Here are the highlight features of this update 

• Localization (to create multilingual knowledge base) 
• The Drive (single place to manage your knowledge base assets) 
• UI/UX revamp to maintain simplicity

1. Localization 

If you are working with global customers, then there is significant value in maintaining your knowledge base in multiple languages. Document360 now comes with complete localization as a major feature update. By offering your brand experience and support in a language that feels familiar, both existing and potential customers are much more likely to engage with your product and its knowledge base content. 

Localizing your knowledge base and the respective home page would eliminate many obstacles faced by your customers in connecting and understanding your business, as opposed to single language (monolingual) documentation and website.  

We have some advanced features like automatic machine translation using AI engine and also integration with our translation partner (Crowdin) to work with translation automation if required. 

The localization feature would make it seamless for our customers to create a powerful multilingual knowledge base,  watch this short video to see the overall localization capability. 

Give Document360 a try! Signup for a 14 days free trial

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2. Drive 

For a good knowledge base, you will require various assets like images, videos, sometimes PDF, Excel, Word files, but managing these assets is always a challenge. Well, worry no more, cause a new and improved repository for your entire digital assets is here. A major step-up from our existing file manager feature.  

The Drive feature we have shipped will solve this problem by being a central place to keep all your assets well-structured in hierarchical folders and sub-folders. It comes packed with features like tagging, drag and drop, color coding folders, and favorites. Sync, organize, backup, and work with your folders and digital file formats like images, videos, audios, documents, and many other formats.  If you have accidentally deleted any of your assets you can easily restore them from the recycle bin. 

You can upload your digital assets to Drive using the simple interfaces on your Document360 project dashboard. The way the Drive works is similar to the most well-known cloud storage platforms like Google Drive, DropBox, Box etc giving the seamless user experience.

Another short video to understand the full capabilities of The Drive  

3. UI/UX improvements 

One of the positive feedbacks we get from our customers is the clean UI/UX and simplicity of Document360.  

 We pay a lot of attention to keep that promise; every time we add new features we constantly redefine our UI/UX. To accommodate the new features (especially localization) we reworked across the application to improve the usability.  

 Settings Menu 

You’d find the facelift evident starting from the Settings menu. We have added two new menu groups; the Knowledge base assistant and Tools. In the new menu groupings you can find new Menu items like Localization & versioning, Extensions, URL mapping to highlight a few.  

The Knowledge base assistant menu grouping is an enhancement and renaming of the existing In-app assistant.  

A minor improvement in editor settings; now you can choose to show line numbers in the markdown editor. You can enable this option using the toggle in General project settings. 

Documentation controls 

As for the Documentation window, you can observe the article controls on the right which are Article settings, Discussions and View history options have been realigned to make it easily accessible.   

Also the article editor realigns to make room for the Discussion window when you select it. You can work on the article editor simultaneously with the discussions window open side-by-side. 

Bulk operations 

You can observe a lot of improvements and additions in the Bulk operations page. We have added Review required and Hidden articles sorting on the left. Another major update is the addition of the different ‘Filter by’ options. Apart from these, the overall look and feel of this section has been extensively worked on.  

New breadcrumbs 

Now you find project level breadcrumbs at the top section of the window. This would help you easily identify the exact page you’re in and the Menu flow.  

Localization elements 

As localization was a part of our major feature release, you can find elements linked to this across the project.  

Language dropdown 

In the Documentation window, Bulk operation, Home page builder, and Analytic you can find the Language dropdown at the top next to Project version dropdown. You can seamlessly switch between different languages in your project version. 

Localization icon  

We have added the  icon in all the places where localization plays a part. You can find this in

• Settings menu items – Localization & versions and Design & Navigation 
• Documentation – Need translation at the top of article editor and along with the article status indicator 

Home page builder 

Based on popular demand from our customer, we have enhanced the Home page customization. You can design and publish individual home pages from each of your project versions.  

Not just for versions, you can also design and publish individual home page designs for the different languages too. 

Conclusion

The localization feature comes as a treat to many of our customers who were waiting for this feature. This feature adds a good value proposition to the knowledge base software, as it opens new opportunities for our customers who are already into the global market or just starting out. And the Drive feature offers our customers the experience they would get from any major heavy weight file management platforms like Google or Microsoft.  

Apart from the major releases we also add minor enhancements to existing features and improve the performance very regularly. You can stay up-to-date with our monthly release updates.  

The post What’s new in Document360? – August 2020 Product Update appeared first on Document360.

Standard Operating Procedures or SOP’s is a fancy way of saying document your day to day processes to make it repeatable. Inside your organization, you would have called it with different terms like Process documents, Blueprints, Business Playbooks, Training Manuals, Employee Handbook  and User guides.

But at the end of the day, it all solves the same problem of educating your employees or customers about a certain process.

Standard operating procedures will be present everywhere within your organization whether you are small or big. The bigger the organization, the number of SOP’s will increase significantly. It is a good practice to bring the culture in the organization to document your routine tasks so that the knowledge is not residing in someone’s head and it’s available for anyone to execute.

Types of Standard Operating Procedure

Standard operating procedures can come in multiple forms, it comes down to common sense and how that process can be represented. Certain SOP’s can be in a simple documentation format (online, Word, PDF), some could be in the form of Checklists, some could be in the form of diagrams and flowcharts.

The result is how can we educate users in the shortest possible time to make them perform that activity reliably and consistently.

As author Michael Gerber famously wrote in the book E-Myth

“You need to be working on your business, not in your business.”

Standard Operating Procedures are investments

The amount of time we spent on producing SOP’s might look overwhelming at the beginning, but definitely over the period, you’ll start seeing the benefits.

It’s always easy to just carry on performing the activities without documenting it or educating someone else to do it. Especially founders and senior managers thought process will be something down the lines of

1.  “I know better than anyone else, no one can perform this task”
2. “I can quickly perform this activity within 10-15 minutes rather than spending 2 to 4 hours documenting/explaining the process to someone.”
3. “I wouldn’t ask my people to do anything that I wouldn’t do.”

If you want to scale your business and make it into a process-oriented organization, you need to come out of the above thought process.

Any complicated tasks need to be split into smaller tasks so it can be performed by anyone without knowing too many dependant systems. The tasks that might look small 10-15 minutes will all quickly add up and eat your day.

Example: a real cost of a 15 minutes task will be over 45 mins, time allocation on both sides of the task, and the cost of context switching. Soon you’ll be bombarded with too many such 10-15 minutes tasks.

It’s always better to create the SOP, train, and empower your team and then to step back.

SOPs first identify and summarize a task, describe its purpose, and specify when and by whom it is to be performed while simultaneously defining uncommon or specialized terms and addressing potential concerns (e.g., necessary equipment, health, and safety, etc.).

They then describe the sequential procedures to be followed, often utilizing activity checklists and graphic illustrations (e.g., charts, tables, photographs, diagrams, etc.) to help ensure that the procedures are being performed accurately and in order.

Also Read: 10 Top Standard Operating Procedure Software (SOP) for 2023

Bring SOPs as Organisation culture

Any business should build the culture of running the business in a more systematic and process-driven way despite the size of the organization. The sooner you bring this culture into your organization your business will get streamlined and scale.

It’s easier said than done, but you can take baby steps and gradually improve the culture of constantly transforming the activities into processes.

Imagine every quarter you pick up a set of repeated activities you wanted to document and convert it into Standard Operating Procedures. Bring this culture across all of your departments Admin Operations, Recruitment, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Engineering.

Let’s imagine you don’t have any SOPs, this could be your first quarter initiative, just start with 2-3 SOP’s for each department and bring it as a culture in the organization to continuously look at what activities people are doing in each department and document it.

Admin & Operations

• SOP – Leave approval process
• SOP – Vacation policy

Recruitment

• SOP – How to use LinkedIn Recruiter
• SOP – Initial screening call procedure

Marketing

• SOP – How to publish a new blog
• SOP – Checklist for social media banner images

Sales

• SOP – How to qualify the inbound lead
• SOP – How to handle pricing objection

Engineering

• SOP – How do you request for code review?
• SOP – How to resolve merge conflicts?

Customer Success

• SOP – Standard set of questions for first customer success call
• SOP – How to segment customers for customer success calls

Accounts / Licensing

• SOP – How to refund payment in Stripe
• SOP – How to follow up on unpaid invoices

Most of these SOP documents shouldn’t take more than a few hours to one or two days. But once done, you can imagine the structure and power it can give over the long run.

Also Read: Organizational Silos: Overview, How to Break Down & Its Impact

You can use a tool like Document360 (or even Google Docs) to easily get started. Here is a screenshot from Document360

 

How to write an effective Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

There is no official standard that will teach you how to write an SOP. But there are some steps you can follow that will help you to organize your thoughts and plan the most effective path to standardizing your procedures.

1. Define the scope

Before starting any SOP document clearly define the scope of the document, your SOP must solve a specific problem and easy to understand. Example: “Employee onboarding”, the scope of this document is very clear just by looking at the title. The document should only cover the essential details about this title.

2. Gather information

Once the scope is defined gather as much information as possible. Most of the time a Standard Operating Procedure document is created to streamline existing work. So you’ll know exactly how that’s done currently, once you have all the data it’s easy to put it together in a structured format.

3. Choose the format

Decide the best possible format for the topic. The majority of the cases it will be either documenting the process in the document (Document360, Google Docs, Microsoft Word) or in the form of Checklist.

4. Complete the draft

At this stage, you are good to complete the first draft of the SOP.

5. Review with stakeholders

It’s important to get the buy-in from all the stakeholders involved for that specific SOP. If we take the same example “Employee onboarding” you might have a few departments and people involved in that process, your Recruitment team, HR team, IT assets team, and Facilities team.

So everyone should clearly understand the document and provide their feedback. You can utilize the “Discussion” feature in Document360 to get reviews and respond to reviews of the Standard Operating Procedure.

6. Publish

Once you get approval from all the stakeholders who are associated with the specific SOP document, you can publish the document in a centralized internal knowledge base that’s accessible to everyone. If you are using Document360, the SOP is already in a centralized knowledge base, you might also use Microsoft SharePoint (if written in Microsoft Word) or Google Docs.

7. Promote

Sometimes it’s not enough to just create and store the SOP document in a central repository, you need to actively promote that content to all the stakeholders. One of the biggest challenges with SOP is often the SOP documents are left unnoticed and kills its original purpose.

So you need a mechanism to constantly make sure it’s used actively. Document360 “Notification” feature can be used for this purpose, both for initial publish and also constantly notifying users whenever there are an amendment and new version.

8. Review and Amend

This is pretty standard. Most organizations don’t look back at their processes after defining them, having a “don’t fix what’s not broken” attitude. More often than not, though, there are a lot of benefits to be gained from improving the process. Document360 comes with a few in-built features to address this “Article Versioning”, “Review Reminders”

9. Analyze usage metrics

First, you need to define the right metrics. You can’t improve something you can’t measure. You need to constantly check the adaption of the published SOP documents. Imagine after spending so much effort and producing an SOP document and after 3 or 6 months you noticed no one is using it, it is such a waste of effort.

Document360 Analytics features help to see key metrics like how many visits, leading SOP article, search terms used to find SOP’s, Feedback comments, etc

Formats of Standard Operating Procedures

All SOPs have in common is the systematization of the individual steps performed in the implementation of a repetitive task to create an overall quality system. There is no one size fits all. Similarly, there is no one tool fits all.

The end goal of Standard Operating procedures is to make sure the end-users understand the procedures well to perform their activity. Try to use the tools you are already using and complement them with tools that will achieve the goal.

Let’s take a look at some of the formats of Standard Operating Procedures

User Documents

Standard Operating Procedures are represented as standard documents in the majority of the cases. This will be more educational helping the employees and users to understand a process in a systematic and repeatable way.

Examples: How to perform code review, How do you set up a new vendor in the banking system, Employee onboarding, and exit procedures. For this scenario, you can use either Document360, Google Docs, Microsoft Word (along with SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or Confluence, etc.) I’ll cover later why Document360 is a better option in this case.

Check Lists (Business Process Automation)

This is one of the common forms of SOPs. The majority of the time a procedure will have a predefined set of activities someone needs to perform in sequence.

Examples: Blog publishing, pushing a new release into production, QA final sign-off process, and so on. For this scenario, you need to use some Business Process Automation (BPA) tools like Kissflow, Tallyfy, Process.st, etc

Infographics

This is similar to user documents, but some processes are better explained using powerful graphics for users to understand. Here is a great example: How not to look ugly on a webcam you could have put these steps either on a document form or checklist form, but creating infographics makes it powerful and engaging for the users. There are various infographics creating tools like Canva, Piktochart, Venngage

Diagrams/Flowcharts

In some cases, the standard operating procedures will be a flow of logical steps that can be better represented in the form of flowchart or diagrams. Example: How to escalate a problem, Lead flow from signup to sales. Tools to create flow charts /diagrams Lucidchart, Creatly, Whimsical

Wiki/Collaboration

In certain cases, where a lot of people involved in updating the standard operating procedures regularly, then an Internal Wiki or a Collaboration tool will be ideal.

Example: Daily/weekly agile stand-up meetings, Team meetings, etc. In our case, we use Microsoft OneNote for our daily/weekly engineering team meetings, where all the developers and testers update their progress. And for one to one meetings, we follow the Level 10 format from Traction with a standard structure across the company which is maintained as Wiki in Microsoft Teams. You can also use modern tools like Notion.so, Coda

 

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

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Structure, Template, and Categorization of an SOP document

SOP Structure:

The standard operating procedures on its own should have a standard operating procedure for how each document will be structured.

• Title
• Article Metadata
• Executive summary
• Glossary terms
• Table of Content
• Main Content

SOP Template: 

Having a well-defined structure (SOP Template) for your standard operating procedures brings consistency across all your documents. The above points are just for your guidelines and you can tweak it according to your company fit. Here is an example.

Document360 single sourcing feature can be used to define this standard repeatable feature in every SOP document.

Categorization

Over some time when your company gets matured with processes and many SOP’s soon, you’ll start seeing a new problem coming, grouping/structuring/organizing them in a well-defined way so people can find it and use it easily.

What’s the point of writing an SOP document if no one can find it or use it. Put a plan in place how you wanted to create an organization level or department level (if you are big) category structure in place to organize your SOP’s

Document360 can help you to achieve this by a couple of features organize using multiple projects or have a clear folder structure and hierarchy using the category manager.

Benefits of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)

SOPs can also provide many benefits, such as minimizing the chance of miscommunication, affording comparability, and ensuring regulatory compliance. Here is the list of tangible benefits of having well structure SOPs

• Enforcing best practices
• Making processes scalable
• Onboarding employees
• Ensuring regulatory and standards compliance
• Preventing process failures
• Reducing errors and corrective actions
• Improving communication (with SOPs, everyone is on the same page)

If you are looking at a long term view, as a business owner, at some point, you might want to sell your company. Just like your client list and products, your Standard Operating Procedures can add value to your company. Well documented routines that are being used sends a positive message to the future owner that your company is organized and can run without you.

Also Read: 10 Benefits of Creating SOP for Your Call Center

Our example scenarios

To understand better why SOP’s are required in an organization, let’s take a couple of real-world examples from our own experience.

Example 1: Recruitment and Hiring Process (Organisation level)

When we were smaller we didn’t have a dedicated recruitment team, onboarding team, HR department, and the IT department. Pretty much all the tasks related to hiring and onboarding were done by either the founder (me) or one or two senior people in the organization.

Today we are close to 130 employees and with all the above-mentioned departments in place in total, there are about 8 people involved in bringing a new employee into the organization.

This is were standard operating procedures (SOP) becomes crucial to make the process seamless, giving clear guidelines on each and everyone’s responsibilities, making it repeatable and reducing dependencies on any individual.

The way we do it at Kovai.co (parent company of Document360) is by clearly defining the SOPs. As I mentioned earlier, Standard Operating Procedures can be represented in various formats.

In our case, it’s a combination of Microsoft Teams with various channels, policy and procedure manual documents in Document360 along with flow charts (from LucidCharts).

 

As you can see from the above picture, for every step in the recruitment process right from finding talent to the exit of the employee it’s well structured. There is a different Microsoft Channel to list the roles (represented with D prefix) by the department.

Once hired we have set of Standard Operating procedures like an approval process, onboarding process (email creation, laptop allocation, etc), performance feedback after 3-6 months probation, employment confirmation, and if someone resigns, the exit process (represented with T prefix).

The only way you can scale a business is by clearly defining your standard operating procedures and constantly tweaking and improving it as your organization grows.

Example 2: Customer Success Routines

At Kovai.co we have dedicated customer success teams for each of our products. Their primary job is to book appointments with our existing customers and have periodic calls every 3-6 months once to understand product usage, get any feedback, and pass it on to the engineering team.

We have a well-defined process and standard operating procedure for this activity, here is a real sample from our existing Document360 internal SOP project.

As you can see the instructions are clearly defined to the detail “try to keep the content in a single line”, “UK Time”, so if we bring someone new to the team, it will take a few hours to 1 or 2 days to get up to speed on the process.

Without these SOP’s the team won’t be co-ordinated and they will all record in whatever way they think is appropriate. Again this process evolved inside the company over time.

Challenges adopting Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

As I mentioned earlier in the document, bringing SOP’s into the organization is a big investment and a cultural change, which needs to be addressed in a systematic way for the success of the implementation.

Some of the common challenges you’ll experience adaption SOP’s

• Outdated SOP’s
• Non-involvement of employees
• Missing Feedback loop
• Easy to consume

Outdated SOP’s:

Your SOP documents are living documents. It’s not typically done and dusted (the majority of the cases). Hence it will require constantly updating them so it’s not outdated. An outdated document is a useless document.

If SOP’s are not reflecting the current working process (even a slight deviation) then it becomes useless. You can easily address this problem by using the Document360 Review Reminder feature you can set a reminder once the article is published to make it stale after a period. Example 3 months, 6 months, etc. You can then review, amend, and republish it.

Non-involvement of employees:

This is another major challenge, if nobody is using the published SOP’s then it’s pretty much useless. You need to have a process to constantly review the metrics, usage of SOP’s and do some push (ex: highlighting it meetings, taking it to senior management to give a push, etc).

Document360 Analytics capability will help you get the metrics highlighting things like views, reads, popular articles, likes, dislikes, etc.

 

Missing Feedback:

 You need to get people (employees) involved to mature your standard operating procedures. If left in the silo then you cannot identify the real challenges in the process.

Document360 can help you solve this problem by giving options for the readers (not stakeholders/reviewers) to give feedback on SOP’s like whether they like/dislike or even give explicit comments about certain sections of the article.

Easy to consume:

The more simple you keep it, the chances of getting adapted becomes more real.

Document360 provides two different interfaces a Knowledgebase management portal for people who write/manage standard operating procedures and a simple Knowledgebase site focused on readers with great search, category visualization, and feedback options.

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

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Why Document360 for Standard Operating Procedures?

Even though you can use standard tools like Google Docs or a bunch of Microsoft Word documents stored in a central shared location. Using Document360 will make your life easy and takes away a lot of pain points I addressed throughout the document.

Let me highlight a couple of challenges with examples

You might want to restrict a specific category of SOP’s to only selected people (Ex: HR team got sensitive SOP documents), you can easily achieve it using Document360’s category level access right using security groups and reader accounts. Even though you can do this with Google Docs and Microsoft SharePoint it becomes a bit more tedious to manage it.

Separate interfaces for Editors and Readers. Editors will require a bit of sophistication while creating SOP’s like rich editor, analytics, category manager, etc, whereas, Readers only need a good interface to read the content in any device with a good real-time search.

Document360 is a better choice to create Standard Operating Procedures.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

• What else should be included in a standard operating procedure format?

  The sop’s title

  A unique SOP identification number

  A date of publication or revision

  The function, organisation, division, to which the SOP applies Names and signatures of people who wrote and authorised the SOP procedures

• What is the purpose of SOP standard operating procedure?

  The goal of a SOP is to ensure that operations are carried out accurately and consistently. It gives precise instructions on how to complete a task so that any team member may complete it correctly every time.

• Why is it important to follow SOPs?

  It gives information for performing a project correctly and consistently in order to meet pre-determined specifications and produce a high-quality end-result.

  SOPs define job stages that aid in the standardisation of products and, as a result, quality. To ensure that processes remain uninterrupted and are completed on time. By adhering to SOPs, you can help to avoid process shutdowns due to equipment failure or other facility damage.

The post How to Write Standard Operating Procedure with Examples & Template appeared first on Document360.

We will give a detailed explanation of why Document360 can be a good alternate to Intercom Articles with a clear and unbiased explanation. 

There is a fundamental difference between Intercom and Document360 that customers need to understand. Intercom is a massive product with a wide variety of offerings. They have solutions for Lead generation, customer engagement, Product Tour, and customer support. Their core offering is on Chat and in-app messaging. For Intercom, their knowledge base solution “Intercom Articles” is a small add-on to support all their main offerings.

Whereas, Document360 is designed as a solution purely to address one problem (very well), providing a great “knowledge base software“. So Document360 will have wider and deeper capabilities when compared to Intercom Articles when it comes to the self-service knowledge base.

Why do I choose Document360, when we already have Intercom?

This question will depend on your knowledge base requirement. If your requirements are straight forward just a simple bunch of documents to support your product written by just one or two people, Intercom Articles will be sufficient. But when you are growing, as your customer base increases your documentation needs will also increase significantly.  You’ll need more control and features.

Here are the few highlighted features that are missing are pretty basic on Intercom Articles. 

Version Control: Your knowledge base will be edited and published by a bigger team (engineering, marketing, support, etc). It’s important to have a complete version history of each knowledge base article, rather than overwriting it. You might lose some good content written by a previous writer. 

Workflow: You will need a level of the approval process. Before content is published someone needs to review and approve it.

SEO:  Your knowledge base is also a good marketing source. If you look at the importance of knowledge base SEO. So you’ll need capabilities like changing the slug (with keywords), meta title, meta description, sitemap, robot.txt, etc.

Realtime Search: Search is THE important aspect of a knowledge base, in Document360 a significant investment is made to make it as good as possible.

Category Manager and Rich Editor: Even though every product in the market will offer these, there is a huge difference in the structure and user experience. How many levels you can go deeper, drag and drop, rename, hide, can you upload videos, code, callouts (like error, warning), etc

Auditing and Notification: As your knowledge base grows, you need to have control of who is doing what in your KB. It shouldn’t be a black box.  ex: Someone deleted an article (it may be a good one generating 100’s of leads or blocking 100’s of customer support emails)

Give Document360 a try! Signup for a 14 days free trial

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Even though it’s handy to have one consolidated tool like Intercom for customer support, customer engagement, and lead generation, sometimes it’s better to pick up best in class relevant tools for each individual requirement. The knowledgebase is something you cannot keep switching, there are implications like losing search engine traffic. So, it’s better to pick the right one at the start, or at least switch it when you start noticing the above-mentioned challenges. 

Please note, Document360 can work together with Intercom, by using Document360 – Intercom application we released in the Intercom App Store. 

Features Comparision

The highlighted points above are pretty much applicable to any customer support product in the market that offers Knowledge Base like ZenDesk, FreshDesk, Help Scout, Crisp, etc.

Now let’s go a bit deeper and compare some of the core features of Document360 and how it differs from Intercom Articles. 

1. Category Management

For a knowledge base, how you structure and manage your categories is very important. One of the big challenges we have noticed on Intercom Articles category management is, it’s pretty hardcoded to only 2 levels. 

Collections > Sections > articles

Collections are top-level buckets like Getting Started, Installing Intercom, Account Management, etc. Here is the screenshot from Intercom’s own Help Center

Each Collection will have a group of Sections (Categories) and each section will have a group of Articles. Here is the screenshot of Sections (categories). 

This structure is not definitely suitable for growing SaaS businesses. You’ll need a flexible category management options like multiple levels of sub-categories. Take an example of the famous Stripe or Microsoft knowledge base

Stripe – category management	Microsoft – Category Management

Also, for the knowledge base, a tree-view structure category view is much better, it provides the full depth of your knowledge base and makes it easy for the readers to navigate between various categories and articles. 

Even though Intercom Articles have a simple 3 layer hierarch it’s still not user friendly to manage it for writers. Articles need to be separately created and then they need to be added to the corresponding collections and sections. When you have 100’s of articles, it could easily become a challenge to manage. 

Document360 provides a complete flexible category management solution. There is no limit on the depth of the sub-categories (we got a soft limit of 6, so people don’t use it in the wrong way). It also comes with rich capabilities like inserting articles, categories easily on a specific level, indicators showing the state of the articles, hide, rename, delete, drag and drop move, etc. 

You can see some real examples of Document360 customers here  Customer.io, Spryker

2. Real-time search with the highlighter

The importance of a great Search in a knowledge base is understood. Every product in the market will claim they have search functionality. However, the quality of the search can vary significantly. It’s the difference between Google and others. 

Even though Intercom Articles comes with a decent search engine, it doesn’t provide real-time search. The user need to enter the search query and click enter, which brings a complete search result page. 

Whereas Document360 comes with a powerful real-time search that returns the key result with highlights within milliseconds. 

Intercom Articles Search

Document360 Search

Search Analytics

Document360 comes with complete search analytics. It’s important to understand the keywords users are searching on your knowledge base, whether they are able to find the content or no results. This will help to improve your knowledge base over time. This is missing in Intercom Articles.

Give Document360 a try! Signup for a 14 days free trial

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3. Version Control

Version control is something very important on your knowledge base once a group of people is updating the content, else you risk content overwrites. 

Intercom Articles don’t come with any version control system. Every time a user edits and amend an article the previous content is simply overwritten, pretty dangerous!

In Document360, you get a full version control system with multiple draft versions, you can easily compare between versions, you can fork a new version from any previous version, and you can even delete unnecessary forked versions (if you have permission). A screenshot from the Document360 article revisions tab, you can clearly see the different revision the article has gone through, and who made the change. 

Document360 also comes with the Difference Viewer to compare the differences between any two revisions – clearly showing new content in green, the deleted portion in Red

 4. Rich Editor

For people who are responsible for creating your knowledge base content, it’s important to give a great editing experience. Intercom Articles comes with a basic HTML editor with a minimal set of options. Being a multi-capability product, it looks like they made the choice to keep the options limited to an absolute minimum. 

But once your knowledge base starts to grow, then you will start seeing the requirements like

• Inserting Code (with language highlighter)
• Inserting callouts (like error, info, warning boxes)
• Internal linking of articles
• Inserting Videos directly (without using embed code)
• Find and replace, etc

Document360 covers all of the above points and one of the unique features of Document360 editing experience is, it comes with two different editor choices. 

• Markdown Editor, and
• WYSIWYG Editor

Markdown editor is a minimalist editor, that helps writers to focus purely on the content and not too much on formatting. You simply need to remember some basic commands and can produce great articles. 80-90% of your articles in your knowledge base will be pretty straight forward content with the standard structure like headers, paragraph text, and lists.

Document360 Markdown editor comes with realtime preview (as you type), and full-blown live preview (with design). 

On the other hand, the WYSIWYG editor is a rich editor that allows you to do pretty much any level of formatting. Like rich tables, font color, background color, etc. 

Document360 allows you to switch between editors at the article level. 

Some nice features on Document360 Editor

• You can add/remove different contributors to the article (can be made publicly visible)
• You can set status indicator like New and Updated articles (and make it automatically go away after certain days)
• Add attachments to the article (ex: PDF, Excel files)
• Complete commenting and discussion between writers

5. SEO Configuration

Your knowledge base can become one of your key content for your SaaS product. It’s important to make sure your customers are able to find the content on search engines like Google. Let’s take an example if someone is searching “how invoices work in stripe“, here is how the results will look

As you can see all the top results are coming directly from the “docs“. In order to achieve this, your knowledge base product must support certain things to make it optimized for search engines.

Intercom Articles don’t provide any options related to SEO.

On the other hand, Document360 comes with a lot of SEO focused features, lets take a quick look

In SEO, your keyword must be present in URL, header, and also important to configure meta-title and description (the description you see on the above search result). You can configure all of them at the article level. In addition, you can also configure exclusions (sometimes maybe you do not want the article to show up in Google)

Document360 also allows you to configure custom Robot.txt and Sitemap.xml files (few advanced SEO items) if in case you need them. 

Give Document360 a try! Signup for a 14 days free trial

Get Started

 

Non-core Features Comparision

All the above 5 points we discussed are really important for a good knowledge base product.

In addition, there are a lot of other features that come with Document360, they are a bit advanced, may not be required by every customer. However, as your product starts to scale and if you wanted to future proof choosing the correct knowledge base product for your SaaS then it will become essential features.

Let’s take a look at 10 advanced features that come in Document360 but not available in the Intercom Articles.

1. Article Review Reminders  – When you publish an article, it’s common the content writers forget about it and never touch it again. Article Review Reminders help you to set a notification to owners after a period (ex: 3, 6 months, etc) to verify and either update the article or mark it with a future date.

2. Auditing and notification – When your knowledge base is maintained by a team of people, it becomes essential to keep track of who is doing what. Document360 audits all the events (you can even configure which ones to record), in addition, you can also configure notification via email, slack, webhook, etc.

3. Security and Roles – Document360 comes with a good security mechanism, you can allocate specific content writers to specific folders. You can define roles like editor, draft writer, etc. Ex: You might want to restrict regular writers from making SEO changes or you might restrict a folder (category) owned by the engineering team from the customer support team.

4. Private Knowledgebase – There may be a scenario, where you wanted to restrict your knowledge base not available in public. Your customers need to login to access it. This is possible in Document360, with complete reader management, including self-service and bulk-import for readers registration

5. Backup & Restore – Document360 does backup on a daily basis, in addition, the users can also back up manually and restore the content from backup all within the portal. If someone in your team messed up your knowledge base, you can simply restore to an older version (like a time machine)

6. The Drive – Imagine having something equivalent of a Google Drive inside your knowledge base, that helps to organize all of your media assets like images, videos, PDF files, etc with a good folder structure. That’s exactly what Docuement360 Filemanger (now The Drive) capability is. Let’s take an example, you wanted to change a screenshot with the new one? The Drive helps you to change it in a central place. 

Give Document360 a try! Signup for a 14 days free trial

Get Started

 

7. Localization and Versions –  Document360 comes with a rich localization capability. It’s really deep and complete implementation. It also allows you to have multiple versions of your knowledge base. Example: You have a live version and your content team is working on the next major upgrade and they wanted to do it in parallel and then switch. The second example, you might have different versions of your product and need a knowledge base to support all the versions (ex: SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2016)

8. Analytics – Document360 comes with rich inbuild analytics that shows various stats like your best performing article, author, category. Search analytics helps you understand the performance of your search in the knowledge base, what queries are used by your users, whether they are able to find the answer or not. Feedback analytics helps you to understand whether your users like/dislike the content and view the comments they left.

9. Home page builder – Document360 comes with drag and drop home page builder. This helps to build a great custom-looking home page for your knowledge base without any developer’s help. 

10. Variable and Snippets – Single sourcing and content reuse is a major thing when you have a sophisticated knowledge base. You do not want to copy & paste the content in multiple places. Variables and Snippets help you to achieve this. There are two use cases, a simple name/value pair content (variables), for example, You may not want to hardcode your product name on your articles, instead, you wanted to manage in a central place. The second scenario reusing a piece of content in multiple places (snippets), it could be a table, a code snippet, or even a piece of formatted content. 

Intercom Articles and Document360 can work together

It’s important to understand the context. The idea for us here is not to blame Intercom Articles with a bunch of missing features. Intercom Articles is complete customer support, customer engagement, and lead generation product, and knowledge base (Articles) is a small part. Hence they are going to have only a handful of features.

However, Document360 on the other hand is the focused product on knowledge base with a single mission of covering all aspects of the self-service knowledge base. So, it’s going to have deeper and wider capabilities to cover your knowledge base. 

There is one big advantage of using Intercom Articles as your knowledge base since there is a tight integration between the knowledge base and the other parts of the product like replying to chat messages, support emails,  etc. When the support agents are replying to customer support queries they can easily do a lookup in the knowledge base before writing their own reply.

This challenge is addressed by our Document360 – Intercom Integration App found in the Intercom App Store. The agents can do a direct lookup on the knowledge base built using Document360.

It will be a better option to use Intercom for all your customer support, customer engagement, and lead generation requirements and use Document360 for your self-service knowledge base. 

Migration from Intercom Articles

We can migrate 100% of your content (all the collections, sections, and articles) safely into Document360 without losing any of your search engine rankings (thanks to our redirect capability). If you are interested either sign up for a 14 days trial or book a demo

The post Looking for alternate to Intercom (Articles) in 2024? appeared first on Document360.

We will give a detailed explanation of why Document360 can be a good alternate to Help Scout docs with a clear and unbiased explanation. 

There is a fundamental difference between Help Scout and Document360 that customers need to understand. Help Scout is a complete customer support product, their core offering is their ticketing system that helps to resolve support queries, besides as a platform they provide supporting offering like Docs (self-service knowledge base), Chat, Customer Management, Shared Inbox, In-app messaging, etc.  

Whereas, Document360 is designed as a solution purely to address one problem (very well), providing a great “knowledge base software“. So Document360 will have wider and deeper capabilities when compared to Help Scout when it comes to the knowledge base.

Why should I choose Document360, when we already have Help Scout?

This question will depend on your knowledge base requirement. If your requirements are straight forward just a simple bunch of documents to support your product written by just one or two people, Help Scout will be sufficient. But when you are growing, as your customer base increases your documentation needs will also increase significantly.  You’ll need more control and features.

Here are the few highlighted features that are missing are pretty basic on Help Scout Docs. 

Version Control: Your knowledge base will be edited and published by a bigger team (engineering, marketing, support, etc). It’s important to have a complete version history of each knowledge base article, rather than overwriting it. You might lose some good content written by a previous writer.

Workflow: You will need a level of the approval process. Before content is published someone needs to review and approve it.

SEO:  Your knowledge base is also a good marketing source. If you look at the importance of the knowledge base SEO. So you’ll need capabilities like changing the slug (with keywords), meta title, meta description, sitemap, robot.txt, etc.

Localization: If you are targeting the global audience (maybe in the future), the platform should support it. 

Realtime Search: Search is THE important aspect of a knowledge base, in Document360 a significant investment is made to make it as good as possible.

Category Manager and Rich Editor: Even though every product in the market will offer these, there is a huge difference. How many levels you can go deeper, drag and drop, rename, hide, can you upload videos, code, callouts (like error, warning), etc

Auditing and Notification: As your knowledge base grows, you need to have control of who is doing what in your KB. It shouldn’t be a black box.  ex: Someone deleted an article (it may be a good one generating 100’s of leads)

Even though it’s handy to have one consolidated tool like Help Scout for customer support, sometimes it’s better to pick up best in class relevant tools for each requirement. The knowledge base is something you cannot keep switching, there are implications like losing search engine traffic. So, it’s better to pick the right one at the start, or at least switch it when you start noticing the above-mentioned challenges. 

Please note, Document360 can work together with Help Scout, you just replace their knowledge base part with more advanced Document360 and continue using the rest of their customer support capabilities.

Help customers help themselves instantly with a Knowledge Base.

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Features Comparision

The highlighted points above are pretty much applicable to any customer support product in the market that offers Knowledge Base like ZenDesk, FreshDesk, Intercom, Crisp, etc. Now let’s go a bit deeper and compare some of the core features and how the products differ. 

1. Category Management

For a knowledge base, how you structure and manage your categories is very important. One of the big challenges we have noticed on Help Scout category management is, it’s pretty hardcoded to only 2 levels. 

Collections > Categories > articles

Collections are top-level buckets like Getting started, Reporting, Account Management, etc. Here is the screenshot from Help Scout’s knowledge base

Each Collection will have a group of Categories and each category will have a group of Articles. Here is the screenshot of categories and articles. 

This structure is not suitable for growing SaaS businesses. You’ll need a flexible category management options like multiple levels of sub-categories. Take an example of the famous Stripe or Microsoft knowledge base

Stripe – category management	Microsoft – Category Management

Also, for the knowledge base, a tree-view structure category view is much better, it provides the full depth of your knowledge base and makes it easy for the readers to navigate between various categories and articles. 

Document360 provides a complete flexible category management solution. There is no limit on the depth of the sub-categories (we got a soft limit of 6, so people don’t use it in the wrong way). It also comes with rich capabilities like inserting articles, categories easily on a specific level, indicators showing the state of the articles, hide, rename, delete, drag and drop move, etc. 

You can see some real examples of Document360 customers here  Customer.io, Spryker

2. Real-time search with the highlighter

The importance of a great Search in a knowledge base is understood. Every product in the market will claim they have search functionality. However, the quality of the search can vary significantly. It’s the difference between Google and others. 

Even though Help Scout comes with a decent search engine, it only shows the article title on the result and it’s missing an important part of highlighting the keyword in the article. Article title alone will not be sufficient for the users, your search keyword may be deeper in the article, and it’s important to highlight it.

Imagine if Google only shows the article title, it’s pretty useless, right?

Watch these short gifs, showing how the search functionality work between Help Scout and Document360

Help Scout Search

Document360 Search

Also, Help Scout doesn’t provide a dedicated search page. Sometimes the user might want to navigate through all the results (not just the top 10 shown). Whereas Document360 provides a dedicated search. 

The other important thing to note, Search is not available for the content writers inside the Help Scout portal. 

Search Analytics

Document360 comes with complete search analytics. It’s important to understand the keywords users are searching on your knowledge base, whether they can find the content or no results. This will help to improve your knowledge base over time. This feature is missing in Help Scout.

3. Version Control

Version control is something very important on your knowledge base once a group of people is updating the content, else you risk content overwrites. 

Help Scout comes with a partial version control option for your articles. Every time you publish a new version of your article, that version is saved as a revision. Here is the screenshot

This is not helpful, for example, there is no option to compare the difference between the two versions, you cannot fork a new version of the article from a specific version. There can only be one draft version, the last one you are editing. Until you publish that version, it just stays in the draft.

In Document360, you get a full version control system with multiple draft versions, you can easily compare between versions, you can fork a new version from any previous version, and you can even delete unnecessary forked versions (if you have permission). Here a couple of screenshots from Document360

Document360 Difference Viewer – clearly showing new content in green, the deleted portion in Red

 4. Rich Editor

For people who are responsible for creating your knowledge base content, it’s important to give a great editing experience. Help Scout comes with a basic HTML editor with a minimal set of options. Being a multi-capability product, it looks like they made the choice to keep the options limited to an absolute minimum. 

But once your knowledge base starts to grow, then you will start seeing the requirements like

• Inserting Code (with language highlighter)
• Inserting callouts (like error, info, warning boxes)
• Internal linking of articles
• Inserting Videos directly (without using embed code)
• Find and replace, etc

Document360 covers all of the above points and one of the unique features of Document360 editing experience is, it comes with two different editor choices. 

• Markdown Editor, and
• WYSIWYG Editor

Markdown editor is a minimalist editor, that helps writers to focus purely on the content and not too much on formatting. You simply need to remember some basic commands and can produce great articles. 80-90% of your articles in your knowledge base will be pretty straight forward content with the standard structure like headers and paragraph text. Document360 Markdown editor comes with realtime preview (as you type), live preview (with design). 

The WYSIWYG editor is a rich editor that allows you to do pretty much any level of formatting. Like rich tables, font color, background color, etc. 

Document360 allows you to switch between editors at the article level. 

Some nice features on Document360 Editor

• You can add/remove different contributors to the article (can be made publicly visible)
• You can set status indicator like New and Updated (and make it automatically go away after certain days)
• Add attachments to the article (ex: PDF, Excel files)
• Complete commenting and discussion between writers

5. SEO Configuration

Your knowledge base can become one of your key content for your SaaS product. It’s important to make sure your customers can find the content on search engines like Google. Let’s take an example if someone is searching “how invoices work in stripe”, here is how the results will look

As you can see all the top results are coming directly from the “docs”. To achieve this, your knowledge base product must support certain things to make it optimized for search engines.

Help Scout doesn’t provide any options related to SEO.

On the other hand, Document360 comes with a lot of SEO focused features, lets take a quick look

In SEO, your keyword must be present in URL, header, and also important to configure meta-title and description (the description you see on the above search result). You can configure all of them at the article level. Also, you can configure exclusions (sometimes maybe you do not want the article to show up in Google)

Document360 also allows you to configure custom Robot.txt and Sitemap.xml files (few advanced SEO items) if in case you need them. 

Non-core Features Comparision

All the above 5 points we discussed are really important for a good knowledge base product. Also, there are a lot of other features that come with Document360, they are a bit advanced, may not be required by every customer. However, as your product starts to scale and if you wanted to future proof choosing the correct knowledge base product for your SaaS then it will become essential features.

Let’s take a look at 10 advanced features that come in Document360 but not available in Help Scout.

1. Article Review Reminders  – When you publish an article, it’s common the content writers forget about it and never touch it again. Article reminders help you to set a notification to owners after a period (ex: 3, 6 months, etc) to verify and either update the article or mark it with a future date.

2. Auditing and notification – When your knowledge base is maintained by a team of people, it becomes essential to keep track of who is doing what. Document360 audits all the events (you can even configure which ones to record), also, you can configure notification via email, slack, webhook, etc.

3. Security and Roles – Document360 comes with a good security mechanism, you can access specific content writers to specific folders. You can define roles like editor, draft writer, etc. Ex: You might want to restrict regular writers from making SEO changes.

4. Private Knowledgebase – There may be a scenario, where you wanted to restrict your knowledge base not available in public. Your customers need to login to access it. This is possible in Document360, with complete reader management, including self-service and bulk-import for readers registration

5. Backup & Restore – Document360 does backup daily, also the users can back up manually and restore the content from backup without reaching to us. If someone in your team messed up your knowledge base, you can simply restore to an older version (like a time machine)

6. The Drive – Imagine having something equivalent of a Google Drive inside your knowledge base, that helps to organize all of your media assets like images, videos, PDF files, etc with a good folder structure. That’s exactly what Docuement360 Filemanger (now The Drive) capability is. Let’s take an example, you wanted to change a screenshot with the new one? The Drive helps you to change it in a central place. 

7. Localization and Versions –  Document360 comes with a rich localization capability. It’s really deep and complete implementation. It also allows you to have multiple versions of your knowledge base. Example: You have a live version and your content team is working on the next major upgrade and they wanted to do it in parallel and then switch. The second example, you might have different versions of your product and need a knowledge base to support all the versions (ex: SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2016)

8. Analytics – Document360 comes with rich inbuild analytics that shows various stats like your best performing article, author, category. Search analytics helps you understand the performance of your search in the knowledge base, what queries are used by your users, whether they can find the answer or not. Feedback analytics helps you to understand whether your users like/dislike the content and view the comments they left.

9. Home page builder – Document360 comes with drag and drop home page builder. This helps to build a great custom-looking home page for your knowledge base without any developer’s help. 

10. Variable and Snippets – Single sourcing and content reuse is a major thing when you have a sophisticated knowledge base. You do not want to copy & paste the content in multiple places. Variables and Snippets help you to achieve this. There are two use cases, a simple name/value pair content (variables), for example, You may not want to hardcode your product name on your articles, instead, you wanted to manage in a central place. The second scenario reusing a piece of content in multiple places (snippets), it could be a table, a code snippet, or event a piece of formatted content. 

Help Scout and Document360 can work together

It’s important to understand the context. The idea for us here is not to blame Help Scout with a bunch of missing features. Help Scout is a complete customer support product and knowledgebase (docs) is a small part. Hence they are going to have only a handful of features.

However, Document360 on the other hand is the focused product on knowledge base with a single mission of covering all aspects of the self-service knowledge base. So, it’s going to have deeper and wider capabilities to cover your knowledge base. 

There is one big advantage of using Help Scout as your knowledge base since there is a tight integration between the knowledge base and the ticket system. When the support agents are replying to customer support queries they can easily do a lookup in the knowledge base before writing their own reply.

This challenge can be mitigated by using the Document360 – Help Scout App (coming soon – similar to our other customer support apps like Freshdesk, Intercom, and ZenDesk). Then the agents can perform the same lookup directly from the knowledge base built using Document360.

It will be a better option to use Help Scout for all your customer support requirements and use Document360 for your self-service knowledge base. 

Migration from Help Scout (docs)

We can migrate 100% of your categories and articles safely into Document360 without losing any of your search engine rankings (thanks to our redirect capability). If you are interested either sign up for a 14 days trial or book a demo

The post Best Alternate to Help Scout (Docs) appeared first on Document360.

In April 2020, we shipped 4 exciting new features that we have been working on for the past few months. 

• Article Review reminders
• Article locking (to avoid conflicts)
• Article status indicators 
• Home page builder (v2)

1. Article Review reminders

One of the biggest challenges in maintaining a healthy knowledge base is over a period some of your knowledge base articles becomes stale, no one touched it for months and it’s completely out of date. 

The other classic example lets say a customer support person is looking at an article and feels it’s not correct. He/she can immediately set the article for review and notify the article contributors (engineering team). 

To address this problem, we are introducing “Article Review reminders” in Document360. You can set up Review Reminders at each article level or you can set global rules when certain articles should be classified as “Needs Review“

At the article level, you’ll see a small icon for “Review Reminder”, you can specify an optional reason, time window when you wanted to get notified and set the reminder. 

Once the reminder is set, on the specified expiry date of the reminder you’ll see a warning showing “Needs review”, the editor can then take appropriate actions and correct the review status. 

There is also an indicator at the category management tree clearly showing the article states, it’s a new feature we shipped in this release which I’ll cover later in the article.

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Global “Review Reminder”

A lot of times you may want to set up “Review Reminders” at a global level (rather than at article level). Example: You shipped a new product update and a bunch of articles is added your knowledge base. You may want to review all of them in 6 months. In this case, you can assign a tag called “april-update” to all the specific articles and apply a review reminder for that tag. 

There are also some intelligent mechanisms like, the system automatically picks up all the contributors of those articles who matched the criteria and mark them as recipients for getting notifications. 

You can set up multiple global review reminders.  

Bulk operations on articles (on Review Reminder)

We also enhanced the bulk operation module to support “Review Reminders”. You can perform the following operations

1. Search for all the articles in your knowledge base that require review
2. Select a group of articles and you can either set reminders or review reminders
3. An indicator showing how many articles in the knowledge base requires review

2. Article Locking (to avoid conflicts)

Your knowledge base typically will be maintained by a team of people. One of the challenges you need to address when more than one person got access is to make sure the content is not overwritten by the other person accidentally. We are addressing this challenge using this new feature called “Article Locking”

The moment someone starts editing an article a lock will be placed automatically on the article and visually represented both for the editor as well as others in the team.

Editor view

Team members view 

The notification is instantaneous, even if the team member is on that particular page on the fly it will be locked. 

Unlocking

The editor can unlock the article manually by clicking the “Locked for editing” indicator or the article will automatically be unlocked after 15 mins of inactivity by the editor. (in the future we will make it a configurable value)

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3. Articles Status Indicator

Once you have a mature knowledge base you are going to have knowledge base articles in various states. Some of them are brand new, some in draft state, some published, some hidden, some might require review, and some articles may be in a mixed state of published but there is a new draft. 

It’s important to have clear visibility of each state of the article across the knowledge base. That’s exactly what we have done in this release. Every article will have one of the following 5 status indicators. 

Let’s take a look at a life cycle of an article that goes through various states

• The user starts with a brand new article (version 1). This will be represented as Yellow  
• Then the user after completing the article publish it. This will be represented as Green
• After some time the user wants to improve that article, he creates a new version to work on (version 2). Remember the article’s first version is live (published). In this case, the status will be Yellow + Green representing we have both published and a draft version. 
• Later there might be additional states like articles marked as “Review required”, which is represented as Red
• Or the user might decide to hide the article from the knowledge base (even though it’s published), which is represented as Grey. 

The status indicators will be visible in multiple places in the Document360 management portal (used by editors and contributors)

• Category Manager
• Article Title
• Bulk operations

Category Manager

Article Title

Bulk Operations (List and Summary)

4. Home Page Builder (v2)

Every knowledge base deserves a great home page. This is the page where your users/customers will land and a place for you to showcase your company, support channels, important categories, etc.

Home page builders help to design beautiful home pages without a need for a designer or developer. It comes with different modules (Text, Image, Category selection, etc) and drag/drop capabilities for you to build great looking knowledge base home page. 

Take a look at some of our awesome customer knowledge base home pages built using the home page builder

• https://documentation.spryker.com/
• https://help.mozenda.com/
• https://support.culture.ai/
• https://support.mambu.com/

Home page builder (v2) (previously called the Landing page builder) had a major overhaul in terms of usability. Let me highlight some of them. 

Collapsible sections

When you have a long page with multiple sections on your home page it might become cumbersome to work on it. We brought the option for you to collapse and expand each section as shown below. 

As shown in the below picture there are various improvements on the home page builder

1. Reposition each category tile
2. Change the icon, icon color, add your icon for each category selection
3. Easily reposition the section up and down
4. Easily add a new section at the desired position using the fly-out menu

Conclusion

We are still pushing hard on adding more and more useful features to make Document360 the number one product for anyone to build online knowledge bases (public or private).

The post What’s new in Document360? – April 2020 Product Update appeared first on Document360.

As a SaaS platform, we continuously push new features, updates and bug fixes into the product. I thought of giving a quick update on the top 7 features we shipped in Q1 2020. 

1. Internal notes for team members
2. Feedback with user comments
3. Team accounts & My analytics
4. Search and Link articles
5. Slack Integration
6. Custom CSS/JS for In-App Assistant
7. Payment revamp

Also, there are many small improvements and bug fixes across the application. 

1. Internal notes for team members

This feature allows you to have a piece of content on your public knowledge base article that’s only accessible to your logged-in team members. Imagine this situation, you have a pubic knowledge base article on product pricing. But you wanted to have a piece of information that’s relevant to either your customer support or sales team. ex: “we can provide discounts up to 20% if customer signing up for 3 years”.

You can insert “Internal notes” in a similar way how you insert callouts like Error, Warning, and Info

Logged-in user view

General user (customers, prospects) view

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2. Feedback with user comments

Most of the knowledge base platforms out there show a user feedback widget at the bottom of the article something like this

This is great to check whether the user likes or doesn’t like the article. But the problem is, most of the time no one gives you feedback when they are happy. Only when the user gets frustrated, they wanted to give some feedback, it’s important to capture that frustration.

To address this challenge, we brought the feedback with the comments feature. The moment the user clicks “no”, a feedback form is displayed for the user to give a detailed comment as shown below

The moment user left the feedback, the knowledge base owners will get notified and they can also view all the user feedback in a central place on the admin portal. 

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3. Team accounts &  My analytics

We enriched the analytics feature by bringing a new section called “Team accounts analytics” (for private/internal projects). On your internal knowledge base, it’s valuable to see the performance of your team’s contribution to the knowledge base. Now you can see “Most Viewed Articles”, “Articles Created”, and “Last Contributed” for your entire team. Also, you can export the results in a PDF or Excel file. 

Team Accounts Analytics – Home page

Individual Author Analytics page showing the full history of articles created with last contribution data. 

Audit history of what activities the users have performed in the knowledge base. This data is available for both team accounts and normal readers. 

My analytics is part of “Team accounts analytics”,  the users can understand their contribution and analytics data for their articles from their profile.

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4. Search and Link articles

Often you wanted to link to various articles within your knowledge base to give users some context and references. Previous, if you wanted to add a link, you need to physically copy that link from the knowledge base and paste it in your editor. Now we added the search feature on the “Insert Link” tool in the editor, which makes life easy for the authors 

5. Slack Integration

If you are using Slack as your primary office communication platform, from time to time you may want to do a quick look up on your knowledge base and share the articles with your colleagues (especially if you work on a customer support team). We made it super simple with our Slack Integration now. You just need to authorize slack via Settings\Integration\Externala Integration

Once connected, the users can simply type the “/doc360” command on the conversation window and perform various operations. One of the main useful operations is searching for knowledge base content.

The search result will show up on a window as shown below, the user can either open the article directly or just link the article to the conversation text box. 

There are also advanced features like creating the article directly from Slack.

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6. Custom CSS/JS for In-App Assistant

In-App assistant is our little widget that helps to embed Document360 (as an in-application knowledge base) inside your application or website. Here is an example of how we use it ourselves within the Document360 portal.

When the user is on specific screens (ex: Backup and Restore) and if they click on the “Get Assistant” button from their profile

The Document360 in-app assistant widget will automatically open with the relevant article from the knowledge base (using our URL mapping capability of Document360).

The in-app assistant was released a while ago, but in this release, we enhanced it to have its Custom CSS and JavaScript that’s different from the main knowledge base. Because you might want to match the style guidelines of your application or website (ex: Font, Header size, Lists, etc).

We also added features like RegEx mapping and Dynamic URL mapping to support complex URL patterns in the In-App assistant. 

7. Payment Revamp

This is not something a feature that will excite end customers, but from a platform point of view, this is a very important update we have done in Q1 2020. The end-to-end payment flow is now seamless, we updated the pricing page with a clear description of each feature. We brought in variable pricing for storage and page visits. One important update, we made “Private Readers” unlimited (before we were charging an additional cost).

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Here is the list of enhancements and bug fixes we have done in Q1 2020

Enhancement:

1. Support dynamic URL mapping by regex pattern in In-App assistant
2. Forked article filter in bulk operation 
3. Introduced Multi-line Callouts in markdown editor
4. Autocomplete on tags
5. Multi token option in Freshdesk Integration
6. Support for previewing SVG image

​​​​​​​Bugs/Improvements:

1. Added support for Cmd+S to save the article in safari browser
2. Provided Change password link in user website for the reader (to avoid going to portal)
3. Ability to go to last/first page using a single click in all grids
4. Added https:// for external links inserted in the article
5. Access level restriction in Dedicated search page
6. Category level restriction while previewing the draft article
7. XSS vulnerability on the dedicated search page

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What’s coming in Q2 2020?

At the top level, we are working on the following features

Stale Articles notification: You can set rules around when articles will be marked as stale and authors get notified

Article Locking: When multiple users are concurrently working on the same article there is a chance of losing content, to address this we are bringing article locking capability.

Home page builder (v2), previously called “Landing page”: Without any coding knowledge users will be able to design professional home pages for their knowledge base.

Performance Improvement: This one is on our plate for a long time. It’s always a challenge between concentrating on features vs infrastructure improvements. Now we feel the product is pretty matured to cater to wide use cases, and this quarter we are prioritizing performance improvement across the board. 

Localization: Currently customers use our project versioning feature as a hack to create multiple languages knowledge base. In Q2, we are addressing this limitation by bringing localization as a first-party built-in feature. 

Enterprise SSO: This one took us a while to sort out, mainly because we are currently using Auth0 as our authentication provider and only later we realized some of the limitations of the product for a SaaS platform. Hence we are bringing our own. 

Multi Data Center deployment option: Currently Document360 is built completely on Microsoft Azure PaaS technologies and runs in West Europe (with CDN to support global audience). In Q2, we are bringing infrastructure changes so customers can choose between the US, Europe, and Australia data centers. 

Microsoft Teams Integration: With the whole COVID-19 situation Slack and Microsoft Teams became the de facto standards for office communication. So we reprioritized Microsoft Teams Integration and bringing it in Q2. 

File Manager v2: We are bringing major upgrades to the file manager capability with support for drag and drop, recycle bin, started files, enhanced search, etc. 

Also, we are working on many small improvements and reported bugs. 

That’s a lot of update coming in Q2, we have been actively working on some of them for a while now. 

Keep tuned!

The post What’s new in Document360? – Q1 2020 product update appeared first on Document360.

In our case, our entire team (around 100 people) were shifted to remote working completely. I’m assuming probably a lot of you are getting used to working from home (WFH) and remote.

In situations like this, the effectiveness and efficiency of how you run your day to day operations-basically come down to the tools you are using to run your business. Being a tech company we are early adopters of a lot of modern tools. For example, we switched from emails to Microsoft Teams at the beginning of 2018, i.e nearly 2 years ago. Over the years, our processes and usage of Microsoft Teams improved and the whole team is fully accustomed to remote collaboration.

This may not be the case for a lot of organizations. I’m seeing a lot of companies switching to modern tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, WebEx, etc overnight and struggling to coupe with training their employees on a new toolset.  

I wanted to explain how Document360 as a knowledge management tool can help companies to cope with these challenging times on working remote  (WFH).  

What are the main challenges?

One of the biggest challenges companies face is the key information like processes, procedures, and policies that are not kept in a central location and are not accessible to all employees.

Examples:

• Standard operating procedures
• Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
• Laptop usage policy when taking it outside work
• Customer refund policy
• Sales playbook
• Marketing playbook
• Business playbook
• Sick leave policy
• Tools usage guide/procedures (ex: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom etc)

The list is very long, the above is just a sample.

Different teams/departments use different tools to maintain this information. In some cases, it may be residing in Microsoft Word documents either in their laptops/desktops and they share it in emails when required.

In some cases, it may be in places like Google Docs, SharePoint, internal Wiki, etc not well structured, multiple versions floating around and people struggling to find the right document and not always 100% sure whether they are reading the latest document.

People don’t think too much or get away from these challenges when they are all working under the same roof and easily can walk up to someone and ask for the required information. But once you go remote, this becomes a major bottleneck and lost productivity.

How Document360 can help

At the core, Document360 can help customers with two main use cases. You can use Document360 to build

1. Public facing online knowledge bases (and/or)
2. Private internal knowledge bases

Public facing Knowledge base

During these challenging times where we are trying to cope with the well being and safety of our employees, it’s also essential to support our customers promptly. A lack of support might affect our customers (and in turn their customers) inadvertently and will have a ripple effect on everyone.

We have been constantly encouraging companies to improve their product documentation and try to encourage their customers/users to get support via self-serve channels as much as possible. This is efficient, quicker and saves money by reducing support calls.

Larger companies like Microsoft and Google have done this very efficiently. For example, if there is a problem on your phone or laptop or any of the services offered by Google like Google Docs, Gmail, etc. you don’t send a support request or call Google or Microsoft, instead, you try to find the answers via their own documentation or from someone’s blog or community forums.  

• Android Documentation
• Microsoft Surface Documentation

Why don’t we adopt the same principles inside of our business? This will help in the long run to reduce support costs and increase the speed of support.

Some of our customers have done this extremely well. Below are the knowledge base sites built by our customers using Document360

• Stackify
• Spryker
• Customer.io

The main advantage of using Document360 for building a self-service knowledge base is you don’t need to worry about anything other than writing great content.

The platform takes care of providing a great tool for you to create/manage categories, writing and publishing articles, version control, backup/restore, customizing the look and feel, configure a custom domain, online hosting infrastructure, security (SSL) and so on.

Private Internal Knowledge base

As I mentioned in the beginning, the second biggest challenge we are facing right now is the scattered internal company knowledge.

I’ll add one more common scenario. It’s typical in the organisations, you do not look into what knowledge an employee holds until it reaches a point they are leaving the organisation and all of a sudden we request them to document everything. It’s natural when someone decided to leave, their affinity towards the organisation is going to be at the lowest level and you are going to only get the basic. It’s better to build a culture where processes and procedures are continuously documented and available to everyone.

Document360 comes with a whole array of features to build your internal knowledge bases.  Let’s take a look at some of them

Private setting and powerful Readers Management

With a flick of a button, you can convert your knowledge base into a complete private knowledge base making it secure. To access the content, your internal employees need to login to the knowledge base first.

You can add your employees to the knowledge base in multiple ways, either one-by-one using the portal settings, bulk import them from a CSV file or even enable self-registration of readers with domain restrictions. Ex: you only users with @yourcompany.com email address can join the project.

Separate portal for Readers

Readers are your typical users who do not contribute the content but only consume it. For example. Your employee handbook would have been written by one or two people in your HR department but consumed (Readers) by 100’s of employees in the organisation. In this case, there is a separate portal for the content producers (HR team) and content consumers – Employees (Readers).

The reason for this separation is to keep the Reader portal simple, focused purely on the content. How quickly you can access them via either category navigation or search

Security at category level

Document360 comes with advanced security access at multiple levels to cover all of your scenarios. You can provide access to your Readers at different levels, for example: at the complete project level, or specific categories level.

Let’s take an example. You have an employee handbook project with various categories (folders) mainly maintained by the HR department. Some of the common folders and access will look like as shown below.

Powerful Search

One of the biggest challenges I  highlighted, in the beginning, is the lost information across the organisation in various forms and employees are not able to access them in a central location. Once you consolidate all your process and procedure documents in a central location using Document360, then your employees can access them seamlessly with Document360’s powerful AI based real-time search.

Despite the volume of articles you have in the knowledge base the AI search engine will be able to retrieve relevant results in a fraction of milliseconds.

Team analytics

The team analytics features give some important metrics at the individual employee level. Some of the key metrics include articles contributed, popular articles, last contributed, last login and so on giving valuable insights about the knowledge base and how it’s been utilized.

Search Analytics

Search analytics is another important metric to maintain a healthy internal knowledge base. It shows the keywords that are frequently searched by your employees, whether they can find the articles in your knowledge base, how frequently certain search keywords are used and so on. The contributors (editors) can have a monthly or quarterly audit and constantly improve your internal knowledge base.

User Feedback

Document360 also comes with the potential for the user to give feedback on each article. They can simply say whether they like or don’t like a specific article. If in case they don’t like an article, they can provide additional feedback at the article level

The content producers (editors) can view all the feedback on the analytics side and take appropriate actions (they will also receive an email notification)

Can I not use Google Docs or Microsoft SharePoint for this purpose?

To some extend you can use either Google Docs or Microsoft SharePoint to achieve a centralized knowledge repository for your internal employees, but these tools are not designed for this purpose. They are more of standalone documents built collaboratively. They miss some of the key features I highlighted above.

Personally, if I’m in a decision-making situation and picking up the tools for the above-mentioned reasons, I would rather pay $50-$100/month and use the tool that’s well designed for this specific purpose, eventually saying a lot of productivity hours, seamless access for all of my employees.  Document360 is affordable and it’s in this price range for the majority of the businesses.

What are your next steps?

If you do not have a good product knowledge base for your customers, then create one with valuable content so your customers and end-users can support themselves using the self-service knowledge base built using Document360.

Also read: Employee intranet: Why does it matter to your employees? 

If your company knowledge is spread across everywhere and you do not have a centralized place for policies and procedures, then create a private knowledge base using Document360.

The post How Document360 can help improve Remote Work and Internal Collaboration appeared first on Document360.

At that time, we were struggling for at least over a year with various challenges on our product knowledge base. We were using the self-service knowledge base solution that came with our help desk software and we were clearly outgrowing its capabilities and we need an alternate solution as soon as possible.

Our growth graph

Problems we were facing

Some of the challenges we were facing at that time

Version control: We had few people working on our knowledge base and it started to happen repeatedly the current content (sometimes really good ones)  getting replaced by new content whenever someone edits/updates the topic, and there is no version history.

Auditing: We had no idea what was going on in our knowledge base, people adding stuff all over the place, adding/replacing content, publishing live documents, delete categories and so on.

Loss of content: We were investing heavily in content with two full-time technical writers, and the whole customer support team constantly adding articles to our knowledge base.  We had an incident where someone accidentally deleted the whole category with at least a months’ worth of work. We never managed to get it back. There was no solution for periodic backup or restore on the platform.

Granular security access: In our knowledge base there are various categories, certain categories are deep-dive articles, only some core technical people can write and maintain. But in our case, we couldn’t restrict and have seen non-technical people making changes with inaccurate content.

Real-time Search: The search was very poor with no analytics. Either the search was performed only at the title level or it didn’t return appropriate results for some technical terms.

Analytics: There was no inbuilt analytics on the knowledge base, all you can do is just plugin the Google Analytics snippet. GA is good as a general analytics platform identifying visitor’s behavior, however, a knowledge base requires more sophistication. Ex: Search Analytics. It’s important to know what keywords your users are searching on your KB whether they are finding answers or not. For every failed search, they are going to raise the support ticket which can be easily deflected if you have a good knowledge base.

Category management and editor: At the face of it, everything will look fine, but once you are working full time on your knowledge base, you’ll start noticing various issues. Inserting videos will require enormous effort, code blocks and call outs will require custom work, category hierarchy is restricted to only 3 levels, you cannot move articles between categories easily, and so on.

Publishing Workflow: We were not having any control over who is publishing live content, our editorial process was controlled by the manual process which failed most of the time and no visibility (auditing).

In addition, there were about another 4-5 core features we were missing like SEO support, Redirection (when we move the article from one place to another), and Localization (we didn’t have the requirement, but it was not there), etc.

Birth of an Idea

Being a technical person, for me, the above requirements are pretty preliminary for a good knowledge base.

I initially thought we were facing all these challenges because we were using the knowledge base solution that came bundled along with the customer support/help desk product and if we move to a dedicate knowledge base product these problems will go away and I started my research to identify the right product in the market.

After a couple of weeks of research, the results really surprised me. At the one end of the spectrum, there are enterprise quality technical writing products that are extremely complex, expensive and still missing a few things that are required for an online knowledgebase. These enterprise products are designed more for technical authoring and multiple platform publications (print, online, etc), but requires efforts to host it and maintain it.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are pure online knowledgebase products who claim to be good, at the face it looked like it’s ticking all the boxes, but once you start exploring they started to fall apart. The editor/category management experience was poor, auditing, security access, etc non-existential. The marketing site looked fantastic, but the product falls apart.

At this point, I was convinced there must be enough people in this world experiencing what I’m experiencing. Being an entrepreneur and having the confidence and ability to build a technical product, I thought instead of keep complaining why don’t we address the solution. There is a famous saying “don’t fall in love with your solution, fall in love with the problem”. This is that Eureka moment, I really wanted to solve these problems.

Business Plan

For many years, I have this practice of raising up early (around 4:30 am without an alarm) and work for 3 hours on core activities. That’s my regular quiet period for myself and I tend to do high-intensity activities during that time. I follow this practice in spite of wherever I’m in the world, whether I’m on business or on holiday.

I was staying at Hyatt Regency, Bellevue (a few miles away from Redmond) and following the same morning routines, this time doing my analysis for knowledge base and seeing all the above-mentioned problems. The moment I decided we are going to build the product, I started documenting all my findings as a business plan.

I captured the core requirements and challenges that we are facing, started putting together wireframes of how the UI/UX will look, and what are the core features we wanted to bring in the product.

I returned back to London from that trip but continued working on the technical specification document for about 6 weeks on my own, without telling anyone. Finally, I had a full technical specification, what features we need, what are the core ones we need to build first, wireframes for the screens, etc.

Here is one of the early prototypes of Document360

I even mapped out the technical stack, what provider we are going to use for authentication, search, data, cache, etc

Choosing the name

It took me only an hour or so to decide on the name, I wanted something with 360 in the name (due to our other product alignments) and something related to knowledge base and technical writing.

The number one criteria these days is whether your domain is available, after juggling with few options I settled for the name Document360. The .com domain was available but for a premium price, at this stage, I was not 100% sure about the project viability, so I just bought the .io domain at the standard price. (later we purchased the document360.com domain for $10k)

How quickly can we build v1?

Being an entrepreneur, when you are pumped up with an idea and can see a market potential you really want to build that stuff as soon as possible. But the reality is you won’t have resources. All of our engineering resources were busy with our other products and we didn’t have any bandwidth to start a new product.

But I felt this idea is something worth perusing and taking bigger risks. Something that made me not sleep seeing a missed opportunity and I has everything ready to take the next step.

This is when I took the drastic decision of pulling our entire company together for a two weeks hackathon in Dec 2017. You can read more about it here. “Ambitious plan to build a new product in 14 days”

I presented the technical specification to the entire company on an all-hands meeting and announced we are going to build the MVP (minimum viable product) in 2 weeks between Dec 1^st to 15^th 2017.

We flew people from London to our India office and pulled the entire team of 35 engineers into the hackathon. At this point, I went one step ahead and mapped exactly how many teams are going to be there, who is going to deliver what, and how we are going to integrate things together.

Our years of experience building and scaling software products helped us a lot and at the end of two weeks we had a fully functioning product “Birth of Document360 – The Inside Story Behind Our 14 Days Hackathon”. Of course, it’s not stable, it’s not ready for production, but it gave us the confidence this product can be built to our expectation.

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Assembling the team

I returned to London after the hackathon, enjoyed the Christmas break however at the same time continued my morning routine putting plans together to take Document360 further. In the new year, we reshuffled the current project priorities and pulled a team of around 8 engineers to start working on the Document360 product.

At this point, we are fully committed and made the decision to go ahead in adding a new product to our portfolio. We cleaned up the hackathon code, pretty much thrown away a lot of stuff that was not well built (prototype quality) and from the ground up started working on a new code base keeping long term view in mind.

Product First & listening to customers 

We had a very clear plan of the features we wanted to build. I put together a road-map up to version 5.0 (3 months per version, 15 months total road-map), with the first version containing the absolute core features necessary for a knowledge base and slowly ramping up with more advanced features on further versions.

I strongly believe in iterative development. It’s impossible to build a world-class product on your first iteration. We have changed the complete UI/UX layout at least 5 times in the last 2 years. Every time we add a feature, we need to reshuffle the UI so that the features are discoverable and easy to use. 

We wanted to take the product to the market as soon as possible and wanted to build it with the customer feedback. We released version 1.0 of the product after 5 months in June 2018. That month we got 2 customers. I don’t know from exactly where they found us, we were writing blogs and engaging in the social media groups, Quora, etc. I was very particular our initial customers must be strangers, not friends and family. Only then you’ll get the true feedback. 

We were rolling out features continuously pretty much every 2 weeks once. Being a hardcore tech company building enterprise-grade products, we never had any challenges on the technical side of things.

We were constantly getting a handful of customers month-on-month, we were listening pretty carefully to those initial customers, making sure they are getting what they want. We are focusing on closing initial sales one at a time, every time the customer needs certain things we will reprioritize our development and deliver it, close the customer and move to the next one. One thing to note, we only built features that are in our road-map, not random (customer-specific) features.

The whole of 2019 we followed the same process, closing one customer at a time, fulfilling their requirements and stabilizing the product.

I strongly believe in this statement.

I keep telling my team, if you are a restaurant, nothing else matters except the food. If your food is good the word of mouth marketing is too powerful, it got inbuilt virality into it and your business will thrive. The same applies to good software.

This is exactly how products like WhatsApp, Uber, Instagram, Apple, and Facebook found success: They poured the majority of their early resources into building unprecedented products and services.

This is how the current version of Document360 looks

We pay attention to every single piece of detail on the screen. 

100 paying customers

This week we reached the first big milestone of 100 paying customers (with 1000’s of users since each customer is a company). This is one of the big feet and proud moment for us to look back and see the road we have traveled, making the right decision almost 2 years ago and keep pushing continuously without getting distracted.

100 customers in 2 years may not be a fancy number in a fast-paced technology world, where venture funding is enormous and growth at any cost mindset is a norm. However, we took a slow and long term view of the “Product first” approach. Now we are confident the product is ready for acceleration. We strongly believe pre-mature scaling will hurt you badly.

Within the 100 customers, we have a variety of profiles, right from small start-ups to Fortune 100 companies to unicorns. Some of the prestigious brands like Microsoft, Customer.io, Monday.com, IATA, Stackify, Harvard University trusted us to build their knowledge base (some of them are private).

Thank you. All I can say is thank you to everyone, first my team who stood behind me and trusted on my gut feeling and then our customers who made this milestone possible.  

The post From an idea to over 100 paying customers in less than 2 years appeared first on Document360.

In this article, I’m going to cover some of the background work we have done and more on the D-Day itself, how things unfolded on the launch day. I haven’t seen any article on this topic. 

In my view, the Product Hunt launch is pretty much like a war zone setup. You need to combat allies throughout the day and march towards the glory. 

In order to help you shorten your reading time, I’m going to skip a lot of the basics. If you are new, then I’ll highly recommend reading this one article How to Launch on Product Hunt directly from the product hunt team. 

Now you know what is Product Hunt, who is a Hunter, Maker, what are all the materials required for the launch day. Most of the Hunters are super sophisticated now, they will send you a survey form requesting all the materials. 

Last week we took our product Document360 (a self-service knowledge base platform) on Product Hunt and we managed to finish on the #4 position with 450 votes, which is an amazing result for us, we set ourselves a target of being on the top 5 and we were super excited about the result. Because if you can’t make the #1 spot, then the next best thing is to end up on top 5 to get all the benefits of the Product Hunt platform.

PS: Why we didn’t finish in 3rd? I’ll cover it later in this article. 

Some of the side benefits of being on Product Hunt includes being spotted and appreciated by community leads around the world, Here is the comment from Aaron Krall one of the famous growth experts in the SaaS world. 

You only got one chance

Technically you can launch your product multiple times, and I have seen products doing it either when they have a major new release or when they release a killer feature. But your first product launch should be a killer launch, you should look at it like a “one-shot” “do or die” scenario. 

When you are getting into a war, you are not going to think if we lose today we will come back later with more ammunition. Probably you won’t be alive to come back in the future. You need to treat your first product hunt launch in a similar way, you go with the attitude of “all-in”.

Who is going to lead your army on the D-Day

If you think your Product Hunt launch as a war zone, then you understand the importance of a leader. You don’t go to war without a leader, someone needs to be at the forefront leading the army and taking responsibility. 

The product hunt community is a bit brutal, for the success of the launch you’ll ideally need the founder(s) or someone really influential in the community to be at the forefront of the launch. I’ve witnessed some successful big startups failing miserably just because they were missing someone taking that lead role. 

In our case, as a founder, I took that responsibility. Behind the scene, I had a team of 5 people working along with me helping me with all the ammunition, but I took the lead. 

Here are some of the things I did that day

•   Responded to 40+ comment raised on our Product Hunt page (about 2 hours)
•   Reached out to about 300 people personally on various channels (LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Email, Product Hunt messages) with follow-ups if required — (about 14 hours work)
•   Updating statuses on all of my social profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)  and responding to comments there — (about 1 hour)
• Constructing and releasing newsletter emails on relevant times, I sent 3 emails. Even though we had pre-written emails, you need to change the content on the fly based on your current status, so it’s not feasible to ask someone to do it. — (about 1 hour)

The reason you need a leader is to have a single point of entry for communication and you need to avoid miscommunication. When you are messaging on multiple channels at once chances of sending messages to the same people is something you need to avoid.

Also, when you are reaching out to some high profile people (in the likes of Founders, Community leaders) the chances of them responding is very low if you are not directly involved. 

Is Product Hunt right for your product?

You need to be clear, not all the products are suitable for Product Hunt, we are basically a multi-product company, I don’t think any of our other enterprise products other than Document360 would be a suitable product for the Product Hunt community.

Product Hunt community is full of early-stage innovators, a typical tech startup community. If your product is suitable for this community then the chance of your success is high. 

In our case Document360, is a self-service knowledge base platform, which is the correct fit for any startup, early stage companies. They all need a good knowledge base to make sure their customers understand their product and also to reduce their customer support cost by allowing their users to do self-service. Why don’t you give it a try?  

Sign up for your 14-day free trial with Document360 now

Get Started

 

Prepare your army

First, you need a good strategy for understanding what’s going to be your end goal. As I mentioned, earlier in our case we were clear from the beginning our goal is to finish on the top 5. After carefully watching the Product Hunt for a period we came to the conclusion we roughly need about 400 votes to stay on the top 5 positions.

 Now that we know exactly we need 400+ votes, we need to backtrack a plan from where we are going to get them. 400 may not sound like a big number, but it’s really hard. Just to give a comparison, have you ever got 400+ likes for any of your posts on social media either Facebook or LinkedIn? such posts are considered super-viral right? then imagine getting 400+ people engaging with you within a 24 hour window, it’s going to take some herculean efforts. 

Like everybody else planning for a Product Hunt launch, we started the planning a few months in advance. This is how we mapped out

•   35 votes from internal employees (only the engineering team). 
•   50-75 votes from about 10 companies we know extremely well, who can put somewhere between 5–10 votes per company. 
•   75-100 votes from my personal connection, I was fully prepared to reach out to some 300+ people one-on-one.
•   25–50 votes from a couple of Facebook groups (SaaS Growth Hacking, SaaS Founders Network) where we were heavily engaged for a long period.
•   25–50 votes from Social Media organic traffic from my profiles. 
•   10-15 votes from our current Document360 customers
•   25–50 votes from our current Document360 users (trial, expired trial, newsletter subscribers etc)
•   25–50 votes from our other product users (newsletters) – remember we are a multi-product company
•   20–30 votes from all the vendor SaaS companies we use (we internally use about 30 products)
•   15–25 votes from our employee’s personal network

The above numbers were a bit conservatory numbers, with the above mapping we were set for guaranteed 400+ upvotes. 

One thing for sure, reaching out to complete strangers will not work, you might get few votes but it’s not scalable and will make you look a bit spammy anyway. 

Aiming for the Organic Traction

The whole point of the above exercise is to get some momentum and make sure you are grabbing the attention of the Product Hunt community to get organic traction. Otherwise, what’s the point of getting into a new channel? 

Once you do all the steps above which are in your control to show the world what you have done, and start positioning on the top 3 then the ball will start rolling and you’ll see the traction from the Product Hunt community, the real deal.

Holding the top 3 position is critical during the 24 hours window, 4th position is taken for the promoted product of the day and I felt once you go below that position your organic traction reduces significantly. 

How long do you need to prepare?

I’ll say you need at least 4–6 months of planning for the launch even if you have a really good personal connection. You need time to understand the platform, build a relationship with the communities I mentioned. 

We asked our entire engineering team to get on the Product Hunt platform 3 months in advance and we actively check and asked them to get engaged at least a few times a week. We didn’t want to create all those accounts on a single day and go and upvote it (clearly this would have signaled spam)

A couple of weeks before the launch I started communicating with people whenever I was interacting about our launch and prepped them.

I prepared the following lists beforehand and maintained a SpreadSheet

Facebook friends: I visited my friend’s page and filtered down people who are relevant for Product Hunt, mainly people from the startup community

LinkedIn friends: I downloaded all the contacts, filtered down people with the title (CEO, CTO, Marketing, Growth, Owner, Founder) 

Twitter followers: I didn’t get time to do this, it was a bit overwhelming. 

I asked the team to do some cleanup, double-check and most importantly mark each contact with the timezone (super important). So I can reach them at the relevant time. 

In addition, I have few pre-written contents for Social Media posts, Newsletter emails, and Facebook Groups posts (I got pre-approval to post it on the relevant groups)

The D-Day

Product Hunt launch day runs 12:01 to 11:59 PST (pacific standard time), if you watch it carefully you’ll see the page getting refreshed, the current products will move to yesterday and a new set of products getting launched exactly at that time. 

Align your timezone with the PST time so your team is aware. In our case, we have a team based out of the UK and India, so for us, the clock runs from 8 am to 8 am London time, so we are very clear. 

First 1 hour: This is super crucial, our aim was to get to 80–100 votes in the first one hour. The main reason, the Product Hunt home page gets a lot of organic traffic and the tendency of those people is to randomly upvote 3–4 products on the top. They may not even look into your product or description, but simply upvote, you need to be on the top to get those free votes. 

In the first hour, I updated the maker comment, published my pre-written posts on all Facebook Groups, updated all my social profiles. Then I started reaching out to people in India, South East Asia, some parts of Europe who were on our close companies list with 5–10 votes potential. We reached somewhere around 80 votes and was top on #2 position.

A bit of luck required: One of the big challenges with PH is you don’t know who else is going to be there on that day, a bit of luck is required. Some times you end competing with some popular companies (ex: Drift and Intercom are prone to keep hitting PH with various campaigns like ebooks, small specific features, new launches, etc or there may be launches like new Airpods from Apple). The other challenge, if you have some productivity apps like Todo lists or some Chrome plugins with the vast individual user base, then you are pretty stuck. In our case, we had both

Next 3 hours, this was a pretty intense period, based on my pre-preparation, I started reaching out to as many people as possible who were in Europe and India via all private messaging channels (LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and email). The votes started to increase gradually and we were maintaining the #3 position.

Around 10 am UK time I sent the first newsletter out to all of our customers, trial users, and newsletter subscribers. 

Around midday, we noticed suddenly the Chrome extension plugin who was trending at #2 position dropped to #3 and we reached #2 position (even though they had nearly 100 votes more than us). This is when we started noticing the PH phishing algorithm kicking in. 

We published our key milestones on our social channels regularly when we started hitting 100, 200 and 300 upvotes. 

When the US started to kick in (around 2 pm the UK time), we started to feel the pressure (since we are not that strong in the US compared to Europe/Asia) we lost our second place and pushed to #3.

I decided to take the next arsenal to combat. We are basically a multi-product company, Document360 is our 4th product. So we have huge newsletter subscribers for our other core products. Around midday 2:30 pm UK time, I sent a newsletter email out with a subject “we launched our new product” since that audience is more enterprisey and chances of them being aware of Product Hunt are very slim. So I just made it sound like a general launch.

I just simply continued my outreach in all the available channels, making sure I reached out to people who didn’t respond earlier but their day might close, thanking people who upvoted on social channels. I pretty much worked almost like a typing robot for these 14 hours non-stop. 

Around 10 pm UK time, we noticed suddenly we were pushed to the #4 position, even though we were about 100 votes more than the #3 position.

I have pre-panned to send the second newsletter email at 10 pm the UK time, but after seeing us pushed to #4 spot, I was in a dilemma should I send it or not? will it help or going to backfire? The only thing that’s in my control is chasing people and asking for more votes, but if that’s not going to help, what else can I do?

At the same time Product Hunt tweeted about us (395k subscribers)and shared a Facebook post (200k subscribers)

I took the plunge, I just wrote a fresh newsletter email pointing out Product Hunt tweet and we are trending in #4 position, thanking + asking for support. After sending the email, I simply closed my laptop and went to bed around 11 pm.

I woke up around 3 am in the morning, I was a bit scared to refresh the product hunt page, but luckily we managed to stay on the same #4th position, nothing changed. 

At this point, I’ve used all my weapons and nothing left. I just answered all the comments that came during the time I was sleeping, followed up with few people who are in India, South East Asia, Australia, New Zealand and just simply watched and prayed we should maintain the position for another 4–5 hours.

Fortunately, nothing changed and we ended up finishing on #4 position. This is a great result for us, for a self-service knowledge base product like Document360 competing against the likes of productivity apps and chrome extensions. 

Why did we lose our 3rd spot?

Even though we don’t know the exact reason, one of the things we suspect is we made a mistake in breaking one of the rules. Later I came to know one of our team members was reaching out to people on Product Hunt using their messaging platform and at one stage the “Message” button was totally disabled . 

Hey! mistakes happen when you are in a war zone it’s difficult to control everything, as long as we won the war we are good. 

Product Hunt Algorithm

There are tons of myths around the product hunt algorithm, some of the common ones I’ve read

• You shouldn’t send your visitors directly to your Product Hunt page, they should visit the home page first and then navigate to yours. — this is not true
• When users click on your website link on your Product Hunt page, you get more credits
• When brand new product hunt users upvote or comment you’ll be penalized
• Over promotion on social channels will be penalized
• Number of hours your product was featured affects your ranking

In my view, no one really fully cracked the Product Hunt algorithm, it’s similar to Google Search, no one really knows the exact algorithm they are trying to figure out certain things based on some assumptions. These platforms constantly evolve as they grow. 

The product hunt blog got a good summary of things you should and shouldn’t do.

In general, you need to follow the basic rule of “don’t try to crack the system”, being spammy, sending unsolicited messages to people with whom you have never interacted (directly or indirectly) especially within the Product Hunt Platform. They do provide the option to send messages to people, but unsolicited messages can be easily predicted.

Based on the activities on the launch day and seeing products going down quickly even with the higher number of upvotes, my assumption is the system is not fully automated, there must be a team of people from Product Hunt monitoring carefully the activities and manually downgrading your position. 

One thing we noticed for sure, once you go down, it’s hard (or impossible) to come back. You’ll remain in that position and someone can overtake you. 

What are our immediate benefits

For holding the top position during the day we got mentions from Product Hunt Twitter handle (about 395k subscribers) and Facebook post (about 200k subscribers)

Received some amazing comments from our existing customers 

The website traffic for the two days doubled from 1500/day to 3000, we had quite a bit of signup. 

We were not really hoping to get a lot of signup/conversion via the launch. Our objective was very simple, to get some branding and take the product in-front of as many people as possible. I believe we have managed to achieve that, the whole exposure to Product Hunt community, interactions on the Facebook groups. Now I believe definitely more people are aware of Document360. 

I’ll say it’s definitely worth giving a shot and could be one marketing channel on your list if your product is targetted towards Startup Tech companies. 

The post Product Hunt Launch - The D-Day preparation! appeared first on Document360.

My favourite reason for being there was to meet technical writers and other attendees from many of the world’s leading companies, and learn from multiple in-depth presentations on wide ranging subjects covering technical documentation.

As a founder I’m committed to understanding practitioner challenges and making sure we’re building features into Document360 to address and resolve real-world pain points in technical writing every day.

WriteTheDocs Prague 2019 drew my attention to one major theme in particular.

In every casual conversation, unconference session and conference presentation, I noticed an emphasis on the “docs like code” or “docs as code” approach among delegates. I felt the focus centred on the infrastructure and process around how to write and publish the documentation rather than core elements of technical writing, like Information Architecture and Content design.

It made me think, is this the right approach? Should technical writers worry about infrastructure and processes or focus more on creating great quality content?

Jen Lambourne, Head of Content at the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) spoke of, “stakeholders becoming anxious and asking them why the tech writers weren’t focusing on the content rather than the tools.”

I want to include everyone, especially those who were unable to attend the conference, so I gathered my notes and expanded on them:

What is “docs like code”?

For those of you who are not aware of this paradigm, Docs like code (aka “Docs as code”) is basically an approach similar to the way software engineers:

• Write code,
• Build an executable,
• Test it, and then
• Publish the deliverable.

In technical writing terms, it can look something like:

• Store your content source in a version control system like Github (typically in format like Markdown),
• Use a static site generator like Middleman, Gatsby, Hugo, Docusaurus, Jekyll, VuePress, MKDocs et cetera,  
• Produce a documentation site, running some validation checks (like broken links) and then 
• Publish it to your hosting provider (Amazon or whatever your choice).

There’s also a complete end-to-end CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) requirement to constantly produce an end result for every check (documentation changes).

I even heard of one company building its own “static site generator” because existing vendors were not performing well for their 1000+ pages of documentation. They ended up reducing the build time from 3 minutes to 30 seconds! 

Should you treat your documentation file like a source file?

Just because you can manage “docs like code”, should you treat your processes the same way?

For me in the first place, a source code file and a documentation file (even if it’s written in plain Markdown format) are not the same.

A source code file is in plain text. A compiler (ex: C#, Java) reads the file and converts it into a machine-readable format (like an executable file).

A documentation file on the other hand will require extra elements, such as:

• a link to an image (raising questions like, Where will it be hosted?, and Who is going to upload it?) and
• different rich styles like Tables, Tabs, Source code viewer, etc.

In terms of source code files, compilers are pretty mature and stable. If there is a syntax error (not functional errors) the compiler will catch them immediately.

In contrast, converting a Markdown file (using a static code generator parser) into a final output file like HTML is error-prone. More than that there is no defined syntax for formats like Markdown, merely various flavours of it.

Other challenges in a “docs like code” approach

Here are a few other challenges with a “docs like code” approach that struck me. I raised them with fellow attendees and we often struggled to find simple answers:

• Simple fixes are complex
• Editorial Workflow and Review process
• Image management and preview
• Category Management
• Search Implementation
• Developers are not writers (and vice versa)
• Educating the team

Simple fixes are complex

Let’s imagine a situation where someone spots a typo or an incorrect sentence in your live documentation. You need a quick fix. How is this going to work?

If you’re a full-blown “doc like code” shop  you need to check in the code changes, meaning the entire CI/CD has  to run and get published to the live documentation site.

That’s not as simple as it sounds. Anyone with a software development background knows the pain of release cycles. Code merges and conflict challenges, and risks of breaking things if automated QA code coverage is inadequate can conspire to  delay or lengthen release cycles, which is a lot of work for simple fixes on live sites.

Editorial Workflow and Review process

On the software development side, there is a process called “Peer Review”. Once a developer checks-in the code a senior person reviews it for  consistency and approves the gated check-in to get into the CI/CD build process.

In the documentation world, this is the equivalent of someone writing the draft and asking a senior person to review the document for grammatical and editorial errors, styling, tone etc.

However, when you’re using “docs like code” and editors like VS Code to write the documents, what is this process going to look like? The tools that come with technical editors are more geared towards software engineers, i.e. they’re probably geekier and more cumbersome.

I raised this with a few people and the response I received was a bit shocking! They use Google Docs for writing their first draft versions, relying on capabilities like Review and Comment. Once they are happy, they convert them into Markdown and use VS Code (or another editor) to check the changes in.

The whole process is a bit messy, and what happens in future revisions? Reverse the process and go through the full cycle?

Image Management and Preview

There is a famous saying “an image is better than 1000 words”. This is so important when it comes to documentation, where the primary responsibility is to explain something to an end-user whether it’s an external customer or internal colleague.

However, with the “docs like code” approach, I noticed image management is really challenging. There needs to be a well-defined process, where you can upload the images (repo directory), how you include the links (the links might different between staging/production sites). What happens if someone moves the image etc.

When you are including images (or videos) in your documentation, you really want to visualize it quickly to see how it looks on the final website. But with the whole CI/CD build process, it means you need to run the process every time before you can see it.

It’s simply a time-consuming process and prone to errors.

Category Management

Your articles are not going to stand alone on their own. You need to have good category management to structure your content. I see this as a big challenge with the “docs like code” approach. Someone explained that they maintain some kind of Table of Content Markdown file and a process (plugin) to convert them into tree-view style navigation on the public site.

Good category management like adding categories, sub-categories (hierarchy), adding articles to specific categories, hiding, deleting, redirecting articles when moved from one category to another is all very important in the context of a good documentation site.

This is a substantial effort when you are taking the “docs like code” approach.

Search Implementation

A good documentation site must have a robust search capability. The bigger your documentation site, the more important search becomes. These days people just use the search box wherever possible; they are not going to navigate through your hierarchy.  But how do you address this challenge in “docs like code” approach?

The static site generators are only going to generate a good looking website based on your templates. In order to have a good search, a reasonable amount of custom work is required. For example, if you are using Jekyll as site generator then you can use something like “Simple Jekyll Search” (another opensource thing to worry about)

Or you need to use something like Algolia API’s to implement a good search on top of your static content.

This is a lot of work for a technical writing team to take it.

Developers are not writers (and vice versa)

I’m coming from a technical background, over 20 years’ experience as a Software Engineer. I have worked with many developers in my career. I’ve hardly seen a hardcore developer passionate about writing. They might maintain a well-structured beautiful code with great internal comments, clear variable declarations, etc. However, if you ask them to maintain documentation for their work, I can guarantee it will be totally out of sync very soon. They won’t be as enthusiastic as writing documents compared to writing code.

The reverse is also true, a good writer who needs a good creative thinking and ability to explain things clearly are going to struggle to be a good coder.
The challenge with “docs like code” approach is your trying to cross this barrier. You are expecting one thing or the other either technical writers to be coders or developers to be writers.

It’s going to be a big cultural challenge.

Educating the team

With “docs like code” approach a whole new set of guidelines and processes need to be followed. Things like how to write documentation in Markdown, what are the accepted syntaxes (not all Markdown are same), any specific rules and governance around the usage of special instructions like HTML tables, inline CSS/HTML, static site generator specific metaphors, table of content structure, source code structure, etc.

In addition, you will have processes similar to software engineers like sprints/agile methodology, release cycles, QA etc.

It’s not going to be easy to scale the team or bring someone quickly into the process.

How do we address these challenges?

The first question to ask do we really need to go down the “docs like code” approach?, do we have the technical capabilities in the team to address some of the challenges listed above, do we really need this level of complexity, are we ready to face the cultural challenges.

In most cases, you really don’t need this level of complexity. You can achieve pretty much everything you need using Document360  (or something equivalent in the market) abstracting away all the complexity. You don’t need an army of tools like Github for version control, Google Docs for workflow/review, Static site generator for publishing the site, Instant publish without a build system, etc.

Our aim at Document360 is to provide a good set of tooling and infrastructure so you focus 100% on the core – “writing great content”. We abstract away all the complexities related to infrastructure and publishing.

Let’s see it one by one

Simple fixes are really simple

Any simple fixes like correcting the typo or changing a paragraph of text should be straight forward 2 minute task, not 2 hours task with the risk of breaking things. In Document360, you simply open the article via the admin portal, make the necessary changes and republish it instantaneously. The system automatically manages the version control and you can always refer back to the change history.

Editorial Workflow and Review

There are two features in Document360 I wanted to highlight here relevant to editorial workflow and review.

The first one is Team roles and access. This allows setting defined permission for an individual user or a group of users. For example, you can assign the standard “Draft writer” role, which allows the users only to create articles but cannot publish (take it to live).

The second feature is in-built Internal discussion, which allows users to have a conversation about an article right in the same place (similar to Google Docs)

This eliminates the need for switching between a Markdown editor and Google Docs.

Editor Choice

You don’t need to use technical editing software like VS Code to edit your Markdown files. Document360 comes with a rich Markdown editor with live preview. This is one big challenge, when you are writing in Markdown from time to time you would like to preview how it’s going to render, Document360 makes it seamless.

Document360 also provides an option for choosing between Markdown editor and WYSIWYG Rich HTML editor. In some case (for some users), they might prefer to use a simple WYSIWYG editor instead of remembering all the Markdown syntaxes. Another example, majority of your documentation can be written in straight forward Markdown, but in some articles, you might need heavy formatting like a lot of HTML Tables, in which case you can use the rich WYSIWYG editor just for those articles.

Category Management

Document360 comes with powerful category management. The context menus help you to create categories, sub-categories and articles within a category seamless. In addition, you also get features like deleting, hiding, renaming, adding emoji icons to categories etc all seamless.

You can also restructure the categories seamlessly using drag-and-drop capabilities, our intelligent inflight menu helps to add categories and sub-categories at relevant places easily.

Search (near realtime)

Document360 comes with powerful realtime search in-build. Behind the scene, we use Algolia as our search platform. Every time you publish an article, we index that article on our search catalog instantaneously using Algolia search API’s and make available.

Most of the platform out there only search on the article titles, but we do full-text document search. In addition, we take care of special scenarios like searching Tags, file metadata, author names, etc. making it super powerful.

Educating the team

Document360 is built in a way it’s intuitive to use. If anyone has used Microsoft Word then they can instantly start using Document360. Very little training is required for technical writers.

Sites running on Document360

Here are some live sites that are built using Document360. You can try features like responsive user interface across devices, search capabilities, category navigation, table of content etc 

https://docs.stackify.com/docs

https://customer.io/docs/getting-started-overview

https://support.mambu.com/docs

https://docs.document360.com/docs (our own)

Summary

Docs differ significantly when you compared to source code. In theory, it might look facinating to go down the “docs-like-code” approach, but in practice it may not be required to get into that level of complexity. Look into tools like Document360, which helps to abstract the complexity and allow you to focus on writing great content. Docs-like-code may be suitable if you are developer focused company like Twilio, Stripe etc where there are large dedicated teams purely for documentation with software engineering resources. If in case you don’t have software engineers in your documentation team, I’ll recommend you should skip docs-like-code approach. 

The post “Docs-like-code” or “Docs-as-code” – Is it worth the hassle? appeared first on Document360.