Extensive experience with Paligo for publishing a library of technical documentation
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As the technical writer for OpenVPN, I use Paligo to manage and publish reference pages, tutorials, FAQs, user manuals, API documentation, and video landing pages for Access Server, CloudConnexa, OpenVPN Connect, and OpenVPN open source. Our main use case is updating documentation for new and updated features pertaining to product releases. We use features such as content reuse, taxonomies, API layouts, and versioning. It's helped us address the structure and navigation of our documentation. The scope of our implementation covers nearly 3,000 published pages on our website.
Pros
- Using the XPath search allows me to find specifics in the documentation for updating.
- We've set our topics with taxonomies to highlight documentation specific for different product versions.
- The API layout provides a positive user experience for working with that documentation.
Cons
- As they've rolled out the new review beta, my reviewers have to manually revert back to the previous review tool because of issues specifically with how it displays our code blocks that include callouts.
- Once we've uploaded javascript or CSS to a layout, it's not possible to review or edit those files from within Paligo.
- When I'm working on topic that is lengthier (a complicated tutorial), the tool starts to lag.
Most Important Features
- Structured authoring
- Versioning
- Collaboration
Return on Investment
- The structured authoring has increased the organization and navigation of our documentation for customers, thus providing a better self-help experience.
- The content reuse has improved our efficiency for making updates that propagate across the published pages.
- Our support from Paligo as a company has been personal and quick.
Usability
Other Software Used
Atlassian Bitbucket, Atlassian Confluence, Zendesk Guide
