Scale content creation and deliver a rich, rewarding experience (consistent across pre- and post-sale) for product documentation, information manuals and more.
Product documentation, be it help, support or technical, is often the first thing that customers look at when using a product. As organizations create more product variants and SKUs, the demand for associated documentation keeps rising. But, more often than not, documentation teams are either understaffed or lack appropriate solutions to do this effectively. Not only can scaling content creation become a challenge but managing content efficiently and providing a rich, consistent content experience across channels also takes a massive effort. Organizations face various challenges across the content lifecycle:
Piecemeal, disjointed solutions from multiple vendors drive the total cost of operation higher, posing a massive challenge for IT teams. This problem is compounded by the fact that technical and support content is generally managed using a different CMS from the web CMS used for marketing purposes.
Most documentation portals are not easily searchable, the experience isn't interactive, and often just have static, monolithic PDFs.
Providing a content experience which is consistent across channels, especially with marketing content, is a big challenge. This is primarily due to the silos between marketing and technical content teams.
Organizational content workflows often lack robust review and collaboration capability. They fail to keep authors and content contributors informed of the multitude of changes and/or versions. In fact, most solutions can’t even provide an easy way to involve subject matter experts in the review process.
Organizations are constantly evolving their products. While the core documentation might remain the same, a lot of it can get enhanced compared to earlier versions. There can be new workflows, features, steps, error fixes, new branding, or regulatory changes. The task of keeping so many documents up-to-date can be overwhelming, especially without an efficient content reuse capability.
Inefficient content reuse leads to content duplication, resulting in higher translation time and costs.
Consumers today want personalized experiences, tailored to their needs, across devices and formats. Without an enterprise-class multichannel publishing capability, that can be difficult to deliver.
Over a period, the content technology stack can become cluttered with complex workflows which require manual intervention. This increases time, costs, and maintenance overheads.
Technical documentation, especially in high-tech and manufacturing sectors, tends to be long and complex which mandates the need for a robust, scalable solution built on a structured content management approach.
Moving legacy unstructured content to structured can be a daunting task requiring huge investments in terms of time, cost, and effort. This can also severely impact business continuity.
Organizations are always wary of getting stuck with a proprietary format that makes them vendor dependent. An open standard helps future proof their content and migrate easily if need be.
An inability to track technical content consumption reduces the ability of content teams to deliver personalized marketing content based on usage patterns.
Overcoming these challenges can go a long way in delivering an exceptional customer experience.
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With a robust, scalable CCMS like Adobe Experience Manager Guides, documentation teams can create future-ready content with a great customer experience. Adobe provides an end-to-end content management platform for streamlining enterprise content workflows and improving business agility, performance and reliability. With Adobe’s easy and efficient solution, managing product documentation becomes simple and painless. It results in:
Having a single CMS solution, like Adobe Experience Manager, for managing the entire content stack can eliminate the time and cost associated with managing multiple CMSs including deployment, maintenance, and training.
Managing marketing and technical content on a single CMS also makes it easy to deliver a rich, rewarding content experience that is consistent across pre- and post-sale content, at every touchpoint of the customer journey.
With powerful review and next-gen collaboration, authors can do more in less time and increase their productivity. Collaboration with casual contributors and subject matter experts (SMEs) becomes effortless with a web-based review.
Advanced capability to reuse content across documents, departments, and formats eliminates duplication and ensures more accurate documentation. By tagging individual snippets of content, updating just the source instance can propagate changes across all documents.
Agile publishing workflows mean quicker content updates for enterprise content, even for last minute or incremental changes, with minimal IT support.
Effective content reuse helps drive down translation time and costs by eliminating costly retranslation of complex documents containing only incremental changes.
With Adobe’s enterprise-class multichannel publishing, content can be made accessible across devices and easily published to Experience Manager Sites, print, PDF, HTML5, knowledge bases, CRM platforms, mobile apps, EPUB, Kindle, and more.
Technical documentation is generally long and complex. With the structured content management approach of Adobe’s CCMS, content is managed in smaller chunks, which makes handling volume and complexities much easier.
A consistent structure with organized management of metadata dramatically improves search engine optimization (SEO), leading to easy discovery of content.
With an open standard like XML/DITA, organizations don’t have to worry about being stuck with a vendor-driven proprietary format.
Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target allow granular-level tracking of content consumption and help to retarget consumers with contextually relevant marketing based on the technical information being consumed most.
Take the next step and try Adobe Experience Manager Guides to add value to your business.
Laralyn Melvin, Senior Director, Technical Publications, Palo Alto Networks
Product specifications/Technical specifications
Technical documentation
Help content
Support documentation
Part manuals/Bill of materials
Product catalogs (including eCommerce websites)
Training manuals
Maintenance guides
Technical service bulletins
Troubleshooting guides
Installation and operations guides
Datasheets/Data booklets
Service kits
User manuals
Installation and service manuals
IETM (Interactive electronic technical manuals)
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