How Proscia Achieved 95% Faster Publishing Using Paligo CCMS

Proscia is a software company leading pathology’s transition to digital. Pathology, which sits at the center of cancer research and diagnosis, is among the last major fields of medicine to modernize despite informing up to 70% of clinical decisions. Proscia is driving its shift from microscopes and glass slides to high-resolution images and AI, unlocking new insights that can improve patient care.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Philadelphia, the company counts 16 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and major diagnostic laboratories among its users. These include 12,000+ pathologists and scientists who rely on its AI-driven Concentriq® enterprise pathology platform. 8M+ patients are set to be diagnosed on Concentriq this year.

As a company at the forefront of medical technology, delivering clear, accurate, and efficiently managed technical documentation is crucial for its sophisticated user base and global operations. However, as Proscia grew, their existing documentation processes presented significant hurdles.

 

Overcoming Documentation Challenges

A few years ago, Proscia experienced rapid growth as demand for digital pathology surged. To support this growth, they were looking for ways to elevate operations. Bonnie Swanson was hired as the Technical Communications Manager to help improve the creation and management of technical documentation for their two products, including an English-language admin guide and an admin guide published in 12 languages. 

Prior to Swanson joining the company, the technical documentation was managed by a product manager. The PM managed the documentation for the English-only product in Google Docs. The second product had three versions and was available in multiple languages. The documentation for that product was managed using MS Word. In both cases, the documentation was converted to PDFs and published. 

The process of managing the multi-lingual documentation was the most challenging. There was a source file with the user guide. Once it was updated for a new release, it was sent to a translation provider, who would translate it and return Word files in 12 additional languages (they are now at 15 languages). Sometimes, there were issues with the formatting, resulting in inconsistencies across translations. 

When the formatting was cleaned up, the files would be saved as PDFs and opened in Adobe Acrobat to add a cover page using the page assembler (each language version had a different cover page). 

The entire process after translation would take hours, sometimes days. And if there were any changes between releases, such as a change in release date, going back and editing all the PDFs was painful. Swanson said the entire process was unmanageable. She knew they needed to automate publishing and translation management, but as a startup, they had limited resources. 

 

Selecting and Implementing Paligo CCMS

Swanson does her best to stay up to date with the latest developments in component content management systems and other technologies that help manage technical documentation, and she has experience using several CCMS systems. 

She mapped out the three key requirements for a solution for Proscia:

• The CCMS had to be lightweight enough to be managed by a single person (i.e., small, lightweight, easy to manage)
• It has to support translation management
• It needed to provide multi-channel publication, including PDF and Zendesk (which they were planning to use for their support center)

Based on her research, knowledge, and the company’s requirements, they started looking at Paligo and a few other options. Not only did they look at the functionality required, but they also considered the user interface and pricing model. In the end, Paligo came out as the right tool for them. 

Swanson said migrating the existing documentation into Paligo was “super easy.” They had two user guides, each approximately 60-100 pages each. Swanson began with the English-only guide, which was managed in Google Docs. To ensure a smooth migration, Swanson had to revise the structure of the guide around a topic-based authoring model. She also needed to consider the changes required to support publishing to an online help center. The revision process took a couple of months.

Once the guide was ready, it was converted to MS Word and imported into Paligo. They had to fix a few issues that didn’t import correctly, but from start to finish, the import process took only a couple of hours. 

Swanson also spent several months revising the second translated guide to ensure it followed the topic-based authoring model before migrating it to the Paligo CCMS. With this guide, there were three versions, two of which were published with the revised structure and one that couldn’t be modified due to regulatory requirements (this version was imported as is). All three versions are now managed in Paligo. 

The setup of the Paligo CCMS took only a couple of days, and the first official publication, which coincided with a software release, occurred 45 days after the start of the migration. It took Swanson about a year to optimize the entire process from start to finish (which Paligo enabled), including streamlining translation workflows, enabling consistency across multiple products (setting up publication templates), building out the multichannel publishing so they could publish to both PDF and Zendesk, and streamlining regular documentation updates by setting up variables, profiling, and filtering. 

When the entire process was complete, Swanson gave a presentation at their all-hands meeting:

We have reduced our publication time by 95%. We have reduced our translation costs by 75%, and it now takes 90 seconds to publish 15 languages of the user guide and post them for distribution. We celebrated that last September.

Key Capabilities Driving Proscia’s Success

Proscia doesn’t use all the capabilities the Paligo CCMS offers, but the ones they do use are important to their ability to deliver documentation quickly.

 

Effortless Translation Management

Translating documentation was a key requirement for selecting Paligo, and Swanson said the translation workflow was one of her favorite capabilities. When new or revised content is ready for translation, Swanson checks a box next to each topic that needs translation, exports the files, and sends them to Language Wire (their translation provider) for translation. Selecting what to send is crucial because it saves on translation costs. 

I marvel every time at how simple and easy and straightforward that export-import process is.

(Note: Paligo CCMS also has a direct integration with LanguageWire.)

 

Seamless Multi-channel Publishing

Once they had the PDF publication process up and running, Zendesk integration was also set up. 

The Paligo integration with Zendesk really enabled us to very quickly build up a Support Center from literally 0 to 100 in a couple of months, getting all of the existing documentation up there, so we had something to start with. Our support center still has a long way to go, but there’s a baseline now. The baseline foundation of the available user documentation and the simplicity of the Zendesk pre-flight feature, what a lifesaver.

Powerful Content Reuse and Management

Swanson also reuses content in Paligo. From snippets to informal topics to entire topics and sections:

I’ve been having fun exploring really different ways of assembling entire documents and strings of documents, and I feel like I’m just scratching the surface with that.

She uses variables and is increasingly using the filtering and profiling capabilities, particularly with the product with three different versions. She also likes the image management capabilities that enable her to get variants of images for each language:

I have to include the screenshots in the User Guide, and just being able to do a mass upload of the different language variants and have them automatically just publish where they’re supposed to be is a beautiful thing.

Empowering a Lean Team: Paligo as a Force Multiplier

As a growing company, Proscia doesn’t have a huge technical documentation team. Swanson is a team of one, managing the documentation on her own. There are eight people with Contributor licenses and two others with Author licenses (although these are more to ensure others have access when Swanson is away). Swanson said that Paligo’s support team has been very responsive, and that’s been an enormous help to her. 

Paligo has enabled me to extend my ability to be a team of more than one.

The Paligo CCMS’s lightweight nature, ease of management, and responsive support team proved to be the perfect fit for Proscia’s requirements as it continues to grow. Paligo has solved Proscia’s immediate documentation challenges and provided a scalable foundation for future growth, enabling them to deliver high-quality technical information efficiently and effectively to their global users.