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.
In our company, we host our benefit articles based on country on our Zendesk Guide. However, these articles should not be seen by employees that are outside their respective article country. For example, an employee that is based in Thailand shouldn't be seeing Malaysia benefits article as employees might compared benefits. With Zendesk Guide, the system allow us to set the configuration of the article so it is only visible Thailand-based employees, and for Malaysia article, only Malaysia-based employees
They give us ability to control the whole frontend of the Communities by giving us access to manipulate HTML (in HBS file), CSS and JS
They give handlebars templating engine in backend which helps us to show various listing rendered through server side without having need to implement client side rendering of the listing and features.
They provide us dynamic content fields, which can be useful for mapping categories or storing category and topic IDs so we don't need to hard code IDs in Sandbox and Production separately.
The support is good but can sometime be frustrating to get a quick answer. We end up being sent articles that don't answer the question and then we have to go back and try again
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.
It is an attribute of Zendesk that allows for easy over the phone communication between agents and customers. It is more personal and allows for better productivity. Phone support from anywhere with reliable internet connection which is essential to call center communication whether in the office or in the home of the agent.
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.
