OPSWAT, the global leader in critical infrastructure cybersecurity that helps protect IT, OT, and ICS organizations from malware and zero-day attacks, invested six years in building their documentation systems on Confluence until they decided to move to a product that “just works,” according to George Prichici, VP of Product at OPSWAT.
1000+
Customers
19+
Years of Operation
22
Products Documented
5+
Hours Saved from Each Release Process
%15-
Support Ticket Volume
“Our experience using DeveloperHub for public docs vs. our solution is like the difference between night and day.”
George Prichici
VP of Product, OPSWAT
OPSWAT started building its documentation platform on Confluence six years ago because it was the familiar platform to use. Over the years, their customer-facing documentation evolved to 20 products and their customer needs had changed. OPSWAT leveraged the ecosystem of community-created plugins which Atlassian has to satisfy those needs including exporting the documentation to HTML and PDF to make it available for their customers.
Confluence is a general-purpose documentation tool that is built for teams to collaborate on projects of any kind. It has grown in popularity in the internal documentation space due to its tight integration with Jira, and the ability to use plugins to integrate with other systems to bring content in one place.
As the complexity of OPSWAT’s documentation and the number of contributors increased, issues that OPSWAT faced included:
“Since the search functionality provided no value to our readers and there was no way to provide feedback -- it was challenging to know if the content was too hard to navigate, missing, incomplete, or outdated. All of which caused an increase in avoidable support tickets.”
OPSWAT needed to provide documentation in PDF form for its customers who do not have access to the internet due to the nature of their critical operations. To generate PDF exports, they used a third-party plugin that took hours to generate the files. The generation process is impossible to debug if anything goes wrong and often gets stuck, needing a forced restart.
“I remember once when the PDF export plugin broke. We spent seven hours modifying the documentation, trial-and-error, until the offending formatting style which broke the PDF export plugin was identified and removed.”
Releasing to customers was no longer a task they could maintain in a timely manner. It depended on the success of their custom build solution.
OPSWAT began looking for a solution to their documentation problem. Their first thoughts were to build their own backend that pulls content from Confluence and generates PDF and HTML content, so their contributors’ documentation flow would not be affected. The problem is not easy to solve and would require pulling developers who are working on products, to build the backend and perform ongoing maintenance, so they searched for a specialized vendor who would solve all of their documentation challenges.
Reaching out to the documentation tool vendors, most of the solutions did not meet their requirements or were not flexible enough to accommodate their requests. Furthermore, most vendors were either documentation or API focussed, but OPSWAT has API-driven products which require both.
At that time, DeveloperHub did not have PDF export functionality, but OPSWAT reached out to us for a demo.
“Most of the team were very impressed with the demo and the conversation went very well. They were open about building the PDF export feature. We felt that DeveloperHub is a trusted source and that we can start building and working on a solution. The product served much more than we expected.”
To get OPSWAT onboarded:
“For migration to DeveloperHub, we scoped for a phased approach with a 6-9 months timeline. We were able to be ready in roughly 1 month, and we took an additional 2 weeks for QA and final polishing. That included content migration, documentation restructuring, and even branding. That for me was probably one of the most impressive things about DeveloperHub’s team.”
“We left the 90s technology. Our documentation process is much more advanced and streamlined now to better support our customers. All our product docs have the same professional clean look and experience. Our customers can find what they are looking for, proven by the decrease in the support ticket volume. The feedback loop works great - we have biweekly meetings to enhance the documentation according to search analytics and user feedback. It is no longer just about writing documentation; it is about writing, analysing, gathering feedback and iterating to provide the best experience possible.”
OPSWAT’s new documentation portal has now replaced their previous online help site, with a unified experience for all their products. From the get-go, the reader lands on a global landing page which empowers them to search right away through all their products, or to choose the product and topic of interest.
OPSWAT no longer has to plan documentation releases. Their publishers can make changes which reflect to the customers immediately. PDF exports are available in minutes.
Most importantly, OPSWAT knows how their documentation is being used. With Google Analytics, Search Analytics and Feedback, OPSWAT transforms these insights into documentation that is easily accessible, error-free and complete.
By using DeveloperHub, OPSWAT:
Decreased support ticket volume by 15%, due to a more effective search engine and a simpler documentation structure. Unified the experience for all their products under one documentation portal. Have complete trust that they can release products and new versions whenever they need to.“We are very proud and pleased of the quality of work that OPSWAT and DeveloperHub have achieved. Their documentation portal is of world-class quality, and we really cannot wait to nominate them for the best documentation portal awards. OPSWAT nowadays leverages every last feature of DeveloperHub and we are excited to build for them even more so we help them succeed even further.”
Zaid Daba'een
CEO & Founder, DeveloperHub
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