost of customer services can be significantly reduced by allowing your users to leverage self-help using a knowledge base that offers quick responses to their queries.

Once you explore Document360, you will appreciate the rich features that simply empower your content management teams.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

GET STARTED

The post Headless CMS Contentful vs. Document360 appeared first on Document360.

BetterDocs (WordPress) vs Document360: Which is better for knowledge base management?

Arunkumar Kumaresan — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 06:30:22 +0000

Organizations looking to manage their online documentation or knowledge bases for their products and services to support their customers and employees are left with too many platforms and tools in the market. Some organizations use WordPress as a web content management and intend to use the available plugins. If you are one such organization thinking of using one of the widely used WordPress plugins – BetterDocs, to manage your online knowledge base, we recommend you read this blog.

You can use such plugins and leverage the WordPress platform; you may perceive having several advantages. You should assess if configuring and maintaining such plugins, which still are not feature-rich and demand WordPress skills, really outweigh using ready-to-use software like Document360, which could help you to establish and maintain your content in no time at a lower operational cost than depending on WordPress skills and letting you focus on your core business.

Introduction

Businesses are widely considering improving their customer and employee experience. In this thriving era of digitalization, people seek information and omnichannel support. Businesses prioritize the need to make information available online about their products and services.

One of the practices is to use WordPress to build a full-fledged business website to a simple blog and even WordPress as a knowledge base that serves information about the products on the website. It becomes difficult to manage as the content grows and to meet the internet nuances to make your content relevant a customer searches.

As technology and practices evolve, organizations understand the need for better online content management tools. Organizations that use WordPress started using specialized plugins like BetterDocs, to manage their knowledge base.

In one of our previous blogs, Using WordPress as Knowledge Base, we discussed the various aspects of using the WordPress platform to manage your knowledge base and how an enterprise-grade, ready-to-use knowledge base software like Document360 will be more advantageous.

In this blog, we shall discuss the potential advantages of Document360 over a specific WordPress plugin BetterDocs to manage the knowledge base.

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that helps your customers and employees find answers to their support questions by themselves.

Knowledge bases also have evolved to make the information readily available not only as web pages but also through different channels by integrating with chatbots and ticket deflectors by automatically providing relevant answers to the support tickets even before the support agents pick up the tickets.

What is BetterDocs plugin in WordPress?

BetterDocs is one of the widely used WordPress plugins that helps businesses to create & organize their documentation page and manage their knowledge base. It provides basic capabilities that facilitate their content management teams with document authoring and management.

Why should Document360 be considered compared to BetterDocs?

Suppose your business is extensively using WordPress for other purposes. Consider using one of the widely used plugins for managing knowledge bases, which is just another online content. WordPress is built with too many other web content capabilities, and managing knowledge bases is one of the capabilities. Though the plugins look good, they may only serve a very fundamental purpose; as your content grows, it is very likely as your product & services and your content management teams grow, you may be challenged with the limited capabilities.

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

Getting started

To get started with the BetterDocs knowledge base, you should have a paid subscription to WordPress. BetterDocs is a plugin in the WordPress ecosystem and is provided by one of the leading WordPress-based product companies.

Once the plugin is installed, you may have to proceed with a series of configurations and setup before you can start authoring articles. License management and activation is another process you may have to follow if you intend to use the PRO version.

Your hosting options for the Knowledge base through BetterDocs depend on the hosting configuration of your WordPress site.

Getting started with Document360 is super easy. You just need to sign up and start authoring your articles immediately. Your knowledge base is available literally in minutes.

Interested in Document360 Knowledge base? Schedule a demo with one of our experts

Book A Demo

WordPress expertise required

BetterDocs, as a WordPress plugin, will need WP developers to configure and manage the knowledge base, especially when setting up, making any changes like themes, creating, publishing, and maintaining it.

Document360 doesn’t require any such technical staff. It is built with content writers’ experience as a 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

BetterDocs is a WordPress plugin and is NOT free. Though there is a free plan, the feature set is very basic, and the Pro version has different pricing plans. One must be aware WordPress platform charges are applicable and recurring.

It doesn’t stop there; you may need to manage a team with WordPress developer skills that 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.

User experience

BetterDocs, as a plugin, is deeply integrated into the WordPress platform. So, the user experience focused on knowledge base management will be restricted. Users may need help navigating the WordPress platform, switching pages for content generation, and other configurations. Frequently used options may either be hidden or demand navigation.

In Document360, the portal is built to provide a first-class experience to manage the content of the knowledge base. The options required to manage any resource, like categories or articles at focus, are available on that page.

Information Architecture

Information architecture focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content effectively and sustainably. The “parts” of your knowledge base are made up of the article content and categories. The way these are linked creates a cohesive system in which users can learn to find content independently. Within the limits of WordPress UX, BetterDocs provides content categorization and templates. Content management is restricted to basic capabilities like adding an article to a category, moving to another category, etc. The content structure could be more precise, with different levels and hierarchies. 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

Documentation

Documentation means the capability to author and manage content in your knowledge base. Content writers use sophisticated tools to author content and expect similar experiences.

Most required capabilities like the following are not possible or not directly available.

1. Version management

Content writers would like to fork multiple versions of the document and manage the history of the changes. Version control is not native to BetterDocs; you may need to depend on external plugins to manage versions at the WordPress level.

Document360 provides advanced version management at the article level.

While working with multiple versions of the articles, the authors would require the capability to compare the differences between each of the versions.

2. Localization and Translations

Making your content available in multiple languages is essential if you want your knowledge base to cater to visitors from different locales. BetterDocs leverages WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML) for this purpose, which comes at an additional cost and managing the license.

Document360 provides advanced localization and translation services within the portal itself. You can choose and pay based on the requirements.

Editor

Though BetterDocs leverages one of the best editors in the market, it is not very well integrated within the content management portal. Users will be navigated to a different page altogether, which is not a native experience. Organizing the article within the category and managing them is also not intuitive.

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

Document360 provides a 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. Though BetterDocs leverages the pending review capability of the editor, more is needed. Workflows in Document360 create various stages or checkpoints and help track an article/category page from the initial draft (New article) to a published one.

Users & Security

BetterDocs leverages the roles and user access management within the WordPress platform. This may be insufficient.

Document360 on the other hand, has meticulously developed user management and security capabilities.

1. Team collaboration

2. 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 BetterDocs. Document360 allows you to configure this at the user level and to create roles and assign access policies.

3. Secure access through Readers & Groups configuration

Though you can set the access level for an article, whether it is public or private, in BetterDocs, it is not intuitive. 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.

WordPress can be open to access or restricted, but 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.

Backup and Restore

BetterDocs leverages backup and restore capabilities that are available within the WordPress ecosystem. It may require further configurations or integration with other services or site hosting providers.

Document360 provides best-in-class backup and restore capabilities that are native to the tool and better auditing focused on the knowledge base content. You can back up and restore to the required point in no time.

Integrations and Extensions

You may want to expose your rich knowledge base to visitors through various tools and channels. For this, you will need integration to make that information access seamless. BetterDocs doesn’t have extensive support to share their content. You may need to use available plugins that will help you expose the WordPress content.

Document360 has integration to hundreds of external tools and services that work hand in hand with your existing applications.

Help center capabilities

One critical use case of the knowledge base is instantaneously providing your support Though BetterDocs does provide live search capabilities, it is a reader experience. This doesn’t make the content available to your support agents.

Document360 integrates with your existing help desk, analytics, commenting, chat, and translation products both ways.

API Docs

As a knowledge base, you may not only restrict to provide general content but also API-related information about your products and services. BetterDocs doesn’t provide API documentation capabilities.

AI capabilities

Almost all products and services are now considering AI features. WordPress platforms and editors are also experimenting with AI tools. BetterDocs, as such, has not released any AI features.

These features are seeing faster adoption with our existing customers.

The above-discussed features are just a few to compare Document360 directly with BetterDocs. Once you explore Document360, you will appreciate the rich features that simply empower your content management teams.

Final remarks

On the face of it, given your alternatives with WordPress, it may look like a costlier option. Still, if you can start using it and experience the focus on knowledge base management, you will appreciate the value for the money.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

GET STARTED

The post BetterDocs (WordPress) vs Document360: Which is better for knowledge base management? appeared first on Document360.

Pros and Cons of Custom Knowledge base

Arunkumar Kumaresan — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 05:42:35 +0000

Organizations looking to manage their online documentation or knowledge bases for their products and services to support their customers and employees are left with too many platforms and tools in the market. Some organizations intend to build content management tools for this purpose on their own. If you are one such organization thinking of building a custom knowledge base software, we recommend you read this article.

Though you can build a custom knowledge base software that is tailor-made for you and has good control over the software, you may perceive having several advantages. You should assess, if building this software really outweighs using ready-to-use software, that could help you to establish and maintain your content in no time at a lower operational cost than building a custom software and letting you focus on your core business.

Introduction

There are a lot of practices and tools that keep evolving to provide better services to customers. One of the earlier practices was to host static web pages with information about the products on the website. It becomes challenging to manage as the content grows and to meet the internet nuances to make your content relevant when searched by a customer.

As technology and practices evolve, organizations understand the need for better online content management tools and consider various possibilities. One of the practices is to use self-service knowledge bases.

What is a knowledge base?
Why do businesses need a knowledge base?
What is custom knowledge base software?
Advantages of a custom knowledge base software
Drawbacks of using a custom knowledge base software
Should I build a custom knowledge base software?

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that helps your customers and employees find answers to their support questions by themselves.

Knowledge bases also have evolved to make the information ready-to-use available not only as web pages but also through different channels by integrating with chatbots and ticket deflectors by automatically providing relevant answers to the support tickets even before the support agents pick up the tickets.

Why do businesses need a knowledge base?

Help your customers and employees help themselves. Customer experience and happiness are of paramount importance for any business to the retain goodwill of its customers. It is very important to allow your customers to help themselves by providing them with immediate knowledge without reaching out to your support team directly through chat email or phone.

A very well-organized and documented knowledge base will provide immediate solutions to most of your customer queries.

If you appreciate the importance of helping your customers with online content about your products and services, then you can appreciate the need for an online Knowledge base.

Though there are a lot of platforms and tools available to manage content online, many organizations still intend to build knowledge base software by themselves to manage their content.

Check out how Panaya improved customer documentation with Document360

What is custom knowledge base software?

Custom knowledge base software is a specialized software application or system that is designed and developed to create, manage, and organize a unique repository of information, data, or knowledge tailored to the specific needs of an organization, project, or application. This software allows users to store, access, search, and retrieve information relevant to their domain, industry, or purpose.

Before building a custom knowledge base software, any organization should well assess the need to build it by themselves, the advantages, and the challenges they bring while building the software.

Advantages of a custom knowledge base software

Building a custom knowledge base software may be perceived to offer some advantages.

Software that is tailor-made to your needs

Custom software is designed to match your organization’s specific knowledge management requirements. The features can be built to connect to your existing workflows, data structures, and business processes.

Most of the ready-to-use knowledge base software, like Document360, that are available in the market have capabilities to integrate with numerous standard applications that you may be using already or expose APIs and webhooks that can be integrated into your existing workflows.

Reduced dependency on the external software vendor

The software is well under the control of your organization, and you are not dependent on any external vendors for the licenses, necessary feature inclusions, enhancements, upgrades, etc.

Some enterprise-grade software like Document360 already have a rich set of features and are ready to enhance or build a new set of features that align with the interests of a large set of customers. Managing licenses for the software is now made easy through various subscription models. They offer dedicated technical support, training, and documentation to assist organizations in setting up and using their software effectively.

Build only the features that are required for your needs

More often, you may not use all the features that come with the ready-to-use available software. You may be paying for the features that you may not use, or you may have to upgrade to a different license for some of the features you need that are available only in a different pricing model.

You may not find one software that suits all your needs. The features may be available in different products, and it doesn’t serve a purpose to buy multiple software.

This is a trade-off you may need to make, if one of the ready-to-use available software meets most of your requirements, is it valuable enough to completely build a new solution on your own? Instead, just subscribe to the ready-to-use available software and get started.

Long-term cost savings

While initial development costs may be higher than using ready-to-use software, custom solutions can offer long-term cost savings by reducing the need for costly workarounds or frequent software changes.

In reality, the operational cost and managing a team to maintain this software in the long term proves to be very costly.

Interested in Document360 Knowledge base? Schedule a demo with one of our experts

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Drawbacks of using a custom knowledge base software

Building custom knowledge base software can be complex and challenging. While it offers several advantages, it also comes with specific challenges that organizations must.

Software development lifecycle

Requirements gathering, program management and delivery, and defining and documenting the specific knowledge management needs of your organization can be challenging.

You may have to start from scratch to capture requirements, technology, and right development tools, and on-time delivery. As you build it, you may find it challenging if things are not delivered on time. Misunderstood or unclear requirements can lead to a system that doesn’t fully meet your needs.

By using pre-built solutions, organizations can significantly reduce the time it takes to implement a knowledge base. This can be critical when responding to time-sensitive needs.

User interface design and customization

Creating an intuitive and user-friendly interface can be challenging. Design considerations, user testing, and ongoing improvements are necessary to ensure usability.

While customization is an advantage, it can also be a challenge. Balancing flexibility with usability and maintaining consistency can be tricky.

Expertise in building software

Domain expertise

Knowledge-based practice is evolving as a domain. Acquiring the necessary domain expertise can be time-consuming and may involve collaboration with subject matter experts.

Technical expertise

Besides talent for your core products and services, identifying the right technical talent and managing them to build and maintain this custom software is an overhead.

Use of the right technology

Not all the capabilities required for building this software can be custom-built, you may have to consider using 3rd party services for different purposes like

- Advanced search capabilities to provide instant and relevant information.
- Translation services to make your content available in multiple languages.
- Data analytics services to assess content delivery and reader behavior.
- Any AI-related capabilities

The development practices and the dependent tools or services you end up using can be wildly outdated and inappropriate for a modern knowledge management system. You may be using clunky search features or struggling with knowledge distributed over many repositories.

Application hosting and maintenance

It is not as simple as that to host a knowledge base software like a normal website. It has at least two major modules

- Portal for your content writers’ team to create and maintain content.
- A site where the content is accessible to the end readers

Both these demand hosting and maintenance with a different set of requirements like

- Content replication
- High Availability
- Backup and restore.
- Disaster Recovery

Solutions like Document360 include built-in backup and disaster recovery features, ensuring that data is protected in case of unexpected events. It also offers a private hosting feature for large enterprises.

Application performance and scalability

Optimizing the performance of your custom knowledge base software, especially as data volume grows, can be challenging. This may involve fine-tuning database queries and system architecture.

Solutions like Document360 are designed to scale, allowing organizations to expand their knowledge bases as their needs grow. This scalability can accommodate increased data volumes and user loads.

Integrations to external systems

Integrating the custom knowledge base with other software systems and tools in your organization may require developing and maintaining APIs and connectors.

Document360 has numerous connectors to integrate with industry-leading solutions in the help center, customer support, customer relationship, customer experience, and team collaboration categories.

Data quality and management

Accuracy and reliability

Ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the information in the knowledge base is crucial. Data quality issues, such as errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies, can lead to incorrect or misleading information.

Knowledge bases require regular updates to stay current. Developing and maintaining processes for data monitoring, validation, and updating can be resource-intensive.

Your software should have the capability to assess the relevance and structuring of the data and recommendations for regular updates.

No information architecture

Creating a custom knowledge base software may lead to oversight of the Information Architecture beyond the initial setup. Users will hit your knowledge base and be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of unstructured information presented in quite a basic way. Having too much content, especially unstructured, means your knowledge base will be worse than useless.

Non-indexed contents

If you don’t build your software with proper indexing capabilities, search queries will be difficult, you won’t be able to easily browse the content, or ultimately find what you need. This limits the search capabilities still further.

Knowledge base capabilities

The software should be built capable enough to, not necessarily limited to

- Enable Information structure through categorization, replication, and accessible hierarchy.
- Enable collaboration between the content writers, allowing multiple users to contribute, review, and update content. This fosters knowledge sharing and collective intelligence.
- Define user permissions like draft writers, reviewers, and publishers.
- Enable workflows to manage content creation till publishing.
- Version control and management

The point of a knowledge base is not precisely to ‘share knowledge’, but rather to help users to accomplish tasks or solve problems related to your product that you have previously defined.

Solutions like Document360 knowledge base software often come with features and functionalities that have been tested and refined by numerous users and organizations. This can provide confidence in the software’s capabilities.

Document360 is used by 1000+ organizations and a significant portion of them with enterprise licenses.

Security, privacy, and compliance

Protecting sensitive information within the knowledge base is critical. Developing robust security measures to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches is essential.

Knowledge bases should include access control features, enabling organizations to restrict access to sensitive information and protect data privacy and security.

Compliance with legal and ethical considerations, such as data privacy laws and intellectual property rights, is essential and may require legal expertise.

Solutions like Document360 knowledge base are designed with compliance in mind, helping organizations adhere to industry-specific regulations and standards.

Cost and Resource Management

Custom software development can be resource-intensive, both in terms of finances and personnel. Managing these resources effectively is crucial to staying on budget and meeting deadlines.

You may have to manage licenses for the development tools, hosting charges, multiple environments, upgrades, migrations, and deployments.

Ready-to-use solutions typically have lower initial costs compared to custom software. Organizations can save on development and implementation expenses, making it cost-effective.

Should I build a custom knowledge base software?

Your goal should be to help users accomplish tasks or solve problems related to your product that you have previously defined. It involves having an idea of the customer journey, and pain points with your product.

You must prioritize addressing your customer problems by focusing on your core products and services rather than spending time on building custom software.

Business leaders are interested in creating a Knowledge Base to share documentation with their customers, partners, vendors, and stakeholders that includes dynamic customization within one Platform.

That’s where a SaaS knowledge base comes in.

What is a SaaS Knowledge base? Why is it better?

A SaaS knowledge base is ready-to-use software or gets started with a minimal configuration. This allows organizations to establish a knowledge base quickly, which can be especially beneficial for addressing urgent information needs.

A SaaS knowledge base software like Document360 provides a truly unique way to manage documentation and customize content. Having a Knowledge Base like Document360 is a way for your organization to take knowledge management and customization to a new level.

SaaS knowledge bases like Document360 offer several advantages for organizations looking to implement knowledge management systems quickly and efficiently.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

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The post Pros and Cons of Custom Knowledge base appeared first on Document360.

Pros and Cons of Docusaurus as a Documentation tool

Arunkumar Kumaresan — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:55:29 +0000

Many documentation teams are interested in Docusaurus, especially if they are documenting a software product. Docusaurus is very exciting for teams who want the flexibility of using an open-source tool, and utilizing open-source software may even be mandatory for some particular organizations.

However, there is a reason why many organizations opt for SaaS applications like Document360, which is a full-fledged knowledge base designed to help your team write, review and publish online documentation. We want to present to you why many teams are choosing Document360 over Docusaurus.

The main difference to consider between Docusaurus and Document360 is that Docusaurus is a static site generator while Document360 is a knowledge base. Both are used for documentation, and each has different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to implementation.

For example, in Docusaurus, you can access the software code as it is released as open source, while in Document360, the software code is proprietary. With Docusaurus, you host it yourself, while Document360 is hosted for you.

What is Docusaurus?
What Does Docusaurus Offer as a Knowledge Base?
- Advantages of Docusaurus
- Drawbacks of using Docusaurus
Static Site Generators Versus SaaS Knowledge Base
What is a SaaS Knowledge Base? Why is it Better?
The Advantages of a SaaS Knowledge Base like Document360

What is Docusaurus?

Docusaurus is an open-source, freely available static site generator (SSG) developed by the team behind Facebook and built on React. Docusaurus is used to create websites with content written in Markdown and can be considered especially suitable for teams looking to publish documentation.

As long as you have the development resources, teams are drawn towards Docusaurus because it is easy to set up, and your technical writers can focus on creating content. It’s integrated with GitHub, so you can ensure that your documentation is synced with your software releases.

Some may think that you can’t go far wrong when a powerful solution is free, but the reality is that you really do get what you pay for. Open-source software isn’t the kind of tool where you can sign up and get up and running since it requires development resources to install and maintain.

What Does Docusaurus Offer as a Knowledge Base?

You can use Docusaurus to create beautiful documentation sites that will serve content to internal or external users. With Docusaurus, you have the satisfaction of hand-coding your site in ReactJS using the themes available in Docusaurus. Docusaurus offers advanced features and plugins to extend the functionality of your documentation site.

Docusaurus is a great alternative to content management systems such as WordPress, or wikis such as WikiMedia. What you get out of Docusaurus depends on what you want to achieve since Docusaurus is specifically geared toward documentation.

Advantages of Docusaurus

One of the biggest advantages of Docusaurus is its compatibility with the ‘docs-as-code’ approach to developing documentation. This means that developers or technical writers use the same tools to write and publish the documentation as they would to write the code, keeping the docs close to the codebase.

Since Docusaurus follows the ‘docs-as-code’ approach, it is a developer-oriented tool to build static content for websites, web pages, blogs, and, most importantly, online documentation.

Here are the advantages of Docusaurus:

The ‘docs-as-code’ approach seems to be gaining interest among tech writers and other specialists who write documentation for software products.
Docusaurus is a free-to-use software built by engineers at Meta.
Docusaurus is an open-source tool built on ReactJS that is customizable.
It can be self-hosted and self-managed.
It supports MDX – Markdown language standards and JSX – Javascript XML to write HTML in ReactJS.

These advantages are very convincing for users who want to choose a tool like Docusaurus to manage their documentation sites in-house and avoid the cost of using a SaaS knowledge base.

Schedule a demo with one of our experts to take a deeper dive into Document360

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Drawbacks of using Docusaurus

Limited workflow management

As a part of content management, you would want your content to be created, reviewed, and approved by a designated set of team members for that purpose. You may need to have absolute control over the content that is being published. You can perform these tasks in Docusaurus, though not directly. If you choose GitHub to manage workflow, you have to train your team with GitHub practices.

It is difficult to achieve this level of permission in Docusaurus. Private or mixed documentation permissions are almost unable to achieve unless the deployment platform has those capabilities which come with the challenge of learning those platform-specific capabilities.

Managing the software becomes costly

Technical expertise cost

There is a high cost of technical talent which involves the team managing the code base, application hosting, deployment, CI/CD workflows, and more. Either you need an in-house team with this expertise and have to implement continuous training and replacements to manage the application, or you must outsource it to an external party.

Here is why

Need to identify the right servers, and technical team to manage the infrastructure.
Understand the underlying application architecture, hosting requirements, and client architecture where the content will be deployed.
Proficient in the language – ReactJs and related tech stack.
Ensure the infrastructure meets the demand of the day to workload.
Test the new changes to the application before being deployed to production use.
Content writers in Docusaurus must get familiar with the development IDE kind of experience to manage files and content.

Hosting cost

As mentioned previously, the cost of hosting the content management portal and the public-facing site cannot be overlooked. You have the choice to either deploy physical servers on your premises or subscribe to cloud services. You’ll need to take into account the additional overheads of configuration, server subscription management, and so on.

Also, check out our article on On-Premise Knowledge Base

Customization not easy

Themes make it easy to create a website that fits your brand or project. In Docusaurus, themes are loaded in the exact same way as plugins. Be it any customization like styling and layout, or defining themes, one should know how to write ReactJS code and handle CLI and javascript coding to implement the same. 

Maintenance cost

Any software comes with the continued cost of maintenance, upskilling the technical talent, retention, replacement, server upgrades, bug fixes, release follow-up, and management. Docusaurus is no different, and you’ll find yourself spending the money you saved on a SaaS application in maintaining Docusaurus, plus potentially a whole lot more.

Security is your responsibility

As Docusaurus requires hosting from your side, it’s your responsibility to manage the security aspects, such as cyber-attacks. Any vulnerabilities that arise due to infrastructure, code changes, and upgrades must be considered. Once you have set up your Docusaurus application, whenever Docusaurus releases a patch, your IT team must constantly follow up on the latest updates and releases, make changes to your deployments and test them. You are also responsible for any compliance.

No categories and articles management

While Docusaurus provides a ‘docs-as-code’ approach for content management, some of the key scenarios that you may find challenging in managing through Docusaurus are categories management, user access to categories and articles, the link redirects to handle 404 errors, comparing two different versions of the same article, and previewing the article before publishing.

Lack of analytics 

Once you’ve published your content, it’s undoubtedly important to track your content’s performance in terms of visitors, broken links, feedback on the article, team performance, and so on. Since Docusaurus is just a static site generator, it does not provide such sophisticated analytics features.

No backup and restore

You may want to periodically backup and restore an instance, but Docusaurus does not have this capability out of the box. You will have to implement backup and restore using other tools, which means that permissions and configuration become challenging.

Difficulties with consumer-facing site

Once the content is developed in the content management portal by the technical writers, it is then published online for the end users: i.e. the online visitors access the page over the internet. This is where Docusaurus poses another demand in terms of deploying your content since it depends on hosting sites to publish the developed content.

With Docusaurus, you must deal with choosing the right hosting services to deploy your content. Though you can try Docusaurus using the readily available online sandbox environment, it does not provide a unique trial experience.

Limited search out-of-the-box

Docusaurus supports search capabilities similar to Document360. Both use Algolia for search, but the difference is in Document360 search is included straight out of the box. In Docusaurus, search must be configured which makes the experience challenging.

Disruption to editor experience

The open-source nature and flexibility of Docusaurus may sound exciting at first, but you may often find your efforts diverted from generating and managing content to maintaining the application and infrastructure. Choosing such a tool means you are continually concerned with distributing development resources instead of concentrating on content.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

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Static Site Generators Versus SaaS Knowledge Base

We’ve already covered why you might want to use a static site generator, but we’ve also included some of the limitations of an SSG like Docusaurus. Some organizations are required to use open-source software such as Docusaurus, in which case they may well want to opt for an SSG. But using open-source software like SSGs comes with its own headache, and many organizations don’t have the time or budget for it.

In this instance, SaaS knowledge base software becomes very attractive. With SaaS knowledge base software, you pay for access to their software, and you can immediately start generating documentation in no time!

Knowledge bases like Document360 have been created for teams who want simple publishing workflows, attractive documentation sites, analytics for analyzing performance, automatic backup and security, and more. For a single monthly fee, you can outsource the cost of installing, maintaining, and developing your knowledge base to a highly specialized vendor.

Read on to find out more about what a SaaS knowledge base is.

What is a SaaS Knowledge Base? Why is it Better?

A SaaS knowledge base is very much like a static site generator or content management system, except that it has been developed specifically for online documentation. From the workflow management capabilities in the back end to the slick, public-facing website, knowledge base software is designed for teams who want to rapidly and effectively share knowledge.

A SaaS knowledge base has all the features you need to support a documentation team and enable you to present your content to your end users. There’s no messing about with servers or hosts since knowledge bases like Document360 do it all for you.

If you ever have a big spike in traffic, then Document360 can handle this for you, and every page is automatically indexed for SEO. You can choose whether to author your pages in Markdown or using the WYSIWYG editor since Document360 is adapted for the needs of your team.

The Advantages of a SaaS Knowledge Base like Document360

Now that we understand the differences between a SaaS knowledge base and a static site generator, we’re going to look more closely at the main advantages of investing in the latter.

Custom domains

When you publish your documentation to a knowledge base, you want it to be hosted on the right domain for your company. You might even like the knowledge base to be hosted on a subdomain of your main website, such as help.yourcompany.com. All this is possible in Document360 which allows custom domains for your knowledge base.

Software integrations and extensions

What makes your knowledge base software to the next level is the ability to integrate with other tools to supercharge your documentation workflows. Whether that’s ticketing systems, CRMs, or developer tools, Document360 offers a simple integration with many popular tools using an API key or access token so that you can connect all your favorite apps together.

Versioning and translating

Document360 allows you to create multiple versions of a document, which is particularly useful when you need to update or make changes to existing content. Each version is saved separately, enabling you to maintain a historical record of changes made over time.

Document360 provides an intuitive UI to design and manage the versions and locale structure.

Automatic search and AI

Document360 uses intelligent search to help users find the right documentation at the right time. Advanced querying means you can use keywords and tags to find projects, with AI augmenting the user’s ability to quickly find the appropriate content. It is tolerant of typos and uses Algolia DocSearch to search for content on the platform.

Security

Document360 employs industry-standard encryption protocols to protect your data. This includes encrypting data in transit using SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) and encrypting data at rest using robust encryption algorithms. Document360 is VAPT, SOC2 and GDPR compliant certified.

Round-the-clock support

SaaS knowledge base software like Document360 offers 24/7 support for users of the platform, which you can access through help articles, phone, email or live chat. No question is too big or too small for the Document360 support team and you can ensure that you spend your time writing and publishing articles, not fixing software.

CSS and JavaScript styling

Although you can achieve great-looking documentation using the WYSIWYG editor, Document360 also enables you to use custom CSS and JavaScript to style your knowledge base. With relatively little effort, you can design a highly customized and personalized knowledge base that matches your brand and presents your documentation in the right way.

Final Remarks

Ultimately, choosing an open-source SSG like Docusaurus means taking on a lot of responsibility for development. In the end, you might find your new software becoming a hassle as it drains technical resources when you could simply have gone for a SaaS option like Document360. Docusaurus is great for some teams who need or want to use Open-source software, but Document360 works great out of the box.

With Document360, you are paying for ease of use and the reliability of a product that is following a knowledge base roadmap. As user needs have developed and advanced, so too has our software. We have frequently added features that have been requested by our customers, and Document360 is always evolving to suit your needs. When comparing static site generators like Docusaurus and knowledge bases like Document360, you’ll find there is a big difference.

Document360 offers a great user experience for both technical and non-technical teams alike. Organizations find they can focus on the content rather than messing around with tooling, and then both customers and internal users can benefit. Truly helpful documentation is the result for teams that opt for Document360 as their SaaS knowledge base tool.

Schedule a demo with one of our experts to take a deeper dive into Document360

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The post Pros and Cons of Docusaurus as a Documentation tool appeared first on Document360.

Arunkumar Kumaresan, Author at Document360

Process Implementation – A Comprehensive Guide

Table of Contents

What is Process Implementation?

Benefits of Process Implementation

Structured Workflow

Effective Resource Utilization

Improved Quality by Reducing Errors

Compliance and Risk Mitigation

Promotes Adaptability and Innovation

Enables Businesses to Scale

Steps to Successful Process Implementation

1. Establish Specific Goals and Objectives

2. Develop a Process Implementation Plan

Components of a Process Implementation Plan

3. Map Out the Risks

4. Acquire the Necessary Tools and Resources

5. Delegate Responsibilities and Tasks

6. Provide Training to the Team

7. Execute and Oversee the Progress of the Implementation

Best Practices of Process Implementation

Alignment through Communication and Feedback

Utilizing Process Documentation Software

Employee Involvement and Training

Continuous Monitoring and Adjustment

Wrapping Up

Document360 Vs Traditional Authoring Tools ( DITA XML)

Table of Contents

Overview of DITA XML

What does DITA offer?

Topic-Based Authoring

Information Reuse

Specialized Information Types

Conditional Text

Multichannel Publishing

Extensibility

Industry Standard

Pros of DITA XML

Cons of DITA XML

Overview of Document360

Key features of Document360

Pros of Document360

Detailed Feature Comparison

Wrapping Up

Detailed Comparison: Salesforce Vs Document360

Table of Contents

Do you use Salesforce for your CRM, and Customer support?

Challenges using Salesforce for your knowledge base requirements

Getting started is not easy

Setting up to manage the KB is tedious

Lightning experience cloud

Digital experience cloud

Object Manager

Website structure

Understanding Salesforce application ecosystem and concepts

Objects

Data categories

Record types

Page layouts

Permission sets

Guest user profile

Expertise required

What should someone look at choosing Document360 than Salesforce for knowledge base?

Ideal User / Customer profiles

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Structure of the user interface

Editing content

Content structure and information architecture

Reader site access

Content management capabilities

Versioning

Article redirection rules

Translations

Workflow management

Users and Security

Working in a team

Content Access

Public or private or mixed access knowledge base

API documentation

AI capabilities