Sarah Holdgrafer

Hey Rebecca, 

The Paligo trial has been super interesting and a great learning experience (I basically got a crash course in structured and topic-based authoring in the last month and a half, which has completely changed my perspective on how my company has been doing things - shout out to the Write the Docs community for chatting with me and sending me tons of great content).

The rep I've been working with (Steve) and the support people who answered my questions have all been incredibly responsive and also quite knowledgeable about how to manage the ZenDesk integration effectively. It's also clear they are really passionate about their platform and its benefits.

We decided to get a license for my team and we are also bringing the Paligo trainer down to train my team on advanced features (like versioning and localization), best practices, and strategies. Since all of our content is currently unstructured, the trainer will also be workshopping our content directly with us to ensure we can hit the ground running.

The platform itself is super intuitive, as is the publishing workflow. I'm really looking forward to developing our new strategy, and already have a ton of ideas that go well beyond just our knowledge base that would be logistically very difficult without such a platform. 

I've shown it to our marketing dept with some of my ideas about how we can use it for various types of user documentation (specifically for onboarding), so they're intrigued as well but don't have the bandwidth to handle it right now. Meaning, I'm basically the company guinea pig :-) I think in a few months I can come to them with some deliverables, blow their mind, and then train them all on it as well. Is it weird that I'm so excited about this? ;-)

 

I'm currently trialing a cloud-based CCMS that integrates with ZenDesk Guide that could be a viable solution for some on this thread. 

https://paligo.net/

• Uses topic-based authoring
• Enables topic re-use
• Based on DocBook framework (but also integrates with Oxygen XML Author/Editor for those who prefer DITA)

I've published a few articles to our ZD sandbox and it was very straightforward, though I'll have to do some editing of our ZD theme and the Paligo CSS file to maintain the styles we want in our articles. 

It looks like this might be a great solution for teams that don't have the time/resources to learn Python and manually leverage the ZD API. Paligo handles all of that for you and frees up the documentation team to focus on the content and strategy. I am giving myself a crash course on structured authoring right now (a huge topic, really) but this experience has been really eye-opening. 

 

this would be great to have natively within ZD, but as a secondary option does anyone know of content management tools that could be used to create/manage KB content and then uses the ZD API to push the content to Guide?

 

I would also use this function at LEAST quarterly, if not monthly. 

Also, we about to extend our help center to have unique help center access for Canada, Australia, and the UK. Having the ability to have a spreadsheet with all of our articles (potentially organized by section and with their labels included) would be a huge help in the process of determining which articles need what labels, as our labeling strategy will be, partly, about what articles need to go where (since not all articles apply to all countries)