KIX Drops Confluence for Paligo, Dramatically Improving Publishing Processes

KIX Service Software is the developer of the open source service management solution KIX. Based in Germany, the company helps over 400 customers in industries such as manufacturing, hospitals, educational institutions, and city and government administrations with IT service management, enterprise service management, and technical customer service. 

The KIX Service Management Suite provides capabilities, including ticketing, asset management, contact management, FAQs, maintenance planning, and reporting. Built on a strong open source philosophy, the base version – KIX Start – is free. 

An important way that KIX supports its customers is through extensive documentation, including user and administration guides. It also provides documentation for its self-service portal and field service mobile application. This documentation is managed by two technical writers, including Heidi Meißner.

KIX was using Confluence for all its documentation needs. Meißner said it was a nice way to write documentation. You created an index (structure) and filled it with content. The version of Confluence they used employed a number of third-party add-ons needed to support the creation of documentation in the form of PDF manuals in addition to HTML. 

While the solution worked okay for writing content, publishing content was another story. Creating and publishing documentation in PDF format was a time-consuming, frustrating process. Meißner said they would spend hours cleaning up the formatting.  

It was tricky to make the PDF look good. Page breaks would happen in the middle of a table or an information box, and the formatting would constantly change.

Reviews were also a challenge with Confluence. When the writers needed a subject matter expert (SME) to review documentation, they would have to publish and share a PDF via email. The SME would then apply comments to the PDF and send it back, and the writers would manually incorporate edits into the documentation in Confluence. 

One thing Meißner liked about Confluence was the ability for documentation readers to put comments on a page. Customers could point out spelling mistakes, note missing information, or even ask questions when the content needed clarification. 

During their time with Confluence, Atlassian switched to a Cloud-based platform. KIX didn’t want to move to the Atlassian Cloud and faced a number of issues working with the company, including a lack of support.

They decided it was time to move to a new tool. In their search, they were looking for a tool to provide the commenting capability they wanted, but they found nothing. They also wanted a tool that offered workflow capabilities that supported reviews and the ability to integrate with a translation management system (something they could not do with Confluence). 

After a long search, Meißner came across a YouTube video of a TC World presentation by Paligo, demonstrating how the Paligo CCMS worked. Meißner knew it was the tool for them, and two weeks later, they had their first meeting with Paligo.

The KIX team had looked at a number of tools and wanted to be sure that Paligo could provide the capabilities they needed. To do this, they spent a month on a proof of concept and tested capabilities such as topic-based authoring and content reuse. But most importantly, they looked at Paligo’s batch publishing. 

With Paligo’s batch publishing, KIX was able to publish an entire set of documentation, including HTML and PDF, in half a day.  

It took two people two and half days to publish a 2000-page PDF in Confluence. Even small changes would throw off the formatting. With Paligo, we were able to publish the entire set of documentation, PDF and HTML, in a half day or less. And it looked good! 

KIX co-founder Rene Böhm said they also liked that they didn’t have to expose the CMS to the public like they did with Confluence. With Paligo, the CCMS is separate from publishing channels. 

Another reason KIX chose Paligo was the browser-based experience. As an open source company, the KIX team did not work with Windows; most were using Linux. However, many tools they looked at were on-premise and required Windows to run. One solution looked promising until they found the WYSIWYG editor required a Windows installation. As a SaaS application, Paligo has no on-premise requirements.

Topic-based authoring was new to the KIX tech docs team. To help them understand the approach better, they took a workshop. They also attended virtual training with Paligo to understand how Paligo worked and how they could use it to support their clients’ needs best. 

They defined a six-month plan to migrate their documentation to Paligo. They would continue using Confluence while learning to set up Paligo best and then migrate their content. 

Then Confluence broke, the system reset, and they lost all their documentation overnight. They did have a backup, but problems resulted in losing three and half months of work. The KIX application was on version 33, but they only had documentation up to version 31. 

The move to Paligo had to happen faster than they planned. The backup was restored on Confluence, and a notice was put up to let customers know they were working on the problem. They decided to migrate immediately – until they found the add-ons in Confluence prevented it without a huge amount of work. 

KIX decided to migrate manually, create a new structure in Paligo, copy and paste the content, and clean the information as they went. 

We saw it as a chance to work over all the stuff, to do proper new, clean, simple documentation. This was our motivation every day. At the end, we will have a new, good-looking documentation.

It was a challenging time, but they had a lot of support from their colleagues (who also needed the content for their work). One way their colleagues helped was by creating new topics. Meißner said they set up the review workflow and had their colleagues test it. She said it was a good way to get everyone onside with Paligo because it showed them how much easier it was to create, edit, and review documentation. 

It took the KIX technical writers six months to recreate the German language version of the documentation for the user and administration manuals – roughly 2500 pages. They are still working on documentation for the self-service portal and the app manual for the field service agents. After that, they’ll start the process of translating the content.

Currently, KIX is reusing 10% of their topics and 13.5% of their images (something else they couldn’t do with Confluence). Meißner said they are getting used to it and plan to go back through the documentation to find more content to reuse. 

Our main goal was to get it online. Now, we are going into detail, like reusing text, reusing topics, using filters and variables, and putting tags on different topics. So, we are on the way, and we will be on the way for a really long time because Paligo has so many opportunities, and you figure them out while you’re working with it.

KIX loves the Paligo support team. Meißner said the Paligo documentation was great, but support was also very responsive, always answering their questions. Unlike their relationship with Confluence, KIX feels like Paligo is a true partner. 

Every person we’ve talked to so far from Paligo, whether it was Andrea from sales, the support team, Andy in Marketing, or our Customer Success Manager Aideen, it’s been really nice. We weren’t used to this. It’s like we are talking on the same level. It’s not just an email; it’s real people.

KIX is just getting started with Paligo CCMS. Böhm talked about future plans, including creating in-app help documentation for their software and content and quizzes for online training. He said they were planning a proof of concept with a Learning Management System (LMS) to create small training modules to support clients (in addition to their yearly in-person training). Neither of these capabilities was available with Confluence or with many other tools they looked at.

They are also looking at the API for automatic deployments and integrating a translation management system (TMS). 

It’s fun to find out new things. And then use it in your daily work. And then you use it, and it’s like, oh, we can do this and that with it. And it’s like Christmas every day. You find a little present every day.

And you know that commenting capability Meißner wanted? They found a way to implement it in Paligo. At the end of each page of content, they placed a Feedback button, which sends an email to KIX, which is converted into a ticket and sent directly to Meißner. The feature was put out in December, and in January, Meißner received two emails from a client to apply fixes to the content.

There’s nothing more satisfying than direct feedback because it tells you they are reading it.