Intapp Builds a Scalable Documentation Practice with Paligo at the Foundation

Intapp is a software solutions company for professional services companies. It helps professionals turn knowledge, relationships, and operational insights into value. Using the power of Applied AI, they make firm and market intelligence easy to find, understand, and use.

The world’s top firms across accounting, consulting, investment banking, legal, private capital, and real assets trust Intapp’s industry-specific solutions to drive new growth and multiply opportunity.

Marcy Badertscher is the Senior Manager of Information Development at Intapp, joining the company first as an information developer in August 2021, working on a team that develops end-user and administrator documentation.

When Badertscher started at Intapp, there were three information developers acting as a service bureau to support over ten SaaS-based products. The writers worked on end-user and administration documentation requests as they came in from across the company. The team used a documentation platform that, at the time, was only offered as an on-premises solution. The platform wasn’t set up very efficiently and required a lot of manual rework to produce output.

Badertscher was hired to come in and develop the Information Development Team and the processes needed. To resolve their technical challenges, her manager tasked her to find a consultant experienced in their previous platform who could help fix some of their problems. In her search process, Badertscher found Paligo, and when she looked deeper, she found that it offered the capabilities they needed.

I had never heard of this tool before. And I thought, now this is something that is really interesting. And I think we could really use this. If we were going to invest X amount of effort and money into fixing our previous documentation solution, why wouldn’t we just take that effort and money and start on the Paligo platform, which I thought suited us much better.

Although Badertscher recommended Paligo, there was still a review process to ensure it met the team’s needs. After defining a list of requirements, the team tested Paligo in a sandbox environment. They rated the importance of each requirement and how well Paligo handled them. No major issues were identified during that process.

Shortly after recommending Paligo, Badertscher became the new manager of the Information Development Team. She knew the team was too small for the number of products they were supporting, and she knew they needed to be more efficient.

I had to have a solution that was going to be scalable and that would allow us to create efficiencies and do more with the same amount of people. And that, to me, was Paligo.

After adding a few staff members, the first priority was to use Paligo as a platform to standardize their content. Paligo became the environment in which the team developed their initial style guide and standards. The team learned topic-based authoring to support content reuse and began creating topics that could be reused across all documentation.

The transition from the previous platform to Paligo was straightforward for the most part. Badertscher said one writer struggled with the transition, not because Paligo was hard to use, but because they had an established process with the other platform that worked for them. However, once the writer started using Paligo, they preferred it.

As the manager, Badertscher doesn’t work in the Paligo CCMS environment on a daily basis. So, she asked her team, some of whom work up to six hours a day in Paligo, what their favorite features were. Here’s what they said.

The ability to collaborate was a top favorite among the team. The writers collaborate with many subject matter experts (product managers), and Paligo provides an environment that makes that collaboration much easier. With the previous on-premises solution, writers had to download the documentation to a PDF and email it to the SMEs for review. As a cloud-based platform, Paligo enables writers to send review requests from the platform using the Planner feature.

Each writer, when they’re doing a release, may be working with five different product managers, and they need to send reviews out to all those people. To manage that without a tool, would be a lot, right? But in Paligo, they can send them all out from the planner and track them. They can see who’s replied and who’s not replied. It was a really huge thing for us.

For example, Intapp’s DealCloud solution has three writers working with 30 product managers.

The ability to send a review or contribution assignment for a topic or publication to an SME has increased efficiency. I no longer need to publish a PDF, then send the SME an email with the deadline, include any notes for the review, add the PDF, then wait for the SME to mark the PDF or write out changes and send it back for me to make the changes myself. With Paligo, I can assign things with a deadline and notes directly from Paligo, and the SME can make changes or leave comments directly on the topic. This also allows them to see in-line remarks, comments, and conditions which are not viewable in the PDF or Word output. – Intapp Associate Information Developer

Reuse is an important capability for the team. Some products have both a cloud and on-premises version and can reuse content across the document sets. Also, Badertscher said DealCloud is becoming Intapp’s main platform, and they are duplicating features from other products within the platform. Instead of writing separate documentation, the team can reuse content from the standalone product documentation within the DealCloud documentation.

We have numerous products and tons of guides, and finally, we as a team can use the same extracts (aka snippets) for, let’s say, copyright or Preface. The same with layouts and styling. And we no longer need to copy and paste the same settings/snippets to different projects. We just have one, the right one. – Intapp Information Developer

Several writers said the Paligo interface was intuitive and easy to use. They mentioned the Content Manager, improved review processes, efficient reusing of content, and more.

The Content Manager pane is very useful and makes it a snap to organize folders, publications, topics, and other types of documents into logical groups. I like that a topic can be moved around the folder structure without impacting the publications that include it or the other topics that link to it. – Chris King, Senior Information Developer

I have a background in our previous platform, which is functionally similar to Paligo, but the Paligo UI is a lot more intuitive and user-friendly than other platforms I have used. The UI has allowed me to actually see conditions, content reuse, variables, etc. more easily and quickly than I ever could before. I appreciate being able to click Preview > Profile Settings and see what the topic looks like with those conditions applied. I like the color-coding and iconography for remarks, content reuse, links, element attributes, etc. – Intapp Associate Information developer

Badertscher said the team needed a solution that was scalable and created the efficiencies they needed to do more with the same amount of people. A solution that would support their growth goals without needing to add additional resources was essential.

As a leader, as a manager, as a person that has fiscal responsibility and business responsibilities to our users and our clients, but also to the business–to Intapp–scalability when you think about it from a financial perspective, from a resourcing perspective, and just a growth perspective, that, to me, is the absolute favorite feature that I have.

With Paligo in place, Intapp has a process and platform for creating and managing content. But while Paligo offers many options for publishing content, it is not a delivery tool. This is where Badertscher is currently focusing her efforts.

Intapp uses Paligo to publish content as Web Help and PDFs. The team also use Paligo’s integration to Zendesk and just started using FluidTopics, which is also integrated with Paligo. The team is actively developing personas to understand their needs and how to best get content to them.

Badertscher said the good news is that when the team settles Intapp’s publishing requirements, they know that Paligo will be able to support them.

With Badertscher managing the Information Development Team, there have been significant changes in how it operates. Before, the team worked like a service bureau, working on requests as they came in. Some product managers followed releases, but for the most part, it was a first-come, first-served model.

Today, the team operates as a business unit inside the business. A charter defines the personas/audience and the solutions they support.

Intapp provides quarterly releases and monthly maintenance releases. Outside of these release processes, it is “run the business” following a defined process. Anything else goes through Badertscher for vetting. She identifies if it’s their target audience and when it’s needed. The request gets worked into the schedule if it’s within the team’s charter.

Badertscher’s long-term vision is to create “content as a service (CaaS),” bringing other teams on board to follow their content model and approach to content operations. With a process, a style guide, and an information model, Badertscher wants to implement a system where her team acts as consultants for a shared process.

Intapp started using Paligo with five licenses; today, it has 11 licenses. Badertscher said it’s very easy to get new licenses when needed, and Paligo helps train new writers to get up to speed and work in the platform quickly.

Is Paligo right for everyone? Badertscher said everyone has different business needs, so it’s not that simple. But, she said, Paligo is for many different types of situations.

I would say to anybody if you’re in that position where your company is trying to grow, and you’re trying to grow your team and be more efficient, it’s going to have all the things you need.