Fluid Topics' logoAnne-Sophie Lardet
May 15, 2023 

 

Technical documentation has never been more important to the success of an organization.

But at the same time, delivering technical documentation has never been more challenging. Whether it is maintaining pace with product and feature updates, the outputs of different authoring tools and systems across different content creation teams, or serving the right information wherever the consumer expects it, all too often the end-user experience is incomplete or inconsistent.

 

Content Delivery Platforms 101

A Content Delivery Platform reconciles silos and delivers the unified content experience you need. A Content Delivery Platform (CDP) has the capacity to collect all your content from any source – CMS, CCMS, Github, Sharepoint, helpdesk tools, Wikis, – and in any format – DITA, Markdown, YAML, PDF, HTML, Word – and centralize it all in a single knowledge hub.

CDPs are agnostic of authoring tools and offer different ranges of standard and custom connectors, from the most popular CCMSes and document processors to very specific in-house writing systems. As such, CDPs extend the collaborative process of content creation across the organization by including stakeholders that are external to the documentation team.

Advanced CDPs handle both structured and unstructured content, processing the latter to align metadata and provide the same granularity as natively structured content. By doing so, CDPs create unified user experiences across all content sources and for all digital endpoints.

Beyond omnichannel content publishing, CDPs enable Content-as-a-Service: they allow companies to provide a contextualized, personalized content experience to users on the device and at the touchpoint of their choice.

But as with any technology, choosing the right Content Delivery solution for your own business can be overwhelming. Expectations are higher than ever – you want a tool that is cost-effective and can seamlessly integrate into your existing IT landscape, with enterprise-grade security and scalability.

Because finding a Content Delivery Platform that meets all these criteria is a challenge. We’ve unraveled the 10 must-have features you need to investigate for your next tool. (Spoiler alert: Fluid Topics supports them all!)

 

1. INTEGRATION WITH ANY CONTENT SOURCES AND TOOLS

Leading CDPs don’t force you to adopt a specific authoring tool. Instead, they should provide ready-to-use integrations for all your content sources and tools, such as a tech doc team’s CCMS or a marketer’s Word document, and help overcome your content silos.

 

 

2. OUT-OF-THE-BOX PORTAL

CDPs are designed to feed content to any digital touchpoint. By default, they should provide a turnkey portal with key features such as permission-based content accessibility, advanced search capabilities, responsive reader, multilingual user interfaces and content analytics, that deploys in minutes, not months.

3. AUTONOMOUS PORTAL CONFIGURATION

The CDP portal should be simple to configure through settings without requiring interventions from IT, vendor services, or system integrators. The portal should be customizable to your organization’s branding, reflect your product lines and the nature of your audience for a better user experience that meets your current and future business needs.

 

 

4. RELEVANT AND PERSONALIZED SEARCH

Search engines like Google have set high standards for search performance and an intuitive search experience. Best-in-class CDPs should offer the most relevant search results in a flash, with advanced features like faceted search, keyword highlighting, synonyms, misspellings, search result clustering, and more.

5. OFFLINE MODE

Even if the internet seems ubiquitous today, customers and teams can still find themselves in situations and locations without a reliable network connection. Mobile and offline accessibility to your content with a sync capacity for when connectivity is reestablished is crucial to serve your customers.

6. INTERACTIVITY

Bookmarking, adding comments and notes, delivering feedback, and building personal books are just some of the interactive functionalities that leading platforms offer. While all should be offered as standard, you should have the chance to turn-off those not relevant to your organization.

7. NATIVE MOBILE EXPERIENCE

Users in the field need to be supported on the device they prefer, no matter what that device is. A laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, or AR/VR goggles – your CDP should render text, graphics, 2D and 3D models, and multimedia content consistently and seamlessly.

8. SEO CAPABILITIES

Online documentation portals can generate organic traffic for your organization if it’s optimized for search engines like Google and Bing. Your CDP should offer an option to activate and customize the way that content is exposed to search engines.

9. DEEP ANALYTICS AND REPORTING

The best CDPs provide rich and valuable insights into how your technical documentation and product content is performing. It should capture every user interaction with high levels of detail and deep context to drive your content activity with meaningful information and offer better customer service.

 

 

10. LANGUAGES

Next-generation CDPs should ensure full support for your global operations with the same speed, relevance, and cutting-edge Natural Language Processing capabilities for all your languages. Make sure that your CDP both supports multi-lingual content and provides user interfaces in the languages that you need.

 

Is Your Technical Content Ready for the Future?

Fluid Topics’ Content Delivery Platform is a game-changing solution for tech doc publishing teams, and it can prove revolutionary for many other teams such as customer support and field service teams, too.

Fluid Topics is currently used by companies like Siemens Building Technologies, Hexagon, Teradata, Palo Alto Networks, UEFA, Johnson Control, Kone and many more.

Customers have seen great results with Fluid Topics:

  • 34% decrease in support tickets (Source: swissQprint)
  • 2 weeks saved in the documentation delivery process (Source: Hexagon)
  • 5 million visits on the portal within the first year (Source: Teradata)

Aurélien Unfer, Project Manager New Information and Communication Technologies at Liebherr Mining said “Fluid Topics’ Content Delivery Platform provided us with a fully-featured solution that required limited customization to match our needs. The implementation of the platform is an important modernization step that will help remove inefficiencies as well as allow more personalized forms of documentation and up-to-date instructions.”

The right CDP can help overcome the challenges that can otherwise swamp tech doc teams while improving the end-user experience for a clear business win.

If you’d like to deep dive into what Content Delivery Platforms can do for your business, here is a complimentary guide that will outline what to look for and what to avoid.