Last month I spoke with the team lead of a technical writing team at a mid-sized software company. The team consists of 3 writers spread across 3 time zones: Portland, Austin and London. They were working on the same product manual and were up against a hard and fast deadline. One writer had the latest version of the manual, another was editing content several versions old and the third writer was unable to access the files at all due to VPN problems. It took them 2 days to work through the version conflicts and merge their changes. In the end, they had created suboptimal work.
Stuck in the past with desktop-based authoring tools and file-sharing platforms, such organizations can and do continue to experience on-going problems in their documentation workflows. But, moving to cloud-based documentation authoring in documentation workflows changes everything in the documentation lifecycle.
Real-time collaboration eliminates version chaos
Historically, writers have worked as if they were running a relay race. That is to say, the first writer would complete a section of content, and then the next writer could begin working on the next section. Cloud-based authoring tools, however, change all of that and enable writers to work together in real time on the very same project. Any writer working on a particular project will be able to see the changes that any of the other writers working on that same project make to any section of the finished work in real time. For example, a writer working on Chapter 3 will see the new section or updated content of another writer working on the appendix in real time as it is written.
Real-time collaboration to eliminate the problems of versioning. Documentation that is published to the web is instantly available to all contributors, whatever part of the world they are in, and whatever time of day it is. They can see straight away the changes that have been made to the content that they need to refer to. So for example, an author of Chapter 3 will see straight away any changes made to the content in Chapter 3 by another author. Those changes will also be instantly available to the author of the Appendix that corresponds to that Chapter 3. No more wondering what the latest version of a file is, and risk of overwriting changes made by another author by basing changes on a previous version. Authors can leave comments, edit content, and more. Contributors can provide and manage suggestions for the revision of content written by another contributor. All updates and changes are tracked and reviewed in a single flow of comments, instead of having to create separate review documents, and manage them in email.
Comments, Suggested Changes and Changes are tracked in the document. No need to set up a review document that gets lost in email.
Access from anywhere becomes a competitive advantage
For teams around the world working remotely, documentation authoring in the cloud is important to enable team members to work from anywhere, at any time, using only a web browser. If you have writers working in different parts of the country or around the world, then your documentation procedures can be updated by those writers while they are on the road. Subject matter experts can review documentation from anywhere, such as their home office, and project managers can check on the status of the documentation at anytime from anywhere. This means that people can work from anywhere and documentation can be kept up to date by experts in the field at any time.
Documentation authoring in the cloud enables writers and subject matter experts from all parts of an organization to update and complete documentation from anywhere in the world. Access can be granted to a writer or a subject matter expert anywhere in the world at any time of day or night from any computer with an Internet connection and a web browser. Documentation can be completed by teams of contributors from around the world. For example, the development of a product manual could be completed by writers and subject matter experts from locations in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Contractors and temporary workers can also be brought into a documentation project on an as-needed basis from anywhere in the world.
Documentation online that writers and subject matter experts can access from anywhere in the world be using as reference or for updates can be a huge competitive advantage. It can increase the writers and subject matter experts productivity whether they are traveling or working from home.
Integration streamlines the entire content pipeline
Just as there are many tools that exist within a company’s digital ecosystem that support a variety of functions, cloud-based authoring tools exist within the digital ecosystem that supports business functions and support other business applications. That’s why MadCap Flare Online makes it easy to integrate with a variety of systems, including your Content Management System, pull in data from APIs, and publish content to Help Desks and product development teams can also benefit from the documentation you create with Flare Online. By integrating your documentation into the processes used by these teams, you can streamline your content pipeline.
With MadCap Flare Online, all of the different components of the content process, such as a repository of content, a project management tool, can all be integrated into a single web-based interface. And then, all of the different publishing destinations can be set up automatically so that, with the click of a button, all of the documentation can be published automatically to all of those locations. This eliminates a lot of the time-consuming administrative tasks that documentation teams typically have to complete as part of their normal workflow.
With MadCap Flare Online, all of your projects automatically get published to all of your destinations (like web sites, mobile applications, and print production facilities), in the format and look that you specified. So instead of saving a file to your local PC and then uploading it to a web site or a mobile application, or to a print production facility, the documentation is automatically published to all of these destinations at once, saving a lot of time.
Scalability without infrastructure headaches
A documentation team is similar to an IT department. As the team grows so do the challenges of managing software licenses, storage on servers, and keeping the software up to date on all the computers of the documentation team. Letting the documentation teams focus on what they do best (create documentation) is important to get high value out of them.
First of all, cloud documentation is perfect for documentation teams who need to scale quickly. With cloud documentation, as the amount of content your team creates increases, storage automatically increases as well. This is in stark contrast to local authoring of files which requires the proactive management of storage, such as setting up a local server or purchasing additional space on a network. Moreover, provisioning a new writer on a cloud documentation team is as simple as creating a new account and providing that writer with access to the documentation that he or she needs to complete his or her work. As opposed to local authoring of files where provisioning a new writer would involve purchasing licenses for new software as well as setting up a local configuration for that writer to author files. All in all, businesses with documentation teams that use cloud authoring platforms can react and respond to change faster.
By adopting cloud-based documentation authoring, organizations can benefit from the additional features and functions within a matter of minutes / hours / days, rather than months of procurement processes followed by setup, particularly when supporting new languages, alternative Content Management Systems or additional file formats for example.
Security and backup happen automatically
Many documentation authors are also part time writers. Their main function is to manage other tasks and in many cases they can be forgotten when it comes to remembering to do an occasional backup of a sensitive document or critical document. The storage of your documentation in the cloud automatically includes automatically creating a backup of your content. The access rights to your stored content can be set on a very granular level. Writers can have access to specific parts of a documentation project while others can only read the finished documentation. Audit trails are also included and show who changed what and when. This can be very useful for organizations where documentation is updated by multiple people.
Automated backup of all your content is a standard feature of any cloud-based authoring solution. Also, access rights to access content can be granted on a very fine-grained basis. This means that sensitive information can be protected from unwanted access while at the same time ensuring that your documentation team has the necessary access to perform their work. An audit trail is created which shows who changed what and when.
Switching to cloud-based documentation authoring as part of your documentation processes will change your work as well as how you work with documentation. It will take some time to get used to it. After this period your documentation will be more productive, more flexible and more efficient.
