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Integrate product documentation into real time search results.
Provide integration with Documentation in your real time search results.
I love the "Here's What We Found" real time search results. It collapses together the act of asking a question with the frustrating task of searching to see whether someone else has already gotten an answer.
However, there's one problem with this: RTFM is still a pain. An answer to my question may already exist inside of product documentation, but Get Satisfaction has no visibility into product docs, so it can only give me answers to what has already been answered in Get Satisfaction.
Why not enable companies to link Get Satisfaction in with their documentation and serve up fresh hot results from docs, too?
As a veteran of software product management, I understand the problem of support matrixes. There are so many documentation platforms out there, and providing indexing for them all would not be practical. My suggestion is to integrate only platforms that provide an OpenSearch API.
At Bungee Labs, we are moving our documentation from MediaWiki to Deki (www.mindtouch.com) because Deki provides an excellent REST API. It includes OpenSearch, which is why many companies, including Mozilla, are moving to it. It would definitely be worth a look.
Lastly, I believe that this could be one of your premium service offerings. Provide it for a month or two as a free trial, and then make it a subscription-based service. Its value would certainly justify a reasonable cost for Bungee Labs.
I love the "Here's What We Found" real time search results. It collapses together the act of asking a question with the frustrating task of searching to see whether someone else has already gotten an answer.
However, there's one problem with this: RTFM is still a pain. An answer to my question may already exist inside of product documentation, but Get Satisfaction has no visibility into product docs, so it can only give me answers to what has already been answered in Get Satisfaction.
Why not enable companies to link Get Satisfaction in with their documentation and serve up fresh hot results from docs, too?
As a veteran of software product management, I understand the problem of support matrixes. There are so many documentation platforms out there, and providing indexing for them all would not be practical. My suggestion is to integrate only platforms that provide an OpenSearch API.
At Bungee Labs, we are moving our documentation from MediaWiki to Deki (www.mindtouch.com) because Deki provides an excellent REST API. It includes OpenSearch, which is why many companies, including Mozilla, are moving to it. It would definitely be worth a look.
Lastly, I believe that this could be one of your premium service offerings. Provide it for a month or two as a free trial, and then make it a subscription-based service. Its value would certainly justify a reasonable cost for Bungee Labs.
I’m hopeful that you'll heed this brilliant idea.
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I like this idea!
Tell me when this idea gets some attention.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The company has this under consideration.
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Inappropriate?This is a very powerful idea, and one we're open to. We'll also look into Deki, which looks like a great product.
I’m excited about this idea
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This is one of the best points
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Thanks, Thor! I'm a big fan of Deki and MindTouch. I hope you become one, too. -
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Inappropriate?Take a look at this: http://mindtouch.com/Technology for an overview of MindTouch tech. The gist is: MindTouch Deki is a RESTful web services framework and services orchestration engine that has a wiki interface to it, which exposes most of the platform's functionality. This wiki interface is really really usable and feature rich. People use MindTouch Deki for collaboration, light weight integration, mashups and business intelligence. And of course, it's often used for support documentation and portals and developer communities. A more famous example of MindTouch Deki in action in this capacity is: http://developer.mozilla.org
I’m excited
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Inappropriate?I like the idea, but I would say that we would be most interested in it if it supported PDF files, which are easily indexed and are probably the most common format for printed documentation.
Anyway, this would be a killer feature!3 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Good news! MindTouch Deki does support indexing of PDF for search (and pretty much any other file type you'd care to search the contents of). Moreover, it uses Prince XML to generate stunningly beautiful PDF docs replete with pagination.
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That's cool, but I don't see how that makes it integrate into Get Satisfaction... There are lots of PDF indexers out there, so that sauce is not special. We don't wiki our product manuals (although the idea of doing so is not a bad one).
I like the idea of someone typing a question into Get Satisfaction and it giving them answers from the manual as well as from other users. That would be the hotness. For us, it's all about reducing tech support calls... -
Well, I think this is precisely Ted's proposal. The answers would be returned from the user manual, the community doc portal, etc... If you attached your PDFs to MindTouch Deki and Ted's proposal were realized you would have the benefit of seeing answers from PDFs (or other file attachments) as well as from content authored by your team or by your community of users that have contributed content to MindTouch Deki.
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Inappropriate?@Andrew Starks:
As Roebot states, that is precisely my point. Deki's native capabilities are so well suited as a complement to Get Satisfaction, that your PDF suggestion (which is spot on) would fall right into place if Get Satisfaction were able to mine Deki for search results.
I’m even more convinced than before.
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Inappropriate?Just like to voice my support for this idea... I work with Andrew and this would really help us out with reducing the stress level for our already taxed support team.
So, let's say someone searched from something in GSFN there was a match in some Deki resource... What would GSFN return? A simple link to that resource in Deki? Would it pull the data and display it inside some sort of GSFN topic?
I like the idea of keeping things within Satisfaction... We're trying to turn it into our single source for all things support-related, but I imagine that it would be tricky to have outside resources displayed.
Just some thoughts, I like the idea a lot.
-John
I’m digging it
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this is one of the best points
2 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Well, pulling the content into GS is simple enough. First, you should understand that anything a human can do (and MORE) can be accessed programmatically via RESTful web services. In fact, every "wiki" page in MindTouch also has a web service interface. We kind of define WOA here at MindTouch. :-) http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2008/08...
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BTW, who is Andrew? Oh, and you're in St. Paul. Wild. MindTouch started in St. Paul. LoTo. We moved the Bellevue and St. Paul offices to San Diego in 2006-2007 though.
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Inappropriate?@John Reilly:
As I see it, your question breaks into two parts: how deep would GS search for in Deki, and how would results be presented
Ideally, the result would represent full text search, not just article titles. That's how both Deki and GS work today, and they both use the OpenSearch standard.
GS presents titles only in results, but they do show an icon for the category from which they came. So perhaps they way to show the results would be with a reference manual icon.
(Although, now I think about it, I would like an option in GS to show text snippets that contain the key words that produced the result.)
Those are my thoughts,
Ted
I’m always happy. Too happy, dammit.
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Inappropriate?I'm Andrew Starks, with Tightrope Media Systems... We'll keep the Twin Cities real for you, while you're gone. :)
Anyway, I think that we're all on the same page here. When a user asks a question, mining the data from any source, but at least PDF, would be great. Furthermore, a reference to at least the page where the reference was found is probably needed.
Ideally, when you hover over the page number, the first paragraph where the phrase or keywords were found (or maybe the whole page) would show up.
Also, possibly instead of just page numbers, the bookmark prior to the text could appear.
I realize that this is a bit of a rats nest, but keep in mind: something is way better than nothing. We have more than 1000 pages of documentation that answers most of our user's questions. It'd be great to include this.
I’m hopeful!
3 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Doh...Andrew, the one from the previous post!
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@Roebot: You'll get this whole Internets thing down soon, Aaron. Just stick with it.
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Thanks I'm taking a class on CD...
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Inappropriate?(In response to Roebot's comments above...)
Hi Roebot... I agree that REST lets GSFN pull in just about anything from a technical perspective, but I'm wondering what it should do once GSFN gets the data. Specifically, do my customers get transported to a different site when they click on a GSFN search result that came from Deki? Or does GSFN somehow display the data as if it were yet another topic, allowing them to reply/comment/etc directly inside the GSFN interface?
An "external link" search result would probably be easiest for GSFN to implement, but from a usability perspective I think I'd prefer the "psudo-topic" style, since it doesn't require users to bounce back and forth between two separate websites. That said, I have absolutely no clue what that would look like or how it would work. Plus, what happens when the external resource changes? Does the topic get updated somehow? Pretty huge can of worms there, I'd imagine. :)
PS, you guys should definitely move back to St. Paul. No way San Diego has the beautiful fall colors we're rockin' right now. ;)
-John
I’m dang opinionated
3 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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@Roebot: Don't fall for the whole "fall colors" routine. It's pretty packaging on a bitterly cold winter! :)
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Ted, I can't hear you with all the pretty fall colors around... :P
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LOL. It's hard to hear with all the sunshine here too... ;-)
70 degrees and sunny is kind of nice, but it can get boring. For Fall colors I go to the mountains with my family.
I still make it back to MN regularly. In fact, one of my co-workers here at MindTouch lives in White Bear, MN. -
Inappropriate?I guess I should point out that a lot of MindTouch customers, EMC, Temenos and many many others are using MindTouch Deki for their support doc authoring and then they spit out PDFs and deliver this PDF to the end user. Even more interesting than this are the cases in which the product is customized/able or very highly configurable. In these cases MindTouch customers will resell licenses of MindTouch Deki and distribute MindTouch Deki (as SaaS or VMware certified image) to their customers to provide the support docs for their products. In this way the customer gets a living support doc portal they can maintain and update. Is this relevant to our conversation...I'm not sure, but I do like to brag about how MindTouch kicks ass. ;-)
I’m pimping MindTouch
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Inappropriate?Boy, awesome thoughts you guys are sharing here. Keep it coming. The implications for this kind of integration are pretty large, so I'm not sure if it's something we can do without a lot of thought, but I do like thinking about it -- especially as a premium offering. I'll see if I can get some other opinions about it here, too.
I’m impressed
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Inappropriate?Hi all. I just have to chime in that we're all loving this conversation over here at Get Satisfaction. You definitely have gotten our wheels turning.
I’m in San Francisco looking at the Fall fog.
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