Moving From an Unstable Tech Stack to an Efficient Documentation Workflow

Data has quickly become one of the most critical corporate assets in this digital age. WingArc1st supports companies in their efforts to make effective use of their information. They offer software and services to help companies build environments that enable them to use information efficiently and obtain strategic insights from their data. WingArc1st makes every effort to provide comprehensive customer-focused services that address customers’ unique needs and accelerate their business.

WingArc1st were looking for a cloud-based solution with topic-based authoring and workflow management to streamline their authoring process. Paligo not only delivered these features but also excellent translation content management capabilities and an integration with
Memsource.

Previously, the team at WingArc1st used an on-premise tool called WikiWorks, which was highly customized. Because of the deep customization required to author content, the tool was not stable and problems often occurred. Authoring content was simply not efficient. In addition, the quality of the output was not up to their high standards. WingArc1st’s documentation team realized that they also needed a robust authoring solution that supported their translation procedure. The integration with their preferred translation platform, Memsource, is one of the huge advantages of Paligo for them. For example, authoring in Japanese used to follow this process:

1. Requests to add or change content come from the development or support team
2. Writers used the legacy tool to edit the content
3. The development or support team reviewed it
4. Writers made necessary modifications
5. Output HTML or Word from the tool and editing them to create final deliverables
   (including conversion from Word to PDF)
6. Released Japanese documents in HTML and PDF

Next, was translating the Japanese documents into English and Chinese:

1. Imported Japanese documents (HTML or Word) as source files into Memsource
2. Translated using Memsource
3. Exported translated content as HTML or Word files from Memsource
4. Edited them to create final deliverables (including conversion from Word to PDF)
5. Released translated version of documents in HTML and PDF

The ability to reuse the same topic across multiple documents and freely edit document structures makes our authoring process very efficient.

When using WikiWorks, writers needed to write the same content repeatedly. This inefficiency has been solved by using Paligo’s content reuse features. The topic-based authoring functionality is especially helpful because the team needs to release a variety of documents on a regular basis. The functionality to reuse the same topic across multiple publications, and freely edit document structures, makes the authoring process very efficient.
In addition, it is easy to see what workflow stage individual publications are at. There are also significant benefits in the translation process. Previously, they could not start the translation process until the Japanese documents were completed and released. But with Paligo, Japanese content can now be authored and translated in parallel rather than a bulk translation process at the end. Topics that have already been translated do not need to be translated again, reducing costs significantly. Upon the introduction of Paligo, the languages for translation were primarily English and Chinese only, but now they are able to manage projects translating into 21 additional languages. Using Paligo, it was easy to handle such a project by working with the Memsource integration.