Aderant Handshake vs. BookStack

The user of Handshake takes a certain amount of user computer literacy and the user needs to be resourceful. When building our site, I needed to google quite a bit. On the contrary, if budget allows, Handshake developers will do it all for you.

Incentivized

BookStack is fantastic for having business users and not-so-technically-savvy IT users. It enables them to create a documentation they like in a visual way while still forcing them to adhere to logical structure of a document. It works fine even for more technical matters such as integration guidelines, especially when these concern some of the more obscure technologies. The exported docs are presentable but lack any interactivity. Where it lacks is generating heavily technical documentations. Heavier REST or GraphQL integrations should for example be documented through other means. As for developer documentations, there are definitely more suitable alternatives, also.

Incentivized

• The main reason we got Handshake was to display visual gadgets for our accounting systems. We always provided spreadsheet type reports, but pictures and more engaging. Attorney gets a dashboard in real time of where they stand financially.
• Additional use as FAQ's in different departments in the firm, that is, accounting, IT, and office services.
• Knowledgebase - How to's and software.

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Guides
• Knowledge-base
• Version control

Incentivized

• Documentation is weak, but hopefully, since Aderant just acquired the company, that will improve

Incentivized

• Continuity in backward compatibility
• Dark mode
• Absent tree view

Incentivized

None. Always need about Handshake's interface with Aderant, way before Aderant purchased them. Seemed like a natural fit.

Incentivized

Confluence, having only a slight advantage in terms of features compared to BookStack, really only makes sense to procure as a part of the Jira bundle. It requires much more maintenance from my experience and does not really deliver any extra value aside from the very strict certifications like HIPAA. DokuWiki and MediaWiki both provided way too much in terms of customizability, not really focusing on the business need. Of course, MediaWiki was conceived for a whole different purpose but is very often seen being used for both internal and public documentation delivery. DokuWiki did not provide the authors with the user-friendly environment that BookStack has and integrated most poorly with LDAP. As for OneNote, which was used for support docs prior to BookStack, it provided the authors with too much of a user-friendly environment, rendering the product of their work very inconsistent. Also, the sharing model was either peer-to-peer or within Teams, neither of which made it easy to audit and supervise.

Incentivized

• Hard to say, but ultimately putting knowledge in the hands of fee earners immediately it is positive.

Incentivized

• Spillover within Business IT staff up, nearly double substitutability. This is through the ability of a support technician servicing a different product to find a guide describing how to solve the more frequent issues the way a product lead would do it.
• Time to draft and publish a documentation down some 20% compared to previous solution.
• OpenSource that integrates fine with enterprise-grade software and somehow even passes security audit. 20 times cheaper to implement compared to Confluence, almost free to maintain.

Incentivized