Paligo + Zendesk: Publishing Technical Documentation to Your Help Desk Made Better

March 11, 2020
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Looking for a smarter way to create, manage, single-source, and update your Zendesk help center articles? If you’ve ever written an article in Zendesk, you’ll know that the editing features are quite basic.

That’s fine for creating small numbers of articles, but when your content scales, the lack of advanced authoring features becomes a problem. Because it means you have to update each article manually, which can be a time-consuming and repetitive process.

But there is a smarter way to manage your Zendesk content.

With Paligo, you have access to the advanced authoring features that technical writers need in the modern workplace. You write in Paligo and then publish directly to Zendesk (you can publish to other outputs too).

By using Paligo, writers can:

  • Create the information once, in one place, and then reuse it wherever it is needed. No need for manual copying and pasting the same content into multiple articles.
  • Update content from a “single source of truth”. Make the update to the original topic and the change is automatically applied in all articles that use that topic. This can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to update your articles.
  • Make changes to product names and images across all articles at once, with variables.There are also advanced conditional content features, so that topics can be reused with minor changes. For example, you can include a paragraph in one version, but remove it from another.
  • Use Paligo’s built-in project management and translation management to manage their workloads more effectively. You can also integrate directly with translation software like Memsource.

In 2016, Paligo was the first technical communication software to introduce direct publishing to Zendesk. Since then, we have enhanced the Zendesk integration in many ways, including support for cross-category link resolution.

Now, we are leading the way again, this time with the launch of Zendesk Preflight. This exciting new feature gives authors unparalleled control over the mapping of single-sourced, structured content to Zendesk.

Take control of your publishing with Zendesk Preflight

The Zendesk Preflight update gives you much greater control over how your technical documentation is published to Zendesk. It makes it easier and quicker to map Paligo topics to the sections and articles of your choice.

Zendesk Preflight is a new feature that is shown when you begin the publishing process.

You can use Zendesk Preflight to:

  • See how your Paligo content will map to Zendesk There’s no need for trial-and-error experiments, as Paligo shows you exactly how your content will map to Zendesk’s categories, sections, and articles. The preview includes the content in your Paligo publication and also any articles that already exist in that category in Zendesk.
  • Change the mapping With Zendesk 2.0, Paligo gives you the ability to control how your content is mapped to Zendesk.For each new Paligo topic, you can choose to map to a new section/article in Zendesk, or any existing, unmapped section/article. You can also replace topics that have already been mapped, without affecting the URL in Zendesk. Very useful if you need different content, but want to keep the URL the same for external links from web pages, support tickets, etc.
  • Choose which content is going to be published You don’t have to publish everything! You can choose to publish individual topics, groups of topics, or your entire publication, it’s up to you.
  • Set the status for new or updated content The new status options mean you can choose whether your Paligo content is added to Zendesk in the Draft or Publish state. There is also support for Zendesk’s Permission Groups and User Segment Groups, so you can also control who can see and manage your content.
  • Remove articles from Zendesk It’s not just about adding content to Zendesk, you can remove it too. If you see that there are unmapped Zendesk sections or articles that need to be deleted, you can remove them remotely from Paligo.

Zendesk integration success

Paligo’s Zendesk Preflight integration is an enhancement of our hugely popular Zendesk integration. It gives you extra control over the mapping in addition to the powerful Paligo-to-Zendesk publishing that so many of our customers love.

Managing multi-brand guides in ZenDesk became so much simpler with the Paligo ZenDesk integration. Love it!

One such customer is Shipstation, who provide first-class ecommerce software. Shipstation had over 600 articles in their Zendesk help center, all created in Zendesk itself, and this was proving hard to manage. They needed a smarter way to create their content, something that would allow them to create more consistent content and manage and update it more efficiently. They also needed a way to manage their translation requirements.

Paligo was the answer.

It started with being able to manage and update images. But as the team started learning about topic-based authoring, content reuse, and the possibilities of structured authoring, they realized Paligo could make their life much easier with textual content too.

Now, if Shipstation need to make an update that will affect 25 articles, they don’t need to change all 25 articles manually. Instead, they can make the change once in Paligo, and the change will automatically apply to all 25 articles where that content is reused. So updates are quicker to implement and are consistent across all articles.

Shipstation use Paligo to single-source content and publish to multiple Zendesk help centers in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. They also reuse the same content to publish PDF versions.

If you have a Zendesk help center, why not take advantage of our free trial and see how Paligo could help you produce content more efficiently.

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