November 29, 2018
Review: "Paligo is a great CCMS and structured authoring tool!"
Currently, only my team uses Paligo. My team creates end-user help articles through ZenDesk Guide. Paligo is a CCMS that allows us to use structured authoring to manage all our content and publish not just to ZenDesk, but to PDF and HTML5 as well.
Paligo allows us to single source the majority of our end-user content, reuse topics across multiple articles, publish to multiple channels, filter for languages and markets by country, manage content in an intuitive way, and remove all styling concerns from the content creation process so we can focus just on writing the content and managing article images and gifs. Our article styles are handled all through our external CSS, which automatically applies to articles when we publish to Zendesk. This makes our content creation process shorter overall and allows us to reuse content in multiple formats with different styling, without creating the content from scratch each time.
In addition to managing our knowledge base content, we've also created feature-level user guides in PDF to distribute to select users, and PDF guides to send to developer partners as product documentation required for the plugin development approval process.
Paligo allows us to single source the majority of our end-user content, reuse topics across multiple articles, publish to multiple channels, filter for languages and markets by country, manage content in an intuitive way, and remove all styling concerns from the content creation process so we can focus just on writing the content and managing article images and gifs. Our article styles are handled all through our external CSS, which automatically applies to articles when we publish to Zendesk. This makes our content creation process shorter overall and allows us to reuse content in multiple formats with different styling, without creating the content from scratch each time.
In addition to managing our knowledge base content, we've also created feature-level user guides in PDF to distribute to select users, and PDF guides to send to developer partners as product documentation required for the plugin development approval process.
- Topic reuse - many of our tutorial and how-to articles include procedures with the same first steps. Reuse allows us to create these steps once, including images, and reuse them in as many articles as we need.
- Single sourcing - At any time if the text or images in reused topics need updating, we just update the original topic and the changes reflect in every article that uses that topic.
- Content management - the topic and media management is excellent. we can organize however we need, rename topics and images as needed and move them around within the folder structure without breaking any links to the topics / articles they are used in (each topic and asset has a unique ID number that doesn't change, allow us to rename and move assets to best suit our needs)
- Filtering and variables - we can create a single topic that includes all the information for different markets (in this case, different content for accounts in different countries) and by using filtering and variables when building the content and in the publishing workflow I can publish just the US content to our US help center, the UK content to the UK help center, and the Australian content to the Australia help center, but using manage a single article within Paligo itself.
- Translation and localization workflow - the translation workflow (sending topics to be translated into another language) and localization workflow (publishing the same content in multiple languages) works well within the ZenDesk integration. It uses the ZenDesk localization settings to ensure the proper translation ends up in the correct articlein Zendesk.
- Speed - since it is cloud-based we do sometimes run into speed issues in loading or saving content
- steep learning curve requiring training - the Paligo trainer is great, and their help center is also very good, but for individuals not already well versed in structured authoring it's a bit of an uphill battle to really understand why the UI works the way it does. that said, their support is incredibly helpful and enthusiastic!
- Stats - it would be great to have easier access to data showing which users on my team have created what content and performed what actions within the app or on specific content. This is mostly a manager need as I need to report progress to my manager regularly.