The Paligo CCMS is game-changing for software and IT companies

A common theme in many companies is the need to manage all the content spread out across an organization. There can be difficulty in breaking down silos and getting a general organizational understanding of what solutions are available.

Many content management systems don’t have the functionality required to maintain large or complex sets of documentation or knowledge bases. You need a more robust solution with a better usability ratio. In other words, a modern software documentation system. So how can you do that? With a component content management system (CCMS).

It’s a familiar story. The team working in technical documentation or knowledge management builds a custom solution to quickly fix the documentation problem. This works for a while, but as the company scales up, they outgrow the solution. The team finds themselves in a repetitive cycle, trying to keep up with ‌growth. They are constantly playing catch-up, trying to find new solutions to fit the needs of an ever-evolving company. This leaves them frustrated and overwhelmed, and they’re no closer to finding a permanent solution.

That’s why a component content management system, or (CCMS) is a game-changer for software companies. It enables you to efficiently manage content and improve the user experience. Using a CCMS software, such as Paligo, lets your documentation team automate and streamline many of the manual processes they used to rely on in the past. Then your team can focus on more strategic tasks, instead of being overwhelmed by the day-to-day operations of documentation. Also, this approach helps to maintain a consistent level of quality and accuracy throughout your documentation. Let’s explore how this is done.

Using CCMS software offers numerous benefits for efficient content management and development. It can help to organize and manage content in a clear way that is easy for users to understand. Let’s take a look at some examples of how the Paligo CCMS can be used in software companies:

Topic-based (structured) authoring

The Paligo CCMS enables you to break down documentation into modular components, such as topics or sections, which is called structured content authoring. This approach enables content reuse, where these components can be easily shared and reused across multiple products, versions, or platforms. It streamlines the documentation process, reduces duplication, and ensures consistency.

Many of our customers use Paligo for technical communication that includes hardware manuals, training information, and software reference material. Many customers also use Paligo to manage all user documentation, often involving thousands of topics in numerous publications, including system setup, usage, hardware, and software.

One of the biggest challenges software companies have in managing and maintaining such a large amount of content is that there are not enough writers to handle the number of variations on all products. Typically manuals can be a thousand pages or more. But taking a closer look at this documentation shows that much of the content is reused across variations. And a CCMS with structured content authoring is the perfect fit for this situation.

The Paligo CCMS makes it easy to reuse content and to quickly update it when needed. This saves time compared to having to manually update each document every time there is a change. And it ensures that all documentation is always up-to-date.

In the meantime, you and your team gain the ability to maintain all variations in a single publication. Then, it’s simple to automatically generate the selected set of topics you require at publishing time.

Version Control

As products evolve and undergo updates, it is crucial to keep documentation current. Documentation teams need to maintain version control for their documentation. A CCMS makes it possible to track and manage different versions of documentation, making sure that users access the relevant information based on the software version they are using.

If you need to update documents for multiple releases of multiple products, Paligo’s versioning, content reuse, and integrated CCMS make that practical and straightforward.

Without version control, your documentation risks falling behind the product, and it can be hard to keep track of the different versions of your content. Version control enables you to ensure the latest content is available to your customers, and helps you compare different versions of the document side-by-side to find any inconsistencies.

Before switching to Paligo, many of our customers performed document reviews by emailing a PDF and consolidating review comments. But with Paligo, reviews are much more efficient, taking place entirely within the system. And reviewers can see each other’s comments.
For example, your company may manage technical documentation for around 50 different software products, distributed in multiple markets. Your team may also work with different product managers. You need a reliable way to send and track assignments for review and approval. In a company that is scaling up quickly, leveraging Paligo’s reviewing and tracking features will help ‌greatly increase your efficiency.

Or perhaps your company spends a lot of time writing multiple software manuals. Paligo lets multiple writers collaborate on writing manuals for multiple pieces of software. Our collaboration features help you manage and track the entire content creation and ‌localization processes.
Paligo’s collaborative features‌ enable teams of technical communicators, subject-matter experts, and reviewers to collaborate seamlessly. Because these features allow multiple users to work on the same documentation simultaneously, the review and approval processes are streamlined, leading to efficient task assignments, tracking progress, and clear communication among team members.

(To learn about how this collaboration saved time for one of our customers in the software industry, take a look at our customer story with Jenzabar.)

Localization and Translation Management

For software companies operating in global markets, a CCMS simplifies the localization and translation of documentation. It permits the separation of content from the presentation layer, making it easier to manage translations across multiple languages. And Paligo has built-in features for translating your content. These include integrations with professional translation software (Semantix and Phrase), built-in workflows, and a translation editor and assignments.

Your company may need to adapt your content to a specific market or region. The translation and filtering features make it simple to efficiently re-use content in documents across various products. And revision times and translation costs are greatly reduced.

Single Source Publishing

With CCMS software, teams can publish documentation across various formats and channels from a single source, whether it’s generating PDFs, HTML5, online help systems, etc. The need for manual formatting is eliminated along with customization for each output, saving time and effort for technical writers.

In the software industry, it’s important to have a single source of truth for your documentation. Because Paligo is an intelligent cloud-based platform, it provides true single-sourcing. So, if all of your documentation is in Paligo, you can create, store, and manage it all in one place. That makes it easier to keep track of changes and maintain up-to-date information.

These examples are just the starting point when it comes to the benefits of implementing a CCMS. Your team can improve documentation strategy, quality, increase productivity, and enhance the user experience by providing accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible content.

The Paligo CCMS offers many different types of integration that can be useful to companies operating in software and IT. For example, Paligo integrates with popular content delivery platforms including BitBucket, GitLab, FluidTopics, Zoomin and more.

If you want to have a premium search tool, like Algolia or Elasticsearch, you can also integrate that directly into your HTML output. Providing that you have a subscription, all you need to do is click a button and enter your credentials.

These are just a few examples of integrations with Paligo. You can find all current Paligo integrations here.

Note: Paligo also offers developers access to powerful tools such as the Paligo API allowing them to create custom integrations with other applications.

Paligo is an ideal choice for software and IT companies that require top-level security and compliance standards. With Paligo, businesses can be confident that their content is secure and compliant, and that their teams have a safe platform to collaborate and manage content. For more detail about Paligo’s security and compliance, take a look here.

To summarize, Paligo’s cloud-based CCMS provides a wide range of features and benefits for software and IT companies. These include streamlining and automating the content creation process, enabling collaboration, supporting multilingual content, offering personalized content delivery, and providing advanced security and compliance features. If you work in software or IT, take a look at the Paligo Academy and scroll down to see what some of our customers in software and IT have produced through the Paligo CCMS.