Fresh Perspective: Reflecting on Fluid Topics’ First Semester 2023

The past 6 months have flown by. When we started the year, there was barely any excitement around topics like “ChatGPT” and in a matter of weeks, it became a game-changing technology that everyone talked about (including us!).

As we look ahead to the second half of the year, we decided to round up the best Fluid Topics news that have been announced thus far in 2023 (and that you may have missed).

1. We released Fluid Topics 4.1 and it included:

• Improvements to Taruqa, our proprietary search engine

Following conjoint tests with several customers, we have refined the relevance tuning of Taruqa, our proprietary search engine. We have also introduced new search templates that combine both global and personal ranking criteria.

Finding the right balance between all these criteria has required a lot of testing but the overall relevance of our search engine has clearly been improved and further widens the gap with traditional Enterprise search engines.

If you’re not sure what Taruqa can mean for your portal, we have published a blog article with detailed information about our search engine and its business applications for technical and product content.

• New DITA connector

As you may know, Fluid Topics comes with a wide variety of connectors, to ingest the most common content types whether structured or unstructured.

The DITA connector is one of the oldest and most used connectors of the Fluid Topics platform and the makeover was long overdue. We moved it to the new microservice-based connector architecture which provides real advantages:

• The DITA-OT execution is more isolated to improve the security of the entire system,
• It can scale to more instances executing in parallel for faster processing,
• It’s compliant with our monitoring stack to spot any issues faster.

There will be more connectors to come in the second part of the year! Stay tuned!

• New analytics screens

We have introduced three new reports to leverage our customers’ understanding of their portal usage over time:

• Content inventory to accurately visualize how the number of documents, topics and map attachments evolve over time.
• Event traffic to check how users engage with the content, displaying documents, topics, searching results, sending feedback, creating personal books…
• Evolution of user assets over time: how many bookmarks, personal books and personal topics, saved searches, alerts, and collections are stored in the portal? How do users’ assets evolve?

You can read the full Release Note here.

2. We talked ChatGPT and its impact on technical documentation

We couldn’t not talk about it! The world has been concerned with what to expect from Generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT. Especially tech writers! And here is a basic question that may have come to mind: “Do I still need to write technical documentation or can ChatGPT do it for me?”.

Our CEO, Fabrice Lacroix, shared his thoughts on how it could impact technical documentation.

As a next-generation Content Delivery Platform, we’re always exploring new ideas and trends. GenerativeAI is just one of the many exciting developments on the horizon. That’s why this thought leadership piece is supported by state-of the art research and the most recent advances in the field of AI, of which the Fluid Topics R&D team has been an active community member over the last decades.

3. The Ultimate Guide to Content Delivery Platforms was published

This complimentary Guide provides due diligence evaluation advice on how to find the right Content Delivery Platform (CDP) to leverage the power of your product and technical documentation.

A CDP is a game-changing solution for tech doc publishing teams that can prove revolutionary for customer support and field service teams, too. The right CDP can help overcome the challenges that can otherwise swamp tech doc teams, while improving the end user experience for a clear business win.

In this guide, you will discover what a CDP is, how it is different to a Content Management System (CMS) or Component Content Management System, which use cases are best served by a CDP, the must-have features your CDP should have, how a CDP should integrate with your existing IT stack, and read case studies from organizations that have successfully deployed a CDP.

• Download the guide

4. We hosted 4 webinars

We had the pleasure of hosting 4 webinars this past semester, 3 of which featured customers or partners. We explored topics such as customer support and self-service documentation, tech docs and field service or even the future of tech docs.

• Transforming the Customer Service Center with Self-Service Documentation
• Research Findings: How Tech Doc Fails Service Technicians. And How to Fix It
• The Forthcoming of Social and Semantic Technical Documentation
• Delivery-First Approach: The Key to Faster ROI in Content Projects

If you missed any of them, don’t hesitate to watch the replay.

5. We launched the Engineering Corner

We announced another exciting news…for all the Engineers – Developers – Tech lovers out there!

At Fluid Topics, most of our team is composed of developers and engineers so it was only fair that they had their own blog where they could explore their favorite topics.

We launched the Engineering Corner, the one-stop destination for all information regarding technology, devops, conferences, culture and more.

Make sure to visit the blog!

What to Expect in the Coming Months?

• Fluid Topics V4.2 will launch at the end of the summer with incredible features including an enhanced version of our case deflection module.
• We will be attending Nordic Techkomm in Copenhagen, Lavacon in New Orleans, and host several webinars.
• We will deep dive into Generative AI, ChatGPT and what it means for the tech comm community.
• And so much more (we can’t give out all our secrets).

Are you as excited as us? Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.