OPSWATAll achieved in under one month.
OPSWAT, the global leader in critical infrastructure cybersecurity, invested six years in building their documentation on Confluence until they decided to move to a product that “just works.”
Our experience using DeveloperHub for public docs vs. our solution is like the difference between night and day.
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 (including exporting documentation to HTML and PDF) to make it available for their customers.
Confluence is a general-purpose documentation tool 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. As the complexity of OPSWAT's documentation increased, issues arose:
“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no way to provide feedback: it was challenging to know if the content was too hard to navigate, missing, incomplete, or outdated.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.”
George PrichiciOPSWAT needed to provide documentation in PDF form for customers without internet access due to the nature of their critical operations. To generate PDF exports, they used a third-party plugin that took hours to generate files. The generation process was impossible to debug if anything went wrong and often got 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.”
George PrichiciReleasing to customers was no longer a task they could maintain in a timely manner. It depended entirely 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 pulling content from Confluence to generate PDF and HTML content. The problem was not easy to solve and would require pulling developers away from product work, so they searched for a specialised vendor.
Reaching out to documentation tool vendors, most solutions did not meet their requirements or were not flexible enough. 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 for a demo anyway.
“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.”
George PrichiciTo get OPSWAT onboarded, DeveloperHub set up a dedicated Slack support channel for direct communication. The teams worked closely together on:
“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.”
George PrichiciContent migration, restructuring and full branding, done in roughly one month against a plan that had allowed six to nine.
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.
“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.”
27,000+ documentation sections written and a 4.8★ average on G2.
“After switching to DeveloperHub, clients were calling us and telling us that they chose us over competitors due to documentation.”
“We saved half the time we were putting into documentation before. I can tell you that if I took DeveloperHub away from the team, then there will be some loud loud protests at the office.”
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