HTML-friendly knowledge base/support solutions?

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Erin Kelly
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Sep 26, 2013 8:31 pm

HTML-friendly knowledge base/support solutions?

Unread post by Erin Kelly »

I'm looking for suggestions on an integrated SAAS knowledge base/ticket system provider that would work well with "real" HTML output from H&M. Any ideas?

We need to deliver multiple versions of our knowledge base articles for different products and customers, which is why we moved to a single-source system. But when it comes to getting the HTML file the "last mile" to the customer we have some issues.

We'd like to use an integrated tool that can do self-service knowledge base and forum searches when the user is opening a support ticket. The products we've found (UserVoice, Freshdesk) sort of support HTML, but not an HTML-based file structure with directories and relative links and all those nice useful things. The workaround is to open each HTML file separately, copy and paste the relevant content into the tool's editor in HTML mode, save the article and find out what its unique ID is, then manually update all the links in all the documents I've already output.

So I'm researching alternatives. We could host our docs ourselves (or via some sort of Amazon Web Services solution to avoid in-house web server maintenance tasks), but that prevents the self-service functionality we like with the portal system. We could try to script the link rewriting so that it's just a copy and paste (for each file) in each documentation portal. We're not very concerned with the "round-trip" problem because we don't tend to get a lot of user interaction with our docs in the portal.

Are any of you using a nice knowledge base solution I should check out?
Michelle Cuellar
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Nov 25, 2014 5:17 pm

Re: HTML-friendly knowledge base/support solutions?

Unread post by Michelle Cuellar »

Hi, I know it's a complete and total long shot, but were you ever able to find a solution for this? My company is in the same boat and we're currently having to jump through hoops to get the end result we want.

Thanks!
-Michelle
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Tim Green
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Re: HTML-friendly knowledge base/support solutions?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Erin and Michelle,

Have you tried out the full version of Wrensoft Zoom? This is the same program that Help & Manual integrates to create its local WebHelp search in a single project. You can also integrate the full version to do this and give you more configuration options, but that is not what you are looking for here, since you are clearly planning to search multiple projects and folders and possibly also other file types.

Zoom can do this too, but then you need to use it in full stand-alone mode. It can index a wide range of different file types in addition to HTML, including PDF and Word etc, and it also has a spider mode to update its indexes automatically as you add material. Basically, you create a folder for Zoom and its indexes, tell it where the tree of folders is located that you want it to index and create a search page interface.

Another possibility would be to set up Google Site Search.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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cindynotbrady
Posts: 157
Joined: Wed Mar 01, 2006 3:49 pm
Location: Provo, Utah

Re: HTML-friendly knowledge base/support solutions?

Unread post by cindynotbrady »

I too was looking into this recently. Has anyone used Swiftype? Supposedly, Google Site Search is going away:

https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gss.html

It looks rather easy to implement Swiftype into your current web site. I'm curious if anyone has tried it and it's worth the price. We want to be able to search both our huge documents on the web (using HelpAndManual) and our other site location that has all tutorials (not created with H&M) and combine them under one search tool.

https://swiftype.com/
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