Sriram Hariharan, Author at Document360 The knowledge base that scales with your product. Mon, 30 Oct 2023 07:51:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://document360.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/favicon-150x150.png Sriram Hariharan, Author at Document360 32 32 July 2018 Product Update: Article Search in Portal, Category Manager Emoji Icons, and Improvements https://document360.com/blog/july-2018-product-update/ Fri, 03 Aug 2018 10:15:30 +0000 https://document360.com/?p=816 Welcome to the Document360 July 2018 product update! It’s that time of the ...

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]]> Welcome to the Document360 July 2018 product update! It’s that time of the month to take a step back to see what we have achieved as a team. Let’s dive right into the updates!

Missed reading our previous month updates??

July 2018 Product Update

Here’s the list of items we shipped into Document360 in the month of July 2018:

  1. Article search in the portal
  2. Article status indicator on the user website
  3. Category Manager emoji icons
  4. Improvements
    1. User website single sign-on
    2. Text formatting in callouts

Article search in the portal

When writing documentation, content writers may need to switch between articles for different reasons. Searching for an article from the category manager might not be an easy task.

To make it simpler, we introduced the capability for content writers to search for articles using the “Article Search” menu. You can find the search icon on the top right of the documentation page.

Search Article in Portal - July 2018 Product Update

Simply type the text you want to search and the search will return the list of articles containing the text. 

Search in portal - July 2018 Product Update

To reset the content in the search box, click “reset” represented as an eraser icon.

Reset search - July 2018 Product Update

Click “Close Search” to close the search bar.

Article status indicator on the user website

It’s important to let your knowledge base users to know when a new article is published or an existing article is refreshed. We added the capability to mark an article as either “New” or “Updated” before publishing it. 

To set the article status, click the “Settings” icon on the document editor page. Select “New” if you are publishing a new version of the article. Select “Updated” if you are updating (forking) an existing version of an article.

Article Status Indicator - July 2018 Product Update

You can set the number of days to show the article status. The default value is 30 days and the maximum duration is 90 days.

Article Status - July 2018 Product Update

Once the article is published, the status indicator will be visible next to the article name on the Category Manager.

Article Status on Landing Page - July 2018 Product UpdateCategory Manager emoji icons

We added the capability to add emoji icons for the categories. Emoji icons convey the purpose of the category and its contents. 

To add an emoji icon, click the folder icon next to the category name. Select your preferred icon from the emoji picker.

Category Manager Emoji icon - July 2018 Product UpdateImprovements

  • Did you feel you were prompted one too many times to login to view the (private) documentation? We realized that and implemented single sign-on capability to log in to the portal.
  • You can now format text (bold, italic, add links) within information callouts (Info, Warning, Error)

Want to try these features? Get started with a free trial of Document360 today!

Related: June Month Product Update

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]]> 13 Most Popular Tools for Technical Writing https://document360.com/blog/tools-for-technical-writing/ Wed, 11 Jul 2018 14:26:07 +0000 https://document360.com/?p=677 Having worked as a Technical Writer for about 10 years in my career, ...

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]]> Having worked as a Technical Writer for about 10 years in my career, I’ve used a variety of documentation tools on a need basis. As a technical writer, the primary job role is to get the content right.

Using the right tools for technical writing makes the life of a technical writer easy. There are tooling available for different purposes — authoring, publishing, screen captures, drawing, image manipulation, and more.

 

What is Technical Writing?

So, let me start off with the basic question — what exactly is technical writing?

Before going into knowing about the tools for technical writing, let’s get the context right. Technical writing is the art of explaining how to use a technology to a non-expert user using easy-to-understand language.

In a more generic way, technical writing means technical communication — to convey complex information in a simple format.

13 Most Popular Tools for Technical Writing

This blog will cover the 10 most popular tools for technical writing that every writer should use to make the most while curating content. Hope this blog adds value for aspiring technical writers and for those who are keen to expand their knowledge horizon.

We will split the blog post based on the phase of documentation for which you can use the tools for technical writing:

      • Publishing tools
      • Authoring tools (on-premise and cloud)
      • Screen Capture tools
      • Image Editing tools
      • Spell check tools
      • Video editing tools

Publishing tools

Document360

Knowledgebase Portal-Document360

Document360 is a technical writing tool that has some cool and advanced features that you would not find in most of the tools. It is a knowledge base platform that helps businesses like yours create self-service platform to help your customers understand the technical aspects more easily.

With Document360, you can write any form of technical writing which is not just limited to user manuals or memos. You can write content forms like product descriptions, white papers, business proposals, and so on. To deliver the exact output that your customer desires, you need to choose the right technical writing tool. Because the right technical tool is equally important like how a great technical writer is important for a business.

A lot of editorial features are packed with Document360. You can use either Markdown editor that helps you edit the way you want or the HTML editor. Category manager helps you to create categories, subcategories, group similar files together and creates a well-structured hierarchy of all your information. With version history, you can roll back to the previous version that helps you especially when you overwrite a content by mistake.

These are some of the most common features and not just that, you will be able to view the analytics and get powerful insights to make your content looks even more engaging and converting. With great and easy to configure features, you get 100% cloud-based architecture, enterprise SSO, auditing, and much more. A great documentation tool is when it has all the simple features without making things complicated. You can set review reminders, check SEO, and collaborate with other editors, which is the most important task for a technical writer.

The best part is that you can integrate your documentation with your favorite apps like Google docs, Slack, Zendesk etc.,

Adobe FrameMaker

If you are concerned about writing content and re-using the existing content, known as single source authoring, then you can consider Adobe FrameMaker for your requirements.

FrameMaker is best suited for industrial standard documentation for documents spanning over 200+ pages.

Adobe FrameMaker - Tools for Technical Writing

You can generate structured documentation with an XML framework that’s 100% DITA compliant. FrameMaker is a DITA-friendly authoring tool with the built-in Print a PDF option.

Additionally, you can define templates and draft content according to the templates. You can generate the automatic hyperlinks, Table of Contents, List of Figures and List of Tables in just a few clicks.

However, some common limitations of FrameMaker is that it is expensive and requires a steep learning curve.

RoboHelp

RoboHelp is an application that technical writers can use to publish online documentation. It is one of the most popular Help Authoring Tools (HAT) developed and published by Adobe Systems to help technical writers develop help projects and render them across different formats. RoboHelp is used by businesses to deliver online help content and knowledge-based articles.

RoboHelp Tools for Technical Writing -Document360

You can use RoboHelp to generate output in the following formats —

  • HTML5 help format
  • XML
  • Printed documents
  • Mobile App formats
  • WebHelp formats
  • eBook

The RoboHelp interface is user-friendly and helps users to publish content easily without any hassles. Being a HAT, users can take care of creating the documentation for publishing the content without any assistance.

The major downside of RoboHelp (or any HAT for that matter) is that it takes time to accustomed to the software. Also, when collaborating with multiple users (for peer reviews), it gets difficult to share the content with other users since the content resides within the tool. The cost of Adobe RoboHelp (latest version) is $1000 which is not suitable for independent technical writers or small businesses.

Read More: What is Help Authoring Tool: Benefits, Features & Use Cases

Authoring tools for technical writing

Microsoft Word

When it comes to content writing, Microsoft Word is the first tool that comes to mind in a flash for any technical writer. Microsoft Word is definitely a technical writer’s best friend. What makes it so popular is its simple and elegant look combined with a rich set of features.

According to a report from Microsoft, 1 out of every 7 persons uses Microsoft Word either for his/her professional or personal work. Statistics also say that about 80 percent of students use Microsoft Word for individual work, while 13 percent use it for group work.

Microsoft Word Tools for Technical Writing -Document360

Here’s a list of features that make Microsoft Word the best tool for content writers:

  • Automatic spell checker and highlighter, inbuilt grammar check capability
  • Pre-loaded document templates such as brochures, flyers, technical whitepapers, troubleshooting guides, and so on
  • Tracks change — useful for editors and peer reviewers to review and suggest edits to the content.
  • Want to replace a word across the entire document? Find and Replace is probably, your life saver.
  • Save your document to different formats such as PDF, XPS, web page, Rich Text Format (RTF), plain text, and more

Additionally, you can define your own style for the documentation. You can define text and paragraph formats, add a Table of Contents for your content, create tables, and do wonders with the tool.

 

Notepad / Notepad++

Notepad is the default text editor that ships with Windows. You can write simple text file content such as a ReadMe file, or License Agreement file.

You can use notepad in cases where you don’t need rich formatting capabilities. Say, you are in a meeting/conference and you want to take quick notes, Notepad is the better choice of tool.

Notepad - Tools for Technical Writing

Tip: Use notepad when your focus is more on writing than on formatting.

Notepad++ is an advanced text/source code editor that offers support for more languages. In addition to typing text, Notepad++ supports spell check, find and replace capability (very handy feature when you have a lengthy file and you want to change multiple occurrences of a word), and more.

These features make Notepad++ score more brownie points when compared to Notepad.

Notepad++ - Tools for Technical Writing

Google Docs

Google Docs Tools for Technical Writing -Document360

Google Docs is a free, multi-user collaboration tool that is available as a part of Google Drive. It’s best suited when multiple users want to collaborate and curate content together on a specific topic. Most businesses these days are adopting this tool to increase the efficiency of their staff and make information readily available on the cloud.

With Google Docs, you don’t have to worry about versioning problems for your documentation. Because you will see who is working on the document as users make changes to the content. Changes are automatically saved every few minutes to your Google Drive. This means the data is always available in your Google Drive account.

In Google Docs, you have three options — Editing, Suggesting, and Viewing. In the editing mode, you can edit the document directly and the changes will not be tracked. Suggesting will enable tracking and the edits you suggest will become suggestions. You can read or print the final document from the Viewing mode option.

Few disadvantages with Google Docs (despite being one of the popular free online word processors) — it requires internet access to view/edit the documents. While this is an advantage on one side of the coin, on the other side, this becomes a disadvantage.

Without internet access, you cannot access Google Drive (or your Google Docs!). The documents that you are working on will not be available in the absence of an internet connection. Google Docs also lacks the wide range of formatting options available in traditional word processing systems.

Markdown Editor

In recent years, Markdown has attained a lot of interest and attention. Markdown was initially aimed and developed as an alternative to HTML. The intention was to help people to create web pages easily using plain text writing without much HTML experience. As the tool grew popular, people also started to make use of Markdown for taking notes, to-do lists, and so on.

Markdown uses simple formatting syntax that most users are familiar with. There are no extra words or syntax used for a specific operation. For example, bold is **bold**, heading 1 is # Heading 1, and [link] (URL) for hyperlinking. This is very simple when compared to HTML syntax such as <a href=” link url”>Link</a>.

You don’t need any special WYSIWYG editors to get started with Markdown. You can use any plain text editor (even notepad!) to create content using the Markdown syntax. There are a lot of markdown editors that you can get started with. You can also use Dingus — the browser version of the markdown editor created by John Gruber.

Did You Know? Document360 also uses Markdown editor to help content writers build knowledge-based articles for their software products. You can give it a try here.

 

Markdown Tools for Technical Writing -Document360

Screen Capture tools

If you are a technical writer or a blogger, it’s very common to add screenshots of an application or a product. There are hundreds of tools available to take screenshots. 

Screenshots are the face of your product/application. That is the first thing people will see when they land on your website/blog post. Having screenshots of the application in your documentation also plays a major role in decision-making. Therefore, it’s crucial to get the perfect screenshot in the correct screen resolution setting.

You also need to be careful in deciding what to show in the screenshot. Things like names, and email addresses should be removed or erased off from the screenshot. Therefore, it’s very important that your screen capture tools provide these capabilities to make changes to the images.

In this section, we’ll list out the common screen capture tools for technical writing that you can use to grab screenshots.

Snipping Tool

If you are used to Windows, there’s a very handy tool that comes pre-built called the “Snipping Tool”. With this tool, you can grab a screenshot of the entire screen, the window alone or grab a portion of the screen using the rectangular snip option.

Snipping Tool - Tools for Technical Writing

After snipping the content, you can use the pen tool, highlight the text to make it look prominent. You can save the image into different formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF or Single File HTML (MHT). There is also an option to directly email the snippet to an email address as an attachment.

Snipping Tool formatting - Tools for Technical Writing

TechSmith SnagIt

SnagIt is a simple and powerful screen capture software from TechSmith targeted for marketers and technical writers. SnagIt is supported on Windows and Mac OS. With SnagIt, you can capture your screen and save them as .PNG, .JPG, or share it to different outputs such as File, FTP, Screencast, Camtasia studio, and more.

SnagIt - Tools for Technical Writing

With SnagIt, you can capture a specific scrolling area (horizontal/vertical/entire scroll area) from the window. SnagIt also supports the Video Recording capability. This feature can be used to record actions being performed on the screen. Recent versions of SnagIt support a new feature called Panoramic capture which is like scrolling capture. The major difference is that you can control how much area to capture from the screen.

SnagIt Panoramic Capture - Tools for Technical Writing

You can also format your images with borders, use paint tools to add arrows, text boxes, callouts, blur out text and so on. You can also combine multiple screenshots into a single image.

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

Get Started
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SnagIt is available in a one-time purchase licensing model ($50) and a 30-day money-back guarantee. With different pricing options such as Personal and Professional, Education and Government, it is one tool that cannot be missed in the arsenal of a technical writer. You can also try SnagIt free for 15 days!

FireShot

FireShot is a browser plugin available with most modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. This tool gives the option to capture a page or select an area on the browser.

Once you have taken the screenshot, you can perform quick edits such as crop, resize, and add annotations. You can save the screenshot as an image or as a PDF.

FireShot Tools for Technical Writing -Document360

When the plugin is added to Chrome, this is how it will look on the address bar. Clicking the icon will present different options to capture the screenshot.

FireShot Extension - Tools for Technical Writing

If you need advanced editing tools and capturing techniques, you can upgrade to the FireShot Pro version for $60.

Image editing tools

Many times, content writers use royalty-free images in their articles or blog posts. These images sometimes cannot be used as-is. It will require some edits that is difficult to achieve with screen capture tools. You will require proper screen editing skills to achieve the edits.

If you have access to your web design team, this makes your job a lot simpler. However, not all times you may have the liberty to reach out to the designer requesting for edits. In this case, knowledge of a photo editor will come in really handy.

Adobe Photoshop

According to Writers UA User Assistance Tool Survey, Adobe Photoshop is the 4th most used tool by technical writers. Technical writers can use Photoshop to edit graphics and create images from scratch. It is always a good practice for technical writers to understand the know-how of Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop - Tools for Technical Writing

Adobe Photoshop is best used to create web page designs, ad banners for social media promotions, edit pictures, merge multiple images into one, add special effects to an image, and lots more.

The learning curve of Photoshop is quite steep. There are alternatives such as GIMP that should work for technical writers, but GIMP also requires its own learning curve.

Spell check tools

If you are a technical writer or blogger, you will know how much spelling and grammar mean to your content. It’s easy to write an article but the hardest part is to proofread the content and make sure it is perfect. This will increase the quality of the blog or technical article.

Grammarly

Grammarly is the writing assistant for most technical and content writers. This is one of the widely used tools for technical writing. Grammarly is available for free as an online text editor and a free extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers.

Grammarly - Tools for Technical Writing

Grammarly automatically highlights the mistakes instantaneously; and offers suggestions to improve or correct the errors. For terms specific to your requirement, you can add them to the dictionary so that Grammarly will not flag them as an error in the future.

Grammarly also has an interesting feature where it has the capability to check a document for plagiarism. It has an internal logic that automatically classifies the content as copied from the internet.

Acrolinx Desktop Checker

The Acrolinx Desktop Checker comes with an Acrolinx text editor that includes an integrated Sidebar. It’s more than just a spellchecker. Users can use it to swiftly check content from a variety of sources. For technical writers, Acrolinx enables you to publish exceptional content that is compatible with your objectives and overall brand.

Acrolinx Desktop Checker

To analyze a fresh piece of content, it’s possible to open a file from the Acrolinx text editor or paste your text straight into the text box. Users can also launch the Desktop Checker directly through the command line.

Acrolinx improves your content for clarity, consistency, tone, inclusive language, scannability, and more. It’s focused on helping enterprises create better content experiences for their customers by scoring the quality and connecting with your other favorite applications.

HyperSTE

HyperSTE

HyperSTE is one of the market-leading content quality tools for creating consistency in your technical documentation, developed by Etteplan. It’s aimed at companies that want to deliver error-free documentation in any type of language and limit the risks incurred by the company. HyperSTE customers can comply with industry safety standards and ensure they produce the highest quality documentation.

HyperSTE analyzes your content to make it more findable and readable. You can access HyperSTE via a secured cloud solution hosted by Microsoft Azure, but you can also download it as an on-premise solution. HyperSTE has a long list of integrations so you can connect it with your own authoring environments.

You can check your documentation against a wide range of industry guidelines including the Microsoft Manual of Style and ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English for Aerospace and Defense, which means you can reduce the chance that it violates important standards.

Video editing tools

Creating videos is a powerful way for technical writers to teach users how to adopt their products. Although relatively costly to produce, videos are proven to be the preferred way that users want to engage with content and there are tools available that can help technical writers with this process.

DaVinci Resolve

Davinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve is video editing software used by Hollywood industry professionals to process their videos and take them to the next level. Technical writers who are interested in working with video can benefit from Resolve because they can produce videos that engage and teach their audiences.

You can make your videos look great with DaVinci Resolve. For technical writers on a budget, it is available as a free version with all-in-one editing, color, VFX, motion graphics, and audio. You can work with 8-bit video formats and collaborate with other users to make videos even better.

At last count, Resolve had more than 2 million users making it comparable with Apple’s Final Cut Pro X. DaVinci Resolve Studio (the paid version) offers many extra features including adding an editor keyboard, color control panel, or audio console, which lets you work with both hands at the same time.

Final Thoughts

Finally, As technical writers, it’s important that you choose the right tools for technical writing. Technical writers work in different industries and are the primary responsible sources for generating quality documentation.

Before getting started on any of the tools for technical writing, make sure you read the features offered. This helps to make a better decision.

Picking the right tools for technical writing will help you generate quality content for your products that will interest the users.

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

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So, if you are a technical writer reading this blog post, do you use any of the aforementioned tools for technical writing? What are your thoughts on the products?

Feel free to share your comments. If there are better alternatives to the products suggested, please recommend the products so that it will benefit our readers.

Frequently Asked Questions

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]]> June 2018 Product Update: SSL for Custom Domain, Embedding Videos, and Improvements https://document360.com/blog/june-2018-product-update/ Wed, 04 Jul 2018 17:49:21 +0000 https://document360.com/?p=656 Another month has passed by, and its time to take a look at ...

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]]> Another month has passed by, and its time to take a look at what we achieved during that period. It’s always a best practice to take a step back and see what we have done.

This gives clarity and ideas for the next set of developments. Welcome to the Document360 June Product Updates!

Missed reading our May update blog? Catch the updates here.

June 2018 Product Update

  1. SSL for custom domain
  2. Embed videos
  3. SEO title
  4. Image resize
  5. Multi-level category

SSL for custom domain

We invested quite some time to make sure the custom domains are SSL secured with the certificates when mapped with Document360. 

Why SSL?

  • SSL will give your website a professional look (improve SEO)
  • Improved ranking in SERP 
  • A secure connection between the landing page and the users

When you map a custom domain, a background process will first check if the domain is a valid one.

And when saving the custom domain setting, another background process will execute a three-step process — configure the custom domain for the project, verify the domain and provision the SSL for the domain.

Custom Domain Mapping - June 2018 Product Update

Users can remove the custom domain mapping and replace with a new domain name.

When the certificate expires, the background process automatically takes care of renewing the expired certificate.

Multi-level categories in Category Manager

In the previous month (May), we made significant changes to the category manager.

This month, we made improvements to the category manager to be able to add up to 6 levels of categories and sub-categories. All the articles within categories will be automatically indented.

June Product Update - Multi level category

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Embed videos

This was one of the most requested features during the customer demos and on emails.

We brought in the capability to embed videos from popular video platforms like YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia. While writing documentation, you might want to embed video from third-party sources to better explain your content.

To embed a video into the documentation, copy the video URL or the video short URL and paste it in the editor pop-up window. On the Markdown editor, you can also specify the height and the width of the video. You can also use any freeware video converter to convert your video into any format.

June Product Update - Video Embed

Here’s how you will see the syntax on the Markdown editor and the preview pane —

June Product Update - Video Embed example

Reader role association visible in dashboard

Let’s say, Darren is the administrator for a project that’s specific to his team. Darren is also a part of the business team within the organization.

When the business team grants Darren a “Reader” access to their project, Darren can see the project on his dashboard.

June Product Update - Associated as Reader

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

We made lots of improvements to the existing capabilities. Here’s a few of the major changes:

  • Want to export your documentation? You have the option to download the file directly or grab the download link — if you want to share with another team member.
  • We added the “SEO Title” field in article settings. This is useful when you want a different title listed for your article on Google search. With this, you can optimize for specific keywords for search.
  • Faced challenges to swap items in Header and Footer navigation? Not anymore. You can drag and drop the links appropriately.
  • The project name is now an editable field. Yes! We heard your feedback!!
  • Faced issues when adding formatting to text within a callout? We’ve got that fixed and you can format the text inside a callout.
  • You will see a notification message when landing page/documentation is disabled
  • Users can now add height and width and resize the images from the editor
  • Get to know your last login information details under the Teams & Protection section
  • Users can collapse the inline preview option using the ‘<‘ splitter option from the editor. To again view the inline preview, users can click the ‘>’ icon.
  • View the collaborator details (as avatar images) in the published article

Want to try these features? Get started with a free trial of Document360 today!

Events

Events provide a perfect opportunity for networking with businesses and people. In the month of June, Document360 was a part of few events around the world:

  • May 31 — June 1 – We registered as a “Visibility Sponsor” at the Evolution of TC 2018 conference at Sofia, Bulgaria. 
  • June 4—6 – We demonstrated the product capabilities to over 400+ attendees at INTEGRATE 2018. INTEGRATE is the premier integration focused conference organized by us (BizTalk360) in London every year.
  • June 7 – We exhibited at Kent B2B Event at Ashford. This was a good opportunity for us to meet small and medium businesses. 
    Here’s a recap blog of our experiences at the event.
  • June 13 – Document360 was selected among the 100 exhibitors at Startup Grind Europe Conference, London 2018. Here’s a recap about our experience at the event.

What did you think of these new features? Do you have any feedback to help us improve your favorite knowledge base software?

We would be glad to hear about in the comments section.

Related: May Month Product Update

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]]> Top 20+ SaaS Products For Startups To Consider https://document360.com/blog/saas-products-for-startups/ Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:17:42 +0000 https://document360.com/?p=886 Running a successful company depends on a few key factors — bringing talented ...

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]]> Running a successful company depends on a few key factors — bringing talented resources on board and making use of the right tools. Large enterprises have the option of bringing in more resources on board to build successful products. When it comes to startups, it’s the other way around. Startups must find and make use of effective SaaS products (tools) to grow their business. This will help them to effectively replace the task of adding more workforce.

Why use SaaS Products?

Let’s start off with the definition, SaaS refers to Software as a Service. In SaaS, the product is offered as a service by the provider, and the users subscribes to the software. The subscription can be on a monthly or yearly basis without any upfront costs.

Here are 5 reasons why you must use SaaS products for the success of your business;

  • Lower market entry cost — You don’t have to buy the hardware to build your product. You can easily get started with the APIs offered by the SaaS provider.
  • Predictable costs — Business owners will get an upfront idea of the cost that will be involved to build the product.
  • Scalability — You can scale your product depending on the workloads by upgrading the subscription.
  • Maintenance — You need not worry about maintaining the software or any downtime. It’s the responsibility of the software vendor to keep the service up and running. Backing up of data is also taken care by the software provider.
  • Anywhere access — The software is hosted in the cloud and are accessible from anywhere via mobile device or any modern browser.

Our experiences using SaaS products

With Document360, we started off with a bootstrapped approach by making use of relevant SaaS products. As we grew in confidence, we started to take advantage of SaaS products according to their fit into our business model.

Based on our experience, this blog lists the top 20+ SaaS products every startup should consider to run the business smoothly. Remember that you need not go and sign up for everything on day one! As you grow, you will come across the need for these tools or even better alternatives, as even more appropriate.

We’ll categorize the SaaS products based on a few important categories —

  1. Customer Support
  2. Project Management
  3. Business Process Management
  4. Team communication
  5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  6. Accounting
  7. Payment
  8. Marketing Automation
  9. Time Tracking Tools
  10. Graphic Management Tools
  11. Social Media
  12. Appointment Scheduling
  13. Video Tools
  14. General Tools

 

Customer Support (Self-Service) – Document360

Docs-Document360

Document360 is a cloud-based knowledge base software that helps to reduce your support ticket and customer support calls.

It is best suited for small businesses to medium and large organizations. To create the perfect self-service knowledge base, you need specialized software with appropriate features. Document360 is designed specifically for SaaS companies to grow at any stage of their journey.

Document360 structures the knowledge base into projects. Also, each project can have its own colour theme, domain, team members etc. this solve the multi product challenge. It also integrates with Intercom, Slack, Freshdesk, Microsoft, Zendesk, and a variety of other services.

Find out how Document360 can help you to reduce support tickets!

Book a Demo
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Customer Support – Zendesk

Zendesk

Zendesk is a web-based customer service help-desk software and a support ticket system. Zendesk in most cases suited for small businesses to medium and large organizations. You can integrate your other support channel sources (such as email, chat) with Zendesk. This tool increases the productivity of your support team and ensures customer satisfaction. Finally with Zendesk, users can set up self-service support portals to help customers seek answers to their queries by themselves.

You can customize your customer support portal with the theme and branding options. Easily integrate with third party solutions like Salesforce, JIRA, FreshBooks and so on.

Customer Support – Freshdesk

freshdesk customer support

Freshdesk is also a customer service software that offers help desk support for businesses. Freshdesk can be your single platform to manage your support tickets.

You can get to know the customer information, status of the ticket, add notes to the ticket, add a team member as a watcher to the ticket, send canned responses to most common questions, and merge tickets that report the same issue.

Freshdesk comes with a free plan for businesses to try out, and later upgrade to one of the paid plans.

Customer Support – ProProfs Helpdesk

 proprofs-help-desk

ProProfs Help Desk is a cloud-based customer service software that allows your agents to join forces and resolve customer queries from a shared platform.

It’s simple, Gmail-like user interface can work great for startups as your agents will not have to undergo any additional training to get started. ProProfs has a variety of customer service tools like Live Chat, Knowledge Base, Survey Maker, etc. that can help you offer a 360-degree customer support experience.

This dynamic tool can be integrated with popular business applications like Salesforce, MSDynamics, and a lot more. It offers an incredibly affordable pricing and users can get started with their Premium Plan free for the first 15 days.

Also Read: Top 7 ProProfs Knowledge Base Alternatives in 2022

Project Management – ProofHub

ProofHub

ProofHub is an ideal project management candidate for startups that need a centralized tool for streamlining their daily work activities. It consists of 8 work management apps wrapped into a highly functional interface.

Most startups have cross-functional teams that actively collaborate on work tasks. ProofHub offers that wholesome platform for communicating ideas, tracking ongoing activities, and managing project data. Its flat monthly fee is a definite plus for growing startups – they can bring their entire office to ProofHub with no bill fluctuations as new members join.

Right from organizing tasks into Kanban boards to discussing project topics and then sharing project files, ProofHub sufficiently meets all project needs. Managers can actively track who’s doing what, instantly communicate using team chat and ensure optimal productivity levels with project reporting. Startups working hard to build that winning team synergy must try ProofHub for making the process much easier.

ProofHub is offered at a flat monthly fee of $89 when billed annually consisting of unlimited projects and tasks. It has no feature restrictions and comes with 100 GB of dedicated storage per account.

Project Management – Clickup

Clickup

ClickUp is an all-in-one project management and productivity tool built for all types of teams, from large corporations and solopreneurs.

Teams across industries use ClickUp because of its customization capabilities, advanced features, and affordable pricing plans—making it the only tool you’ll need to scale your business.

ClickUp can help you manage small to complex projects and everything in between. Easily create, delegate, and manage tasks, communicate with your team, plan project roadmaps, create custom dashboards for reporting, and more all within the same platform. Streamline your processes even further by bringing all your work in one place when you integrate ClickUp with 1,000+ other work tools.

Best of all, ClickUp offers a feature-rich Free Forever Plan. Get 100 MB of storage, unlimited seats, unlimited tasks, 24/7 customer support, and more—all for free!

Project Management – Trello

Trello

Trello is a project management tool best suited for project managers to create tasks and keep track of it. Leading businesses in the world such as Adobe, Google, RedHat use Trello for their project management purposes.

Users can create a board for the project and add new topics, ideas and set deadlines, assign users for specific tasks. The project owner can invite team members to collaborate and work on tasks. Create a checklist of tasks and allow team members to strike off tasks as and when complete.

Trello offers a free plan for you to start with. You can create an unlimited number of boards, cards and invite members to the project board.

Project Management – Asana

asana

Asana is a free task management application to help business users create to-do lists and action items. It’s very easy to start with Asana and quite popular because of this simplicity. You must create a workspace and add projects that lists the tasks and priority.

Asana is a perfect replacement for using excel sheets to manage tasks and projects. It improves the efficiency of work as it’s easy to prioritize and organize the tasks.

Start your journey with Asana for free(up to 5 people), however, some cool features like Timeline view (to plan and manage projects) are available in the higher plans. Nevertheless, it’s a great SaaS product for start-ups to get started with.

At BizTalk360, we used Asana to manage the tasks for our community initiative — Integration User Group. 

Project Management – nTask

ntask

nTask is a crucial tool to have if you want the tasks and processes of your project development process to be tracked and managed perfectly.

The application is an amazing team management tool that allows you to manage all of the different remote teams that are working for your company from all different corners of the globe.

And with the collaboration features and meeting management feature, the application can help your teams to stay connected without any danger of blank spaces when it comes to communication.

The application offers a free plan and a free trial, that can easily get you started if you are a startup and want premium features for a reasonable fee.

Business Process Management – Process Street

Process.st

Process Street is an all-in-one, no-code modern process management platform. In addition to being a mouthful, Process Street enables your teams to efficiently and accurately run your recurring processes without digging around for some binder in a back closet.

Everything in that binder can be loaded into Pages+, which is a free-forever digital knowledge base that lives side-by-side with your workflows – all in one, easy-to-find, central location. Process Street also fully integrates with Slack, Zapier, SalesForce, DocuSign – the list goes on, really. With the Automations feature and the other app integrations, you can fully automate your most-used processes.

Process Street offers a freemium version with access to all features on up to 5 active workflows. Alternatively, for $25/month, the Pro plan offers unlimited workflows and members and the custom Enterprise plan comes with a dedicated Success Manager to support you every step of the way.

Team Communication – Slack

slack

Slack is a SaaS product that facilitates team communication and collaboration for companies with any size of employees. Slack effectively integrates with many other productivity tools.

With Slack, teams can pretty much do anything — get on a general chat discussion, collaborate for team projects and do lots more. You can take the free version of Slack that should work well to experience the taste of the product.

Another good reason is if you are working with a remote team in a different time zone? Slack works a charm!

CRM – Pipedrive

pipedrive

Pipedrive is of great help for the sales teams in your organization. Pipedrive is one of the simplest, easy to use and customizable low-cost CRM tool. With Pipedrive, you can set up multiple sales pipelines with the set of stages. You can plan your action and see how the leads are moving through the defined stages.

Above all, Pipedrive integrates with third party applications and tools. You can download the app version of Pipedrive from Google Play Store or iOS App Store.

There is a free version of Pipedrive that should get you started with the tool.

CRM – Freshsales

freshsales

Freshsales combines different tools such as email productivity, profile enrichment, lead scoring and in-app event tracking used by SaaS businesses into a single CRM solution.

Freshsales gives a graphical view of the sales pipeline with which you can prioritize your leads. You can use the Freshsales API to integrate with your own support system.

In contrast with other players, Freshsales has a free forever startup plan and other plans that suits small, growing, large teams and enterprises.

CRM – Salesflaresalesflare

Salesflare is a smart CRM software that is designed to help the sales team coordinate with the leads and keep track of the sales process. To start, the app integrates with Google & Outlook and it automates the lead data gathering task from email, social media, company databases, phone, calendar and fills out customer timelines. Businesses can use it to track sales, set smart reminders to do- follow up, and engage customers in various platforms. Though the integrations seem to be limited at the moment, with Zapier you can connect to several other software solutions like papertyper, Intercom, MailChimp, Slack, Todoist and more.

Accounting – QuickBooks

quickbooks

Image Source: https://www.getapp.com/operations-management-software/a/quickbooks/

QuickBooks is best suited for small businesses to maintain their basic accounting needs. Businesses can use this software to track their payable bills, overdue items, and common accounting tasks.

As a result, users can generate profit and loss reports in just a few clicks. QuickBooks helps to keep clean business records that are well organized.

The software is very easy to understand. Even a user without an accounting background can learn the software quite easily. Users can export their data to other third-party applications (e.g., tax payment software) without any hassles.

You can get started with a free 30-day trial of the product, and later upgrade to one of the pricing plans.

Accounting – Xero

Xero

Image Source: Xero website

With Xero, small businesses can maintain accurate and up-to-date accounts. Business owners and users can connect their bank accounts and import the bank statements into Xero in just a few clicks.

You can generate customized invoices and send it to customers. Additionally, you can plan and schedule payments well in advance. Build and generate drill down reports using the real-time accounts data.

Finally, Xero comes with a wide range of add-ons for all business needs.

Payment – Stripe

stripe

If you are building a SaaS application, businesses should choose the right payment processor to accept payments from their users. Amongst the most common tools like PayPal, Braintree, Stripe is known to be more popular.

One of the main advantages with Stripe is because of the low credit card processing fees and its ease of use. Stripe is developer friendly and allows developers to build their own payment forms.

We, at Document360, love Stripe for that it offers a wide number of customizations!

 

Marketing Automation – HubSpot

hubspot

HubSpot is one of the most powerful marketing automation tool available in the market. With HubSpot, you can and track workflows that will help to generate quality leads.

HubSpot offers a free CRM and a simple user interface that saves time for marketing teams from performing repetitive tasks.

You can get the HubSpot CRM for free, but the HubSpot Marketing Suite (specific to marketing team) starts at a price of $200 per month. Start with a free trial of the HubSpot marketing suite to explore.

Marketing Automation – SE Ranking

SE Ranking

All-in-one SEO platform SE Ranking is a great solution for SEO automation used by digital agencies, businesses, startups, and SEOs. SE Ranking leverages automated SEO reports, ranking checks, backlink monitoring, and website audit with its webpage monitor feature.

SE Ranking provides daily rank checks in any location, search engine, and device. Automatic rank checking allows marketers to monitor real-time positions and dynamics of their websites and competitors by selected keywords.

Marketers can easily create and customise SEO reports and then set up an automated schedule to get progress reports via email.

Another helpful tool is Webpage Monitor. SE Ranking sends notifications about changes on the website, automatically monitors the index status of every web page, and alerts about competitors’ updates on pricing, product releases, content. If your team made any changes that triggered rankings fluctuations, you would react fast and eliminate the error.

If the marketer focuses on building up a strong backlink profile, SE Ranking offers to monitor link statuses automatically and show you each website backlink status.

SE Ranking PRO package with automation tools starts at $89 per month. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to explore.

Marketing Automation – Marketo

Marketo

If you are focused more on advanced analytics and in-depth workflow functionality, then Marketo is your best friend.

Marketers have the option to perform predictive analysis on the information. Marketo tools best suits for B2B businesses.

To start with Marketo, you can choose from one of the packaged bundles or customize a particular solution. You will have even more option to learn on having a paid subscription account.

Marketing Automation – Autopilot

autopilot

Autopilot is ideal for small to large businesses. Businesses can use autopilot as an email marketing tool to send emails and in-app messages. If you are a marketer you can set up journeys for each stage of the marketing campaign and test every stage individually before publishing the journey.

View real-time reports of the journey performance, the number of link clicks in your email, the mails that are converting and driving sales. Autopilot integrates with almost 800+ tools including Salesforce, Segment, Slack and more. Choose a 30-day trial of Autopilot to start with.

DYK: We use Autopilot at Document360 for our marketing campaigns? Want to receive regular updates from us? Subscribe to our newsletter today.

Marketing Automation – Mailchimp

mailchimp

Mailchimp is best used to send mass emailers and newsletters. Marketers can create campaigns and trigger emails to almost 2000 subscribers in the free plan.

If your company generates a lot of content and you want to share it with your email subscribers, MailChimp is the perfect fit tool.

Start-ups can take full advantage of the free plan when the focus is towards building your email list. Choose a pre-defined email template or upload your custom HTML email templates.

Track the outcome of your emails based on parameters such as open rate, click rate, industry average open rate.

Time Tracking – Timely

Timely Automatic Time Tracking Tool

Did you know that firms lose $52,500 per employee each year due to inaccurate manual time tracking? Even when logged daily, manual timesheets are only ever 67% accurate. Timely is an award-winning, AI-powered employee time tracking software that automates company time tracking and timesheet creation – solving the inaccuracy and effort of manual solutions.

Offering strict user-level privacy by design, Timely is a tracking tool that employees actually trust. Teams can work naturally and focus on their work, confident that every billable detail will make it to their timesheet.

You can get started today with a 14-day free trial

Time Tracking – Time Doctor

Time Doctor

Time Doctor is an employee time tracking software that will help you and your team get a lot more done each day. It offers extensive information on how time is spent during the workday. You may monitor applications and websites accessed while working, as well as computer screen snapshots taken every few minutes as your staff operate.

Time Doctor is simple and easy to use: establish a project, add a task, and then go to work. It logs the amount of time spent on each job, takes screenshots on occasion, and keeps track of the applications and websites visited. It also has a client interface that may be used to bill client projects. It can also be integrated with a variety of third-party apps.

Graphic Management – Canva

canva - top startup tools

Canva is a simple tool that can be used by your graphic designers and content writers to create graphics for websites, blogs, and social media.

You can start with ready-made design themes or create custom designs with custom dimensions.

Above all, with the free plan, you can invite up to 350 members to your team and share the designs/folders.

Graphic Management – TinyImage 

TinyImage

TinyImage is the best image compression tool by Attrock, It is designed to help you reduce the size of your images without compromising on their quality. With TinyImage, you can easily compress images before uploading them on your website, social media pages, or any platform where large files could pose an issue.

The biggest advantage of this tool is that it is very intuitive and user-friendly. It is easy to use even for those who are not very tech-savvy. Plus, the compression process is pretty straightforward, allowing you to compress multiple images simultaneously, saving time and effort.

Another important feature of TinyImage is its ability to maintain the quality of the images even after compressing them. You can safely reduce the size of the images without having to worry about them looking blurry or pixelated.

TinyImage is also a web-based tool, which means there is no need to download or install any software. It is an extremely convenient option for those who need to compress images on the go or those with limited storage space on their devices.

The best part? It is completely free to use.

So, if you are a blogger, influencer, digital marketer, or anyone who needs to work with images regularly, this is a tool you must try.

Social Media Management – Hootsuite

hootsuite - top startup tools

Hootsuite is the best friend for your team working on social media posts. Configure multiple streams for a specific social media account. For example, with Twitter, you can create streams like My Tweets, Mentions, #documentation, #SaaSProducts, and so on.

Set up multiple social networks in a single place. Schedule posts across multiple social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and lots more.

Save time by building your posts in a CSV file and uploading it to Hootsuite. Get an in-depth view of how your social media strategy is working from the Analytics data.

Appointment Scheduling – Calendly

Calendly - top startup tools

For any startup business, scheduling customer meetings and demos are very crucial. Calendly is one of the best suited SaaS products for small to medium size enterprises.

The interface is very simple to set up a meeting. All your daily meetings visualized on the dashboard. You can also conveniently embed Calendly into a webpage where your customers can schedule a meeting according to their convenient time.

Calendly integrates well with Gmail, Office365, Outlook and other SaaS products like Slack, MailChimp, Salesforce.

At Kovai Limited, we use Calendly to allow our customers to schedule demos for BizTalk360.

Video Tools – Wistia

wistia - saas products for a startup

Want a simple video hosting tool that offers detailed analytics and the ability to capture user details (like name and email)? the answer is Wistia!

Wistia is best suited for companies that use video on their websites for marketing, sales, and support.

It comes with strong analytics features that show the user engagement, how long the user watched the video, when they dropped off, and track the performance.

You can customize the appearance of your video by adding a thumbnail, change the colour of the player, and configure the social share icons.

One of the key features of Wistia is the ability to add a Turnstile to capture user information and add a call to action at the end of the video (like Watch More Videos, Read More and so on).

Choose a free plan that allows you to add up to 3 videos with the Wistia branding. The pro plan costs $99 per month.

Video Tools – Loom Video Recorder

Loom is a video recorder application to capture your screen and record videos. On a button click, you can start a video recording of your screen. Very effective when you want to send video responses via email explaining something important, record video tutorials for websites and documentation, and more.

Unlike other recording software, Loom has a cool feature where your presence seen visually in the video. This gives a different dimension to watching just a plain video.

The videos saved to a video library and available for export to popular video hosting platforms. Loom is available as a desktop application and as a browser extension.

Video Tools – Zoom

There are lots of video conferencing SaaS products available such as GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting, Join me, and more. For early start-ups and small businesses, Zoom pretty much has all the features required for video conferencing.

The stand-out feature of Zoom is the capability for both presenters and viewers to see each other. Zoom video conferencing is a combination of webinars and live events.

It comes free of cost for meetings under 40 minutes and can host up to 100 participants. You can record a full video and watch the replay of the meeting (including the questions on the chat window).

General Tool – Google Analytics

Analytics is a free offering from Google. Gather meaningful insights on your website and blog traffic. Google Analytics comes in very handy when you have set goals and you want to measure the traffic and conversions for that goal.

Analytics lets you know which content source drives more traffic to your website (e.g., direct, organic, paid, and more), from where people access the website, their gender, and so on.

The best thing is, it’s free!

General Tool – NAKIVO Office 365 Backup

Startups rely heavily on digital data, including customer information, financial records, intellectual property, and critical business documents. Losing this data due to hardware failure, human error, or cyberattacks can have severe consequences. The NAKIVO Office 365 backup was developed with the intention of safeguarding and securing the information stored in Office 365. It offers robust built-in features that ensure reliable data protection for businesses and individuals.


NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides data backup for all Microsoft Office 365 applications, such as Exchange Online (email), SharePoint Online (collaboration and document management), OneDrive for Business (file storage), and Teams (communication and collaboration) allowing users to easily configure and schedule automated backups.

In addition to backup capabilities, the NAKIVO solution offers two-factor authentication, and role-based access control to protect backups against unauthorized access and ensure compliance with security standards.

General Tool – SEMrush

SEMrush is a popular keyword research and analytics tool used by SEO specialists. With SEMrush, SEO professionals can keep track of how the competitors are ranking for a keyword on Google and Bing search engines.

Your SEO team can also use this to find out the long tail keyword phrases to garner better benefits. It is the complete tool for digital marketers that covers all the aspects of online marketing.

For instance, you can compare your paid search campaign with that of competitors and tweak your spending effectively.

General Tool – Grammarly

As a start-up, churning out blog articles and relevant content is a key task. Grammarly is the content writer’s friend! Grammarly points out any mistakes and provides alternate suggestions to what you have written.

Grammarly checks the content for spelling, grammar, voice (active/passive), and readability.

You get all these capabilities in the basic free version of the software. If you want more advanced features (such as a plagiarism checker), you can purchase the premium version of the software at $29.95 per month.

For instance, you can compare your paid search campaign with that of competitors and tweak your spending effectively.

Final Thoughts

The list is not done with these SaaS products. This is just a small set of the most popular SaaS products used across different areas of the business. Each product has its own purpose that aims to help start-up companies grow faster and scale higher.

If you have used any more of such awesome SaaS products, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to drop in a comment below.

Thinking about investing in a self-service knowledge base? Try Document360 — the knowledge base that scales with your product. Start with a free trial to build the complete self-service knowledge base with ease.

The post Top 20+ SaaS Products For Startups To Consider appeared first on Document360.

]]> May 2018 Product Update: Pricing Subscription Plans, Private Documentation, Article Preview and Improvements https://document360.com/blog/may-2018-product-update/ Wed, 06 Jun 2018 08:04:03 +0000 https://document360.com/?p=584 Welcome to the Document360 May Product Update. Our engineering team has been busy ...

The post May 2018 Product Update: Pricing Subscription Plans, Private Documentation, Article Preview and Improvements appeared first on Document360.

]]> Welcome to the Document360 May Product Update. Our engineering team has been busy releasing new features and making improvements to existing features based on customer and internal feedback. It’s only fair to justify the efforts gone behind the product development by highlighting the updates.

The major focus area in the month of May was to get the product ready for the public. This was right in time before our flagship integration conference – INTEGRATE 2018.

Top Product Updates for May 2018

  1. Pricing plans
  2. Private documentation
  3. Article preview mode
  4. Improvements to documentation  export and import

Pricing Subscription Plans

Document360 Pricing - May update

We enabled the Pricing functionality in Document360. Users will now be able to purchase from one of the available pricing plans — Startup, Business, and Enterprise. Our pricing starts as low as $99/month (for an annual subscription).

You will see the Pricing section when you visit the “Billing” section in Settings. Every higher plan (Business and Enterprise) will include the features in the lower plan in addition to extra features. We offer a flat 20% discount on the pricing when you opt for the annual subscription.

For any pricing specific questions, please refer the frequently asked questions at the bottom of the pricing page.

Private Documentation

Private documentation has been one of the most requested features on our support and during customer demos. We totally understand the importance of keeping the documentation private inline with your organization SLAs and policies. Based on the feedback, we have implemented the capability to restrict the documentation from showing up in public view.

May product Update: Private Documentation - Document360

Document360 users (administrators and project owners) have the capability to make the documentation as private. By doing this, only users with access to the specific project will be able to view the documentation. Users must log in with their credentials to view the documentation.

May product Update: Private Documentation - Login Screen

Once you’ve logged in to the portal, you’ll see the logged in user details on the top right corner. You can head to the portal or log out from the documentation page.

May product Update: Private Documentation - Log out users

A small lock icon will be visible next to the Visit Site link on the top left corner. 

May product Update: Private Documentation - Visit Site Lock Icon

Preview mode for draft articles

Document360 supports the preview functionality for draft articles. This helps content writers to get an idea of the final output on the landing page. Previously, users needed to publish the article first before they can view it on the customer-facing website. 

May product Update: Document360 - Preview article

Here’s the preview look for the above content —

May product Update: Preview Article in Portal - Document360

Export improvements and Import capability

We released the export capability in Document360 a few weeks ago. We have tightened the backend and made some improvements to the export logic. 

This month, we brought in the capability for users to import the documentation into a new project. This functionality is really helpful when you want to replicate the data from one project to another. This will save your time from manually creating the articles.

May product Update: Import documentation - Document360

Category Manager Improvements

Category Manager is one of the features we have taken extra care to build and develop in Document360. This month, we made a lot of UI changes to this feature. We added the capability to be able to drag and drop articles to either a category or sub-category. You can also reorder the articles within a category or sub-category.

Category Manager - Reorder the article

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

We focused on a bunch of improvements to make the product ready for v1 release.

  • Faced with an issue when trying to save your email address with an uppercase letter? Our testers caught that during the regression tests and we’ve made the fix.
  • We fixed the issues with Gravatar images not showing up properly across the application
  • Restrictions added for a number of characters in sub-domain name and logo text (in the dashboard)
  • Project version drop-down will not be visible in the landing page when there is only one documentation version
  • Added a custom domain? Now you can remove the custom domain mapping using the Remove icon.

Want to try these features? Get started with a free trial of Document360 today! 

The post May 2018 Product Update: Pricing Subscription Plans, Private Documentation, Article Preview and Improvements appeared first on Document360.

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