Why did we build Document360?

Google

docs

After spending few weeks analyzing all the available platforms, we figured out that the self-service knowledge base market is dominated by help desk software providers and chat application providers. Their primary objective is, of course, providing a robust ticketing system or chat system, therefore the knowledge base offering doesn't get the respect it deserves.

We noticed that most of the preliminary capabilities required for a solid knowledge base is missing in most of these platforms. We concluded that there is definitely an opportunity to build a better product that just solves only one problem, very well - "providing a great self-service knowledge base product", no ticketing, no chat, no bells & whistles.

Here are the top 11 challenges we wanted to address in Document360

1. Mark Down support (great authoring experience): Writing documentation should be as seamless as possible. We wanted our product to provide support for MarkDown syntax with great authoring editor.
2. Category Manager: A good category manager to organise your content (category/sub-category/articles) with the ability to move/hide articles etc., is very crucial for a good knowledge base solution.
3. Versioning: We believe documentation has to be treated like code — never it will be in a static state. A good version control system is essential which allows you to compare changes, rollback to an older version and so on.
4. Backup and Restore: Human errors are inevitable; we wanted to provide a robust backup (both system and manual) and restore mechanism so that you don't lose your valuable documentation.
5. Analytics: Out of the box analytics to identify your well-performing articles, missing articles for user searches, and keeping an eye on the traffic.
6. Good Search: A super good search is vital to a knowledge base. Often these days, search is the number one navigation mechanism for users to find relevant content. The first thing users do is to find and search for a particular content within the knowledge base.
7. SEO out of the box: Your product knowledge base can become a great source of content marketing. For this to be effective, your documentation has to be fully SEO compliant.
8. Feedback system: A user may or may not like certain articles. It is very important to have a good feedback system inbuilt to understand the user input.
9. Customization: Your knowledge base must look clean and reflect your branding.
10. Content Workflow: Ability to have an approval system in place so that only quality articles reach the public.
11. Integration: In today's world, your knowledge base cannot live in isolation. It needs to play nicely with other supporting systems like Google Analytics, Chat applications, Feedback systems etc.

We focussed on addressing all of the above challenges in the product (except analytics, which is coming soon), and there are more things to come in the upcoming weeks/months.

We recommend you to play around with the product, get the feel of it and let us know what you think (using the feedback link at the top right corner).

Regards,
Saravana