Caroline Juszczak: An Information Development Tent Revival

An Information Development
Tent Revival
Customer Success, Context, and Lean Content in MindTouch
Caroline Juszczak, Mike Wethington

The Legal Stuff
About SolarWinds®
SolarWinds provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from
Fortune 500® enterprises to small businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. We
are committed to focusing exclusively on IT Pros, and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have
been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. Regardless of where the IT asset or
user sits, SolarWinds delivers products that are easy to find, buy, use, maintain, and scale while
providing the power to address all key areas of the infrastructure from on premises to the Cloud. Our
solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our THWACK® online
community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and participate in our product
development process. Learn more today at http://www.solarwinds.com/.
SolarWinds, SolarWinds & Design, Orion, and THWACK are the exclusive property of SolarWinds
Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates, are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be
registered or pending registration in other countries. All other SolarWinds trademarks, service marks,
and logos may be common law marks or are registered or pending registration. All other trademarks
mentioned herein are used for identification purposes only and are trademarks of (and may be
registered trademarks) of their respective companies.
© 2016 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved
10/20/2016 © 2016 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 1

Agenda
1. Brief intro to SolarWinds and our users
2. Customer success and context
3. Content reuse challenges and success

Who are we?
Despite our name, SolarWinds is NOT an energy company, nor a space exploration
company.
We’re a software company that monitors IT.
If it can be monitored and reported on, we do it.

Who are our users?
• SolarWinds has over 250,000 customers
running the gamut from small businesses with
minimal IT needs to large institutions.
• The knowledge gap in SolarWinds end-users is
a wide gulf, ranging from experts with 10 sets of
certification initials after their names to the guy
at the office who is ‘really good with computers’.

Where have we been?
• 2014 – SolarWinds Information Development department functioned like any typical
startup shop doc department.
o Eight products had a shared architecture with no sharing of content.
o Every product delivered different docs, no consistency of
output or writing style.
o A large amount of our content was trapped in unsearchable .pdfs.
o Documented the GUI.
• Existing documentation is complex, overly wordy, and
doesn’t explain the basics.

Customer Success and Context – A
change is gonna come…

7
© 2016 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Where are we going?
CUSTOMER SUCCESS GOALS
The mission of Customer Success is to work across SolarWinds teams to
deliver rapid and continuous value to our customers through our products and
product supportability programs.
Speed to Value (initial purchase +
upgrades)
Easy Customer Support & Help
Identify and Turn-Around At-Risk
Customers

Our place in Customer Success
• Where does Technical Content fit into a customer’s success?
o Speed to Value
• Get customers up and running quickly and have them see value from their purchase almost
immediately.
• Build customer loyalty.
• Make day-to-day users jobs easier.
o Easy Customer Support
• Provide timely answers to their advanced questions about product functionality.
• Reduce Support calls.
o Turn-around At-Risk Customers
• Make our brand ‘sticky’ (too valuable to stop using) with customers and keep maintenance revenue
flowing.

Speed to Value
• We create SolarWinds Getting Started Guides (GSG) for each of our main products.
o GSGs are written as stories taking our basic customers on a journey through their first 30 days
after purchase. They use a narrative flow linking together discrete tasks needed to accomplish a
series of goals.
o The guiding mandate for GSGs is that a user must have tangible evidence of success or
progress they can show their boss each week. We set out to make the IT user into a ‘Super
Hero’ to their boss.
• We produce comprehensive, well-tested install and upgrade docs to help people’s
initial product experience be smoother.
• We provide detailed 1-2 page technical overviews of new features to explain why
existing customers should upgrade to the newest version. These emphasize the
business value of the feature, not the actual tasks to perform.

Customers love the new approach…
“You aren’t just talking them through ‘how-to’.
You are helping make their jobs easier
and making them look like heroes!”

Easy Customer Support
• The customers want answers. They are not particular about where
it comes from so long as it solves their problems.
• Traditional content and knowledge base articles work together to
provide a complete picture of the product for the users.
• Customers want to find their answers either through one Google ® search
or through a single federated search on our website.
• By combining traditional content and knowledge base content into
MindTouch ®, we let our users search the entire library of content for
answers with one search.

Give the customer what they want
• In 2014, Google Analytics showed we were getting 35,000+ hits by customers
against our documentation weekly. This represented ~90% of all access to our
content.
So why were we designing our content to look like a book?
What are customers really looking for?

The New 80/20 rule
• We divided SolarWinds end-users into two distinct groups.
o Basic Users (our 80%) – This group represented the majority of our customer base. They are
users who are trying to use the same basic functionality of our products. They have limited IT
knowledge and limited time to learn.
These users need to know the WHY
not just the HOW.

Snowflakes
• Approximately 20% of SolarWinds users have solid IT knowledge.
o These users purchased products not only for basic functionality but to address specific
advanced operational issues.
We call them
‘Snowflakes.’
Each one is different.
Each one is unique.

Writing to the Why? Providing context to our users
• Minimalism
o We undertook an ongoing project to ‘lean’ each topic and strip
away ‘advanced’ content that our basic users don’t need to
know.
• Every Page is Page One (EPPO)
o SolarWinds writers have adopted and been trained in the
concepts contained within Mark Baker’s book, Every Page is
Page One.
o Topics must stand alone or provide rich linking to other related
tasks.
No more random Google search dart throwing.

Before and After Minimalism
Before
Use AppStack
Using AppStack as a troubleshooting tool is fairly straightforward. Simply navigate to the
AppStack Environment view, and then click on an object to see what is related to that object.
To investigate further, navigate to the Details page of the object or any related object.
After
Monitor your environment using AppStack
The Application Stack, or AppStack, describes the various layers that make up a complex
application delivery infrastructure. The AppStack Environment view is an interactive visual
mapping within Orion that provides an in-depth perspective through the entire environment to
help identify the root cause of performance and availability issues.

Keeping users engaged
• According to published research*, the average user spends less than 5 seconds
searching for information on a page. That is how long you have to engage them to
read your content.
o If you can get the reader to stay for 40 seconds, they typically stay for at least 3 minutes.
• We get their attention by focusing the 1st paragraph of every topic on what the
content actually does and what business value it provides (the context) to the user.
* Microsoft 2015

Leveraging the company knowledge base – MindTouch
• SolarWinds selected MindTouch to be its company knowledge base. By March 2016,
MindTouch was live and being propagated with articles using the Knowledge
Centered Support (KCS) principles.
o In February 2016, we had about 3,500 articles in MindTouch.
o There are currently over 23,000 articles in MindTouch and growing.
• Remember the advanced content that we eliminated in our leaning exercise? They
have been transformed into Knowledge Base articles addressing specific user
questions.

Content Journey to our
Success Center

Our Customer Success Home Page

Challenge #1: Loads of content
How do we get a large amount of content into our new tool in an efficient manner?
• Thousands of pages of content that need to maintain structure and cross-references
• Long way to go, and a short time to get there
Our choices:
• Copy/paste
• Hire a consultant
Solution #1:
For the version we were using, we found we could import one type of file that kept our
structure and links.

Challenge #2: Duplicate content
How do we avoid adding
duplicate content?
• Several products with the same
information
• Straight imports = duplicate
content
Core
NPM SAM
NCM
NTA

Challenge #3: Maintaining metadata
How can we import updated content without having to redo metadata?
METADATA
METADATA
CONTENT

Challenge #4: Maintain cumulative page statistics
How do we avoid starting back at 0 when we update our content?

Solution: Reuse
• Store our content in a re-
use area
• Call content to any space
where it is needed
• Search engines do not
see duplicate content
What a user sees What a search engine sees
CONTENT
CONTENT

High Level Concept
Reuse
Success Center
NPM SAM NCM NTA

What it looks like
Reuse area NPM Production area Guide structure

Problems this solved
• Eliminated duplicate content
• Allowed us to maintain metadata
o Page summaries
o Tags
• Allowed us to maintain page statistics

Challenge #6: Use unique styles
How to retain unique styles and formats used in our traditional content that did not
convert in the import to the Success Center?

Solution: Call in custom CSS
Custom CSS in the reuse area DekiScript call to the CSS

Some of our Favorite MindTouch “tricks”
The following slides share some of the favorite MindTouch tips
and tricks we have discovered on our journey so far.
• DekiScript + JavaScript ® : Accordion drop-downs
• DekiScript: Add a link in topic for users to create a PDF
• DekiScript: Create a reuse page for common text
• Create an in-topic “Home” button
• Create a mini-TOC of child pages
• Advanced searching in MindTouch

DekiScript + JavaScript: Accordion drop-downs
CSS and JavaScript in Reuse area Use dekiscript in target topic

Result of accordion drop-down coding
Click each section title to reveal text

DekiScript: Add a link for users to create a PDF
• Add a link in your topic that says “Save as PDF”
• Use this code:
<a data-ga-label="PDF"
href="https://xxx.mindtouch.us/@api/deki/pages/2775/pdf/DPA%2barchitecture.pdf"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="Export page as a PDF"><span class="mt-icon-
article-pdf"></span>Save as PDF</a>
Page ID Page title

DekiScript: Create a reuse page for common text
• Legal notices, cautions, warnings, etc.
Topic in reuse area Source for topic in user area

Create an in-topic “Home” button

Add a mini-TOC to a parent topic
• Use to add automatic mini-TOCs.

Advanced Searching in MindTouch
• https://success.mindtouch.com/Documentation/MindTouchResponsive/Content/Sear
ch_and_navigate_content/014_Perform_advanced_searches
• Cool favorites:
o Content:<text> - Searches within the content of a page. Does not include titles, tags, file
names, descriptions, etc.
o Title:<text> - Only searches page titles
o Tag:<tag> - Lists all pages that have the specific tag you entered
Bonus tip! Click a tag on a page to trigger a search for all pages that have that tag.

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