Zoho Wiki Makes Life Comfortable for Technical Writers - Zoho CRM's Help Documentation Writer Shares her Experience

You would have earlier seen an introduction to the

numerous ways in which

Zoho Wiki is being implemented within Zoho. Now, a series of blogs will explore each facet of Zoho Wiki in detail.



Let me present to you, Pon Pavitra Jothi, the technical writer in charge of

Zoho CRM's Help Manuals. For the past nine months, Pavitra is using Zoho Wiki for documenting the Help section.



"I

was initially apprehensive about how an online wiki could be used for

writing software product manuals. But once I started working, I could

clearly see Zoho Wiki adding value as a product help authoring tool."



-

Pon Pavitra Jothi,


  Zoho CRM, Technical Writer



She adds,


  • "Simple tool

    :

    Zoho CRM is an extensive product and needs a lot of help documents. We want to support our customers in the best possible manner. We have around 175 help pages now and it continues to grow. Zoho

    Wiki is a simple tool to manage such bulky documentation. No geeky stuff. I got started immediately.


  • Easy Editing

    : Making edits to the documents via the WYSIWYG editor is easy and more importantly, it would be live the moment I updated.

    This is real helpful especially since Zoho CRM is a rapidly evolving online service and new features getting added all the time.


  • Team Collaboration

    : Publishing help manuals and user guides always require the content to be shared

    and involves team collaboration. Zoho Wiki makes interactions with the product

    development team a breeze. I could set permissions to every page that I

    created, i.e. publish it or make it private whenever needed. This was

    helpful when new features were getting ready. I could create a page,

    keep it private, draft the help content (with all the formatting done),

    share with my team alone, collaborate to arrive at the correct content

    and simply make it public (publish) on the day of release. Publishing

    the document was just a click away.



  • Version Control Advantage

    :

    Sometimes, I might mess a document but then, I could always revert to

    the previous version. Plus, I could compare two versions and figure out

    the changes.



  • Reliable Search

    : Using tags was helpful in searching, related content for a topic.



  • Powerful Widgets

    : I have used a couple of widgets too. For example, many pages needed the same list of

    Related Links

    . In case, I had to add more to the list, I didn’t want to go and add it manually in each page where the

    Related Links

    were listed. To avoid that, I used a widget and that was easy. Zoho

    Wiki has indeed increased my productivity. There are many widgets to add

    YouTube videos, presentations, graphs etc.



User Communication & Community building

"An important point here is, users can post comments, give their

feedback on the content, or ask their questions. As a technical writer,

I feel, this ensures a two way interaction (my documentation and the

user's feedback on it) which is vital. You see, we have over 500 comments in our help section, that's a testimony to our vibrant community " says the tech writer.



Thanks Pavitra, for sharing your insights about Zoho Wiki.



As more and more Project Documentation, Product User Guides, Help Manuals move to cloud, I'm sure, Zoho

Wiki will be able to empower the technical writers who rely on user

friendly, quality help authoring and documentation software.





Cheers,


Susan


Comments

2 Replies to Zoho Wiki Makes Life Comfortable for Technical Writers - Zoho CRM's Help Documentation Writer Shares her Experience

  1. How do I get started building my own online help? I can't figure out how you set up the links/TOC along the left... is that in wiki? Then how do you create links between documents/wiki pages?

  2. How do I get started building my own online help? I can't figure out how you set up the links/TOC along the left... is that in wiki? Then how do you create links between documents/wiki pages?

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