From Confluence to structured authoring in Paligo in record time

AIOps is the application of artificial intelligence techniques to IT Operations data — instead of rules-based approaches. The Moogsoft AIOps platform streamlines IT Operations and provides Ops teams with the rapid incident resolution capabilities they need to avoid outages, meet SLAs, and help accelerate the digital transformation of their business.

An advanced product needs a powerful way to manage the documentation for it, and the team of 8 technical writers at Moogsoft needed a change – read the story below.

Before Paligo, the Moogsoft writing team were writing and managing their technical documentation in Confluence. Confluence was however missing features for conditional text, reusable content, and didn’t have flexible output formats. Moogsoft also used Xyleme in combination with Confluence, which was intended to take care of the missing features.

But while Xyleme did have some of those features, they hit major usability issues, and it didn’t take care of many basic capabilities they assumed to be available.

Mio Kataoka, Director of Technical Content at Moogsoft, says: “So in the meantime, I had to manually search and replace various terms for our OEM product delivery. Clearly we needed a different solution!”

Moogsoft knew they needed a structured authoring platform, but they also had pressing needs to continue production. They started out with a proof of concept pilot project with Paligo to evaluate it properly. At the end of the pilot, Moogsoft were very happy with the results, and decided to start migrating to Paligo.

But now things got really pressed for time. A new release was imminent, and problems in the current environment made Moogsoft take the decision to go all in and try to get all the content over to Paligo before the release.

So on April 17, 2019, Moogsoft decided to get all 8 technical writers on the team on board Paligo, and they all got to working more or less around the clock to get the import and migration work done in time for the release.

On April 30, less than two weeks after getting the team on board Paligo, they had made it.

Paligo was so intuitive, with a few pointers we got onboarded very quickly.

Mio says: “Paligo was so intuitive, with a few pointers we got onboarded very quickly. And with an all out effort by the entire team, we’ve migrated the entire product documentation to Paligo in a record time so we can release the new docs for the April release.

They were also very happy with the results. She continues: “We are already getting compliments from the internal and external customers on the look and feel, and the general user experience.”

Mio says the onboarding help exceeded expectations, and she also praises the support, and the importance of it for the transition to a structured authoring environment. She rates Paligo’s support as excellent, and says: “They respond immediately, and the answers are not canned case deflection stuff, it’s actually written by someone in response to our inquiry.”

When migrating to a new system for technical documentation, and especially when moving to a structured authoring environment, it’s very important that the system is user-friendly and helps the writers get into the new mindset. User adoption is everything for a successful migration.

Mio says: “It’s a delight to use Paligo. We set up a Slack channel to exchange tips and discoveries amongst the writers, and the tone of that channel is not of a frustration, but more like “check out the cool trick I’ve discovered”. So everyone is having fun using it.”

Moogsoft made the journey from unstructured to structured authoring and content reuse in Paligo in an amazingly short period. Get in touch or sign up for a free 30-day trial below, if you want to find out what Paligo can do for your team.