ClickHelp March Release Sneak Peek — Agile Technical Writing

We are about to provide you with another exclusive insight into the next ClickHelp product release! Today, we will share details of an exciting feature that will become available this March. ClickHelp users are getting the possibility of updating/adding any amount of help topics to their docs instead of preparing the whole project for an update. Let’s take a look at this process and talk about the real life use cases that will make your efficiency skyrocket.

Agile Technical Writing

A documentation team’s workload depends on other teams a lot, mostly on devs. Any sudden functionality change before a product release can lead to a whole lot of changes in documentation. As a result, technical documentation is written by bits and pieces. Deadlines are not always met. A release can be approaching while not all topics are finalized, so, updating the whole project is not an option. At the same time, updating what’s edited and ready is crucial to do before the release.

Now, in ClickHelp, technical writers can update only the topics that are ready and work on other ones for as long as they need!

And, that’s how simple the process is:

• You can access this feature quickly by clicking the stacked papers icon next to the topic filter and proceeding with the Select Topics to Publish… option in the drop-down box:

• You will see checkboxes appearing next to all topics in your current project. Check the ones you would like to update or add to a user manual.

• Click PUBLISH SELECTED.

• The Publishing wizard window will appear. There, you can configure publishing according to your needs.

This brand new process can be incorporated into your product’s agile development cycle. High-quality content is now delivered even faster!

Updating Knowledge Bases Efficiently

Different types of technical documentation require different approaches. Knowledge Bases, for example, are known for a unique update process since they are not necessarily bound to product releases.

Often, all that’s needed from a tech writer is to add several new topics as soon as they are ready. In the past, the technical writer would have to wait for other team members to finish their help topics to upload them all together. Now, all technical documents that do not depend on product releases directly (external and internal KBs, policies and procedures, internal docs, FAQs) can be handled in ClickHelp even more smoothly. Workflows are improved for this whole range of technical documentation types.

ClickHelp users can simply pick the new knowledge base articles and push them following the process described above.

Conclusion

Helping you create more agile and flexible processes inside your team is one of our goals. We believe that this improved topic addition/update mechanism can become a real game changer for many of our clients. This week, we will be posting more information about all the exciting changes and improvements in ClickHelp. Don’t miss out on that!

Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices