Technical Documentation Authoring

Hi ​@ColeM we are currently migrating off of MadCap because of the difficulty we’ve had integrating it with other platforms. But I can share with you what our process has been up to this point, as well as the updated process we had planned on implementing before we decided to move away from MadCap.

We have been using MadCap for several years. Before we began using Gainsight CC our knowledge base was hosted on a Salesforce platform called Experience Cloud. At that time, we were using the Madcap/Salesforce connector to send content to Salesforce where it was turned into knowledge articles. It’s a very buggy, brittle workflow going from MadCap to Salesforce though.

When we migrated to Gainsight CC we were planning on building a custom API connection from MadCap directly to Gainsight CC. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to secure in-house technical resources to build it, so instead we kept the current workflow with Salesforce, and then our Salesforce team added an API script between Salesforce and Gainsight CC to convert the Salesforce knowledge articles into Gainsight CC topics. That process has worked OK but it’s very buggy and requires a lot of manual intervention. We are now planning to migrate off Madcap and Salesforce completely and overhaul our process. 

Before we decided to abandon Madcap we had identified a possible solution to publish directly from Madcap to Gainsight CC. Our plan was to use an integration platform like Workato to manage the process of sending output from Madcap to a remote repository, then pulling that into Gainsight CC using the API. 

Essentially the process was going to be: 

1. Create the content in Madcap.
2. Export the content as an HTML5 package from Madcap.
3. Upload the HTML5 package to a remote repository like a Github repo or an S3 directory
4. Watch the remote repository for uploads, which triggers the publishing process using the Gainsight CC API to convert the HTML5 files into knowledge base topics. 

Our experience with MadCap was that it’s lack of ability to integrate easily with other platforms, either through native connectors or through an API, severely limited our ability to use it and required a lot of teams to create workarounds and incur tech debt in order to build a publishing workflow. I will say that from a tech-writing standpoint, nothing else can really compete with MadCap, in terms of managing a lot of documentation. Pros and cons, but in our case the cons finally outweighed any theoretical benefit that our tech writers enjoyed. 

If you are stuck with it then my recommendation would be to investigate using an iPAAS  like Workato or Zapier to build an automated publishing flow using that basic blueprint.