Effective documentation is very crucial to the success of software development and product management. Documentation facilitates swift onboarding, promotes collaboration, and serves as a crucial resource for troubleshooting and debugging. Without effective documentation,organisations will find it difficult to sell their services like APIs. It will be very difficult for team members to collaborate when there is no effective documentation.
As a technical writer, you need a very good and efficient documentation tool that can help you convey your information to your audience. A tool that will allow you to express yourself effectively by including code snippets, links, images etc.
In this article, we will be discussing two amazing documentation tools that will help you to write effective documentation. We will be explaining some of their amazing feature that will help you in writing efficient documentation.
Portle
Madcap Flare
Portle: Portle is an amazing documentation tool that helps you (or your team) as a technical writer to write efficient documentations easy and fast. Portle is a solution crafted to streamline the creation of user-facing documentation, by offering a simplified approach to documentation.
Features of Portle
- Ability to invite team members
- Ability to add custome domain
- Release notes
- Versioning
Ability to invite team members : Efficient documentation can be a very duanting task, which requires expertise and effort. Portle has an amazing feature that allows you to invite your team members to help you out or to work together. Imagine having a new junior staff in your team, it will be some how difficult for the staff to navigate the world of effective documentation. But with Portle, you can easily take the staff by the hand and teach him how to write amazing documentations by helping you out in the little ways he can.
The ability to add team members to your Portle account can be very helpful. It will enable effective scrutinization, collabration amongst writers, which will enable them to write effective documentation that will be beneficial to the targeted audience.
How to add a team member: Head over to Portle (sign up if you have not), go to the settings. You will see 4 tabs namely domain, Plans and billing, user management account management. Select the user management, you will see an interface that will enable you to invite a team memeber by their emails.
Ability to add custome domain: Portle has another powerful feaure that makes documentation an amazing experience. The ability to add custome domain for your documentation is an awesome experience. For instance, your company is hosting an event like an hackathon, you can easily write down the instructions for the participants to follow. With Portle, you create a dedicated portal at hackathon.yourdomain.com, offering clear and accessible documentation to participants during the event.
How to add custome domain in Portle: Head over to Portle (sign up if you have not), go to the settings. You will see 4 tabs namely domain, Plans and billing, user management account management. Select the domain tab, you can see a button that says connect new domain. Click on it and upload the necessary informations to enjoy this feature.
Release notes: Still working on it
Versioning: Still working on it
Madcap Flare: Madcap flare is also an amazing tool that has been around for decades. This tool helps you to create, manage and publish content for your audience. It enables you to write effective documentation easily and fast.
Madcap flare has awesome and amazing features which can help you in your technical documentation. Here are some of the amazing features Madcap flare has to offer.
Features of Madcap flare
1.Single-Source Authoring
2.Responsive Design
3.Multilingual Support
4.Importation of different file formats
Single-source authoring : Madcap flare has a feature that allows you as a technical writer to create content in a single-source format. This will enable you to write and maintain content in one location and then publish it in multiple formats like PDF etc.
As a technical writer, you might want your documentation to be accessible in many format. MadCap flare can help you to write the documentation once and publish it to both the web and the printer, ensuring consistency which will save you lots of time.
Responsive design: As a technical writer, your main goal should be for your documentation to be accessible for your audience to consume. Nowadays, people use different kinds devices with different screen sizes. Having a documentation that can fit in any screen size will be a nice experience for your audience. Madcap flare allows you to write responsive documentation that can adapt to different screen sizes.
Multilingual Support: Madcap flare has a feature that enables you to write, manage and publish documents in multiple languages. A large number of people do not speak nor understand English, as a technical writer, reaching a wide range of your targeted audience in their different languages will make the documentation so helpful to them.
Importation of different file formats: The ability to import different file formats can really help you to write effective documentation as a technical writer. Madcap flare has an amazing feature that enables you to import different kinds of file formats.
Comparison
Portle and Madcap flare are two amazing documentation tools, that have features that can help you write effective and efficient documentation easily. However, just like every other softwares out there, they have their pros and cons.
Portle is a powerful modern documentation tool that will help you to write efficient documentation. As a modern day tool, it might not have the features that Madcap flare currently have, but you can get your work done with it. It also has a very easy to understand user interface and affordable pricing.
Madcap flare is an amazing documentation tool that has been around for a long time, it has lots of amazing features that can help you write documentations. One of the downsides of Madcap flare is that the user interface might not be easy for a new user to understand it. Because of it`s lots of features, Madcap flare costs more than Portle. Most of the features might not be used all the time in your documentation.
The two tools are amazing, you just have to choose the one that is good for you and your team.
Conclusion
The importance of effective documentation can never be neglected, poor documentation can lead to loss of potential costumers. It will make your product or services hard to use by your costumers.
Efficient documentation can bring about more revenue, clear communication between you and your targeted audience, effective collaboration amongst your team members and good time management.
We have explored two amazing documentation tools that can help us write efficient documentation. Portle and Madcap flare are amazing tools that has their pros and cons. But can help us achieve efficient documentation.
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