This white paper provides an overview to help business decision-makers and documentation managers to understand unified Content Delivery Platforms.
It defines unified Content Delivery Platforms, discusses their benefits and features, outlines key challenges and considerations, and provides a high-level guide to rolling out a delivery platform.
Introduction: Challenges of the Modern Documentation Landscape
It is a challenge for organizations to manage the delivery of technical documentation to their customers, partners, vendors, and employees. Users expect documentation in multiple formats such as PDFs for offline access, HTML for interactivity, videos for visual learning. Documentation may be developed in multiple groups within the organization, sometimes using different tools, templates, and writing standards. The documentation set can also include OEM documents. Different business units, regions, or departments may use different delivery methods – HTML publications with left-hand navigation posted on a website, simple download links for PDF documents on corporate or divisional websites, download or file transfer sites such as FTP, Sharepoint or Dropbox, informal email attachments, and so on.
While most organizations have good information in their documents, these disjointed systems with siloed documentation can hamper access to information, which can frustrate customers, partners, and employees, and can slow product adoption. Release management becomes unwieldy, with version inconsistency, uncontrolled documentation releases, and redundant updates. Content released without centralized processes and centralized governance is likely to have inconsistent tone and branding, and will lack searchability and findability. All this causes inefficiencies, confusion, and a poor user experience. This increases support load, slows down technicians and product integrators, and leads to partners and vendors using incorrect or outdated information, increasing support costs while reducing sales revenue.
The best-in-class approach to address these challenges is through the use of a unified content delivery platform – a centralized platform that aggregates content from multiple sources and formats for delivery to customers, support engineers, employees, and partners. A content delivery platform offers many benefits to an organization:
- Maximizes customer self-service and call deflection
- Helps field technicians become more productive by quickly finding the content they need
- Streamlines the publishing and accessibility of documents for internal enterprise teams, speeding up project deliveries
- Accelerates product adoption
- Enhances the organization’s brand
- Enables rich AI chatbot interactions for customers
This paper provides a full overview of unified Content Delivery Platforms and describes how they centralize and streamline the delivery of technical content across various formats (PDF, HTML, video, and more), benefitting users, content creators, and organizations. It then discusses challenges and stages in rolling out a unified Content Delivery Platform.
What Is a Unified Content Delivery Platform?
A unified Content Delivery Platform (CDP), sometimes called a documentation delivery platform, a documentation delivery portal, a knowledge base, a documentation support platform, or a documentation hub, is a single, centralized site for the delivery of technical documents and related content to customers and stakeholders. It comprises a single source of truth. CDPs provide:
- Content delivery in multiple formats such as PDF, HTML, video, .txt files, .csv files, Excel spreadsheets, and more.
- Unification of content from different source formats and repositories, such as DITA XML Component Content Management Systems, Microsoft or Adobe tools, Docs as Code systems, video formats, etc.
- Multilingual documentation support
- Permission-based user access control
- Omnichannel delivery through linking and API integrations
- Advanced search and navigation, with rich metadata tagging to identify, sort, and filter content
- Rich analytics for user behavior
- Content downloads
- The foundation for a rich customer interaction through AI chatbots
Typical types of content that appear in a unified Content Delivery Platform include:
- Installation and maintenance and troubleshooting videos
- Installation and configuration and other guides
- Data sheets, release notes, and command reference guides
- Service bulletins, manuals, and user guides
- Illustrated Parts Catalogs (IPCs)
- API documentation with embedded code samples, downloadable PDFs, and explainer videos
- Product onboarding content for SaaS platforms
- Learning and training content
- Maintenance schedules
- Policies and procedures
Benefits of Unified Content Delivery Platforms
Unified Content Delivery Platforms offer myriad benefits for users, documentation teams, and organizations.
Getting information and answers
Fundamentally, a unified Content Delivery Platform is about helping users to quickly and efficiently find the exact information and answers they need. A CDP is effectively a one-stop-shop for your technical documentation content, and more efficient content discovery is enabled by excellent search, navigation, and content categorization.
Improving support outcomes
Unified Content Delivery Platforms improve customer support outcomes by providing scalable documentation delivery as a support channel. A CDP reduces support load and lowers support costs both by enabling self-service and by providing support agents with the ability to quickly find and provide links to official documents rather than providing custom responses.
Laying a foundation for AI adoption
The unified content, organization, markup, and rich metadata of a Content Delivery Platform provide an ideal foundation for AI adoption. AI chatbots can be trained on the information. This can be useful in two ways: by enabling better, more precise search through chatbot interactions (yielding links to the exact human-written topics or sections in the technical documentation that answer the user’s question) or by providing a rich automated response generation by AI chatbots. Note that a chatbot can either be integrated directly into your CDP (appearing on the platform screen) or located elsewhere and trained on the content of the delivery platform.
Enhancing content governance
Content governance is all about having rigorous processes and policies to create, update, release, version, and manage documentation, and ensuring that the content produced meets quality and control standards and aligns with your corporate strategy. It is critical to any well-run organization and essential for regulated industries. The introduction of a unified Content Delivery Platform provides an opportunity to enhance content governance across the enterprise.
The platform provides a gatekeeping function. The content audit phase of platform introduction involves identifying all the content in your organization including their locations, formats, and creation processes, as discussed in “Perform a content audit” below. The key content from your audit is consolidated in one location, which allows you to streamline publication and delivery processes with faster updates across all formats while maintaining consistent branding and rigorous quality control. Tight versioning, review and approval, and change management processes can be introduced, while documentation silos are consolidated.
Providing insights
Analytics allow documentation teams to understand usage patterns, popular search terms, user journeys, most popular topics/documents, and so on. These insights enable writing teams to continuously improve their documentation. Writers and managers can prioritize quality and updates for high traffic content, review or rewrite content that has poor engagement, or improve content organization. In addition, user feedback such as comments and page rankings help documentation teams to understand what content works, user challenges, and areas for improvement. Analytics, coupled with user feedback, help writers to understand what types of content and authoring practices are most effective for self service.
Enhancing your brand
Content Delivery Platforms provide consistent messaging, tone, and look and feel, which enhances organizational trust and professionalism and improves SEO and findability of your content.
Growing your business
In general, a strong Content Delivery Platform that provides good documentation leads to smoother, faster releases and product trials, especially in complex business-to-business environments. In software environments, for example, trialing an integration is dependent on excellent documentation, API guides, code samples, command references, SDKs, and so on. A strong platform makes your product easier to build on and extend.
Integrating Illustrated Parts Catalogs
In addition, some Content Delivery Platforms include an Illustrated Parts Catalog (IPC), which allows your customers and technicians to rapidly identify needed replacement parts for product maintenance; the IPC can then be integrated with parts ordering software. It is also possible to automate the production pipeline for IPCs from BOMs and CAD diagrams, and to provide links from reference parts in maintenance guides to the IPC, further enhancing sales of replacement parts.
Features
Best-in-class CDPs have an underlying structured database technology. This enables metadata management, indexing for full-text search, and real-time filtering. In addition, it unlocks superior performance and scalability for many simultaneous users with fast content import, update, indexing, search, and loading.
Multiple content sources
Source content for unified platforms can come, essentially, from anywhere. However, typical systems for technical documentation content generation include:
- Content repositories (e.g., DITA Component Content Management System with XML Authoring, other CCMSs, or Git/Markdown)
Some platforms have tight linkages with source repositories, enabling seamless publication with automations. For example, content can be pulled from a DITA CCMS for automated publication and updates to HTML or PDF output on the platform. - Documentation generators (e.g., Swagger, MkDocs, DITA Open Toolkit)
- Video libraries/servers
- Conventional authoring tools – Word, FrameMaker
Front-end features
The front-end is where your users touch the content; it is the key to the user experience of your platform. Front-end features that are core to Content Delivery Platform design include:
- Responsive design
- Search and filtering features
- Seamless access to PDFs, embedded videos, and web content
- Content downloads for offline access, particularly for binary files such as PDFs, txt files, csv files, and so on. Some organizations will also need offline access for HTML helpsets.
- Unified corporate branding, including colors, fonts, line weights, and other design elements
- Customer feedback
- Customized content based on a user or group
- Multilingual support
- AI chatbots
- Stand-alone site or embedded
Administration features
Key features of the administrator interface to a Content Delivery Platform include:
- Category and metadata configuration
- User/group permission configuration
- Content import and update tools
- Analytics configuration for user tracking
- Feedback gathering
- Multilingual site configuration capabilities
- The ability to reconfigure if or when required
Challenges and Considerations
There are compelling reasons to adopt a unified Content Delivery Platform. While the challenges can be daunting, they are surmountable. This section discusses key challenges to consider.
Building a Business Case
A unified Content Delivery Platform typically provides compelling return on investment. To better understand the ROI for your organization, consider the points in the section “Benefits of Unified Content Delivery Platforms”. While some of the benefits are difficult to quantify, even very conservative estimates of the impact on your business will typically justify the expense. Here are a few ways in which a CDP can improve an organization’s bottom line:
- Reduce support costs through self service and call deflection
- Reduce publishing labor hours
- Improve efficiency across the organization
- Speed up product fixes and help to meet project deadlines
- Speed up customer product adoption and integration, leading to more sales
- Enhance customer satisfaction, leading to more sales and repeat business
As you build the business case, socialize it within your organization, especially with management and leadership teams. While there is usually one key decision maker, gaining broad support for the adoption of a CDP, for example from Support, Sales, Product Management, or Software Development, is often a key prerequisite to getting approval.
Choosing the right technology vendor
Choose your software vendor carefully. Features, capabilities, technical understanding, solution delivery capability, roadmap, chemistry, engagement, commitment to your success, track record, and price are key considerations. Create a document describing the requirements for your platform for discussion with vendors. Requirements will largely be determined by your use cases as described below.
Vendors for Content Delivery Platforms have built features based on broad study of the marketplace and economies of scale – they are building the features that the market needs. The right technology vendor will enable a rapid, cost effective, scalable rollout that will quickly deliver benefit and ROI to your business and will continue to improve and evolve.
Assembling the right team
To select, implement, configure, and launch a Content Delivery Platform, you need a strong, cross-functional team. (Note: Your solution vendor may be able to help with a number of these roles. Some vendors will also be able to offer quick, cost-effective rollouts with basic consideration for each of these areas.) Key roles may include:
Role | Description |
Business Sponsor | Generally a member of the senior management team who understands and can articulate the corporate goals, objectives, and Return on Investment (ROI) of introducing a unified CDP and is prepared to take the business case forward in order to gain corporate approval and funding. |
Content Strategist | The person responsible for defining content processes and workflows to create, review, update, release, branch, merge, localize, publish, and archive content and for aligning these activities with the goals and objectives of your organization. Note that the content strategist and information architect are often the same person. |
Information Architect | The person responsible for the structure, hierarchy, categories, metadata, and content filtering/facets of your content delivery. The information architect typically also performs or understands the information architecture of the source content. |
Branding Expert | The person who advises on the look and feel of the CDP such as the colors, fonts, and logos, and and has access to the corporate style guide. |
User Experience Expert | The person responsible for the CDP use cases, who ensures that the User Experience (UX) will be efficient, meaningful, and relevant. |
Business Stakeholders | Within your organization, you will want key business stakeholders to give feedback on CDP selection and planning. These people may include, for example, key representatives from Support, IT, Technical Documentation, Product Management, Field Technicians, and Sales who can represent the needs and interests of those teams and of the content users. |
IT Representative | If you are hosting the CDP internally, IT must provision and manage the CDP server, including software installation, software backup and restore capabilities, security configuration, and so on. If your CDP vendor will be hosting the solution in the cloud and you require Single Sign On (SSO), your IT team will need to work with your vendor to integrate the platform software into your SSO framework. |
Project Manager | There are a lot of roles, responsibilities, and moving pieces in the implementation of a CDP, so a strong project manager is required. This person needs to bring all stakeholders and team members together, build a good project plan, and ensure that team members execute their tasks and responsibilities thoroughly, in a timely manner. |
Costs
Costs can be divided into initial implementation costs and annual recurring costs. You will need a budget for the initial implementation costs. The budget can be divided into three categories:
- SaaS software costs. Typically, CDPs are hosted Software-as-a-Service sites provided by your CDP software vendor and are integrated with your website. These are annually recurring costs.
- Professional services. Your platform vendor or a third party can provide an array of professional services. You likely want to use some or all of those services, such as information architecture, branding/styling of your platform, training, and project management.
- Internal resource costs. Rolling out a CDP takes time and effort from your internal team. Primarily this represents opportunity cost – people are working on the CDP rather than on something else. However, this effort is strategic and may take just a fraction of each person’s time.
After the initial implementation, typically only the annual recurring costs and the effort/cost to maintain and update the platform content remain, but the benefits extend over time and can be expected to increase as your CDP “bakes in”, becomes the hub for more and more content, is enhanced with software upgrades, and is used by more users.
Scalability for large enterprises
Large enterprises may have a global requirement including Terabytes of technical content and hundreds or thousands of simultaneous site visits, multiple languages, or extensive video content. This requires a scalable architecture for the CDP software. Ensure that your software vendor can scale the solution.
Security and access control
Some enterprises will want to make all of their content publicly available. In this case, access control is not an issue. However, if your CDP contains sensitive information that will not be publicly accessible, there are several considerations when managing customer access.
Firstly, the platform’s administrative interface itself should offer the ability to manage users. This will allow you to add users or groups of users who can then gain access to your content.
Secondly, if you need to give different access permissions to different users or groups, the platform should support this kind of configuration.
Thirdly, in many cases an enterprise will already have a secure area of their website for customer login. In this case, it is far preferable to have the ability to integrate your CDP login and permissions with your Identity Provider (IDP). This typically requires that your CDP support an identity standard such as SAML 2.0 or OAuth 2.0. If you need separate group permissions for different content access, your vendor should enable you to map those groups and content permissions to SAML or OAuth roles.
Security considerations also differ depending on whether your solution is cloud-hosted or installed inside your firewall. For local installations, your IT infrastructure will provide full security for the CDP. For cloud-hosted environments, work with your vendor to ensure that your content is secure and protected from attacks.
Integration with CRM or support software
Enterprises may want their CDP to be integrated with CRM or support software such as Salesforce or Zendesk. In this case, it is essential to find a vendor with the APIs, experience, and expertise to accomplish such integrations. It is also crucial that the goals, use cases, and expected user experience be specified and understood. (Note that the CRM platform may provide the IDP mentioned under “Security and Access Control” above.)
Rolling out a Unified Content Delivery Platform
Laying the groundwork
Perform a content audit
Before you can roll out a CDP, you must perform a complete content audit to identify all the documentation content in your organization. This requires that you identify:
- Source repositories: CCMS, Document Management Systems such as Sharepoint, file systems etc.
- Source content formats: XML/DITA, MS Word, FrameMaker, Excel, video formats, etc
- Output content formats: HTML, PDF, MP4, etc.
- Content types: User Guides, Installation Guides, Release Notes, Data Sheets, Command Reference Guides, API docs, video content for installation, configuration, troubleshooting, training guides etc.
Typically the content audit is performed using one or more spreadsheets. For each piece of content, record at minimum the document title, file location, file format, and product(s) the content is related to. Other data or notes may also be useful depending on your specific needs or goals.
You will then need to decide which content from the audit belongs in the CDP and define processes for governance of this content, including review and approval, versioning, and processes to determine when the content should be released to the CDP, updated, or archived.
Define personas
Personas help you to understand who will benefit from the unified CDP. What does a typical user look like? Are they your customers? Partners? Service technicians? Define as many as you need, but no more. A persona typically uses a name and description, such as: Jane Young, a service technician with electrical expertise for the Acme product line, or Han Zhu, a customer using the product as a software engineer, for example. It is helpful to provide job titles and descriptions for your personas and to identify their primary concerns, challenges, and sources of satisfaction in doing their jobs. Personas help you to construct realistic, valuable use cases.
Define use cases
Ideally you should define a dozen or more use cases to assist you in developing the CDP architecture, configuring the CDP, and testing the architecture and configuration. Make these as detailed as you can; using the personas described above, say precisely what the user is trying to accomplish when they come to the CDP. Are they looking for a specific voltage range for a particular product? Do they need to perform a maintenance or troubleshooting task? Are they looking for a specific guide? In the testing phase for your delivery platform, you will run through the use cases to ensure that your design addresses your users’ needs. For each use case, it can be helpful to define the actor (persona), purpose, preconditions, activity, and desired outcome.The better the use cases, the better your testing results will be.
Define access scope
Next, decide on access scope. Will your CDP be publicly available, or do users need to log in? Is Single Sign On to an IDP required? Will you have different access for different user groups? For example, will customers have limited access depending on the products they own? Or will customers have different access from partners or internal service personnel?
Identify languages
Global enterprises need multilingual CDPs. What languages will your platform be presented in? Work with your platform vendor and regional business units to ensure that the multilingual CDP meets the needs of different regions.
Designing a great customer experience
Customer experience includes every aspect of your customer’s interaction with the CDP, from the branding and aesthetics to ease of use, navigation, search, and performance. But above all, customer experience with a Content Delivery Platform is about one key question: did the customer get the information they needed? Ideally they were able to do this quickly and easily, whether through search, through navigation, or through interaction with an AI chatbot. This goes back to the use cases; if you have written your use cases and personas correctly and have characterized enough scenarios, testing the platform against the use cases will give you invaluable insight into the customer experience and will tell you if your platform is ready to launch. Of course, to give your users the answers they need, you also must populate the platform with great content.
Information architecture
Key to the customer experience is the information architecture: the structure, hierarchy, content categories, internal document structure, metadata, and content filtering/facets of your platform.
A well-devised, user-centered information architecture will drive the findability and navigation of your content, providing clear, logical categories and search filters. The delivery platform should offer a visual hierarchy with clear headings.
Metadata, taxonomies, and ontologies
Consider whether existing metadata taxonomies or ontologies in use in your company are supported. Some delivery platform vendors support powerful metadata models such as OWL 2, allowing configurable import and use of virtually any taxonomy or ontology.
Search
Search is critical. It leverages information architecture, metadata, and filters, and should provide ranked and ordered results that triangulate the user on the exact information they need. Working with your software vendor, search can be tuned during implementation; measure the effectiveness of search against your use cases to know that you’re ready to go live. In addition to search on the CDP itself, for public sites you will need your site to be indexed for Google Search. Work with your delivery platform vendor to enable this functionality.
Look and feel
Your CDP should be aesthetically pleasing and conform to corporate standards for branding and theming, including fonts, colors, line weights and so on. In addition, it should provide a consistent layout and presentation of information. A mobile-friendly responsive design ensures usability on tablets, phones, and other small or large screens. Some CDPs offer an app version for iOS, Android, or Windows.
Feedback and engagement
Many enterprises would like to give their customers the ability to rank content as useful or to provide comments. Most CDP vendors will support this functionality; consider exactly what information you would like to capture.
Integration with product
For software vendors, it may be desirable to have the ability to embed links in your software that point to context sensitive help located in your platform. This is achievable with the right software stack and vendor.
Integrating analytics
As described in Providing Insights above, analytics are critical for understanding usage patterns, popular search terms, user journeys, most popular topics/documents, and so on. Coupled with user feedback, analytics help you to continuously improve the customer experience of your platform. It is important to define the types of analytics that are most useful to you. Then, work with your platform vendor on an analytics rollout that serves your needs.
Developing a launch strategy
As you complete the initial design of your CDP, you need a launch strategy that includes plans for migration and testing.
Migration involves incorporating all of your content into the Content Delivery Platform. For this, it is critical that you have a complete understanding of what content you are bringing into the system, what metadata are attached to each content unit, and where each content unit will go. These things are derived from your content audit, information architecture, and use cases. Then, you must have a methodology for importing or publishing your content. Does your CDP vendor offer bulk import capabilities or automated publishing? It is critical to perform test migrations starting with small subsets of different kinds of content.
As you test content migration, you can begin testing the platform configuration against your use cases. Before going live, you should test your site with the full library of your content. Use the feedback from your testing to iteratively improve your results. You may need to tweak your content or metadata, information model and hierarchy, or search algorithm settings. Typically, multiple tests with your content library and import processes will be required.
Some customers, especially large enterprises, find it beneficial to perform a “soft launch” with a test group comprising either internal users or a select group of customers, gather feedback, and make adjustments before going live.
The Future of Documentation Portals
Interaction with artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT has rapidly supplanted search engines like Google as the primary way in which many people gather information. AI-powered search, recommendations, and chatbot interactions are becoming increasingly prevalent.
For AI chatbots to provide accurate, complete information, though, they still need to be trained on excellent content sources, and for many users a well written, human authored technical document will provide a more carefully considered, technically accurate treatment than an AI-generated response. In this case the key use of AI is for search, informed by metadata. A Content Delivery Platform with a structured, scalable database and sophisticated metadata is critical to deploy AI enhancements.
In concert with AI enhancement, expect to see greater personalization of content for individual users based on user profiles. In addition, users expect more interactive documentation including adaptive learning paths and code sandboxes.
A unified Content Delivery Platform, with its rigorous content governance, rich metadata, and comprehensive collection of corporate documentation, is the essential foundation for the customer experience of technical documentation today and into the future.
