SaaS projects - any background info I should look at?

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ChoccieMuffin
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SaaS projects - any background info I should look at?

Post by ChoccieMuffin »

Hello to the Madcap Hive Mind.

My project group is looking to produce a SaaS product, and I'm wondering if there's anything you wonderful lot can point me towards regarding providing documentation support for a SaaS application.

I realise that docs become much more integrated with the rest of the project in a SaaS delivery (currently our docs production line is separate from the software and only comes together at the final release) so I'd be very interested to learn more about how the Flare Hive deals with SaaS documentation.

Many thanks
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chuck_agari
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Re: SaaS projects - any background info I should look at?

Post by chuck_agari »

I don't treat a SaaS application any different from any other application. A SaaS application is nothing more than using someone else's computer and computing power to do the work.

The essential difference is where your content will be served from. In an application that users install on their computer, user assistance content is often, but not always, installed there as well. In a SaaS app, this won't ever be the case. Figuring out where your output will "live" is still a decision that you'll have to consider. All the other stuff, how your product users will access user assistance, how they will find content so they can succeed, etc., is really no different.

That all said, the trendy term in development these days is CI/CD, or DevOps. It's a "continuous" methodology of development where your goal is to always be building your product. Like "agile," I think it is largely a bunch of buzzwords created with the primary goal of keeping all but the engineer/programmer/developer cabal from accessing what they are doing. I mean, we can't let anyone code, right? Next thing you'll see is thinking anyone can write! The point here is that those teams will be looking for docs in a similar process. It's why some engineer invented Markdown, to make it easy for static site generators to automatically take "code" changes and produce output, even though Markdown objectively sucks as a language for robust content development.

I think MadCap has tried to build in some automation tools, and I think some are included with Central.

Finally, I think that using "content" instead of "docs" is helpful. The content your users use to be successful lives everywhere, not just in the "documentation," so thinking in "content" terms and content experience can help drive you to where you want to go. (And that includes all your in-product content.)
ChoccieMuffin
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Re: SaaS projects - any background info I should look at?

Post by ChoccieMuffin »

Thanks Chuck,

I was already aware of the point you made and have posed the questions you raise already to the powers that be. I was hoping to be directed to a resource somewhere that goes into things in more detail than a single post in a thread like this can give.
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chuck_agari
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Re: SaaS projects - any background info I should look at?

Post by chuck_agari »

I saw a couple of books yesterday that allege to explain the "new" dec dev model:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08 ... 78f07a84d8

https://smile.amazon.com/Docs-Like-Code ... F5H9E5ABEC

I cannot vouch for these, however, just that it may impart additional understanding.
ChoccieMuffin
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Re: SaaS projects - any background info I should look at?

Post by ChoccieMuffin »

Cheers, Chuck.
...............
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JRtechw
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Re: SaaS projects - any background info I should look at?

Post by JRtechw »

Hi ChoccieMuffin,

Last year, I started looking at the same thing. We are going to release a cloud product this year, or a cloud version of our existing on-prem product, and faced the same challenges.

I can only speak for the 'external' online help, which is pretty much business as usual. If a user clicks on help within the cloud app, this triggers a new tab to open at a context sensitive online help page. I manage CSH through a custom mapping redirect file, rather than doing it through Flare. I map a set of GUIDs to help URLs.

But the publishing process, so far, is much the same. We will soon be moving to a 'Continuous deployment' model described by Chuck, in that our help will be built and published on a scheduled basis from DevOps Git, rather than manually from a Git repository. But there's really not much difference in how we research, write, and review content. Build and deploy from DevOps git offers advantages in that you don't need to build locally and publish; all you do is author locally in Flare and push to source control. You will need a spare licence to run the Flare command line builder in your devops pipeline though. I believe MadCap still have a 'deployment only' licence option for this purpose.

I scare-quote 'external' online help because we also offer in-app user engagement for new user walkthroughs, new feature highlights, superimposed tutorials, stuff like that, which is very 'now' in the app world. Flare does not do this sort of user assistance content yet, so I did a vendor analysis to procure a second software solution to complement our Flare help. I don't wish to advertise other vendors on here, but am happy to chat about it.
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