With 2021 quickly coming to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on what we accomplished over the course of the year. In this retrospect, let’s take a look at the highlights that marked the year 2021!
Product & Features
Keeping our customers happy and engaged with our product is what drives all our business and product decisions.
If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll probably know that at Fluid Topics we release new features and bugfixes every week. Additionally, we have two major releases per year. As a result, we have respectively released our 3.9 and 3.10 versions in January and August.
Let’s dive into some of the releases’ main features.
Connectors
As your know, your technical content and product information are often created and stored in a variety of applications beyond the common authoring tools which makes both the publishing and reading experiences a challenge. Therefore, providing seamless integrations with your favorite sources, was high on our list of priorities.
Firstly, we open-sourced our Markdown connector to allow customers to use it in their continuous integration pipelines and publish such content in-sync with all other technical or product documentation. Secondly, we released a new connector to easily ingest content published directly from Madcap Flare. At the click of a button, in the Flare Editor, technical writers can send content to either their Fluid Topics portal or any other digital channels.
Finally, we released our Microsoft Word connector allowing you to upload Word documents to Fluid Topics. This unstructured content is then automatically restructured in order to provide a unified content experience across the board.
Topic and Document Rating
Rating your documentation is now possible at the topic and document level, for both structured and unstructured content. On top of that, users can communicate directly with technical writers to provide feedback, suggestions, and advice.
Analytics
Beyond page views and document downloads, dedicated Content Analytics provide the metrics that matter for your technical documentation. For that reason, we’ve enriched this feature by adding:
- A data visualization dashboard to help you analyze which documents are the most popular from a metadata point of view
- A report highlighting the most/least and best/worst rated topics
- A new dashboard to understand which APIs are the most used among your developers
- A unified data picker on all screens to give users the opportunity to select a single value from a pre-determined set or to choose a date in the calendar and study how content is consumed over that period of time
Offline Mode
Our offline mode already enabled you to make your technical content available under any circumstances, whether you were experiencing a degraded internet connection or for security reasons. In January, we’ve improved the search experience by letting users search within structured and unstructured documents in offline mode. It features result clustering, stemming and facets to help you filter results.
In the same vein, in August, we’ve enriched this feature by offering the possibility for users to automatically sync their offline collections with the latest available content.
Industry
As a fast-growing SaaS company specialized in intelligent content publishing, 2021 represented a thrilling year in our industry and 2022 already promises to be even more exciting.
We’ve witnessed our technology platform become an essential digital tool to guide the Field Service industry. As a result, earlier this year, we published a series of articles on how the Field Service industry can benefit from a content delivery platform, focusing on 3 main themes.
Security
- Improving User Safety with Tech Doc
- Preventing Work Accidents Through Technical Documentation Adoption
Mobility
- Technical Content for Field Services: Take your Doc Out!
- Truly Mobile Field Technicians
Enablement
- Technical Documentation: The Silver Bullet for Technician Enablement
- Field Technicians: How to Bridge the Skills Gap
If you’d like to read these articles, make sure to visit the dedicated pages on our blog.
We are very proud to see how much traction we gained in just a year. The growing use and interest in our solution for customer service, field services and technical documentation publishing, lead us to prepare for new opportunities of growth & business development.
Webinars & Events
2021 wasn’t just about launching new features; it was about meeting all of you, too…virtually! With the pandemic not over yet, we, once again, turned to webinars and virtual events.
Webinars
Missed our webinars? No worries, we’ve got you covered! Here are our top 5 picks of the year for you to watch or learn from:
- Delivering Technical Content at the Speed of SaaS, hosted by The Content Wrangler and featuring Lonnye Yancey-Smith, executive manager for user assistance at Hexagon
- Technical Documentation and Continuous Integration: Wielding the Markdown Secret Weapon
- Web vs. Content Analytics: Measuring the Metrics That Matter for Product Content, hosted by Scott Abel from The Content Wrangler
- Delivering a Personalized Search Experience
- The Fast Lane to Content ROI: Delivery First, Structure Second, hosted by the Data Conversion Laboratory as part of their Learning Series.
Virtual Events
We took part in 3 virtual events this year:
At Convex 2021, Fabrice Lacroix, our CEO, alongside Kirstin Maurer from Teradata talked about “Owning Your Company’s Most Visited Website: Rabbit holes and joyrides” or how switching from a vast repository of PDF downloads to web-based dynamic delivery brings big changes…and some rabbit holes!
The Lavacon Conference took place in October. In her session “Moving the Content Conversation from Cost to Value” Geraldine Boulez, our VP Marketing, gave a clear picture of the cost savings and gains a content delivery platform can generate for customer service, employee productivity, and sales. If you didn’t attend Lavacon, make sure to check our 4 takeaways from this year’s conference.
Lastly, we sponsored the Tekom/tcworld conference. Dubbed “most popular session”, our keynote “Tech Doc Will Go Social and Semantic, as the Web did” explored the principles that transformed the Web from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 and how these concepts can be applied to technical documentation. Make sure to catch our recap on our blog.
Conferences
Some of our favorite moments from 2021 came from speaking or attending different events whether remotely or in-person.
As attendees
Our UX Designers attended UX Days, a French conference dedicated to…you guessed it…user experience! Guest speakers included Peter Merholz, co-writer of the book “Org Design for Design Orgs” and Tariq Krim founder of the Slow Web Initiative.
Our software testers attended ParisTestConf, an online event dedicated to testing and quality assurance. Topics included “Build and grow a QA team from scratch”, “Examining the Link Between Quality & Customer Experience” or “Team collaboration with Test-First Approach”.
Our team also took part in flagship events like A4Q World Congress, DevOps D-Day in Marseille and Agile Grenoble.
As speakers (and we’ve got the replays for you!)
In June, we were thrilled to listen to our very own Aude Lemar-Verrier, Product Owner and Safiétou Thior, Project Manager at the Agile Lyon conference. They explored the history of Women in Tech through an interactive quiz.
Questions included:
- Who’s Katherine Johnson?
- Who was the world’s first programmer?
- Why did women stop coding in the early 80s?
- What is the percentage of female student in computer science in Malaysia?
If you missed the conference, you can watch the replay (in French) right here and take the quiz!
In October, Olivier Thélu, Software Engineering gave a talk at Devoxx Paris on implementing a Zero-Bug Software Policy at Fluid Topics. Devoxx France is one of the most important events for developers in France. You can watch his session (in French also) on our website.
For a lot of our engineering and product teams, getting the chance to meet with their peers, hear about their experience, both good and bad, was exciting and educational.
Company News
This year, we are very proud to see our company grow so much in so little time. Our team has increased by 17%.
New collaborators will join Fluid Topics in the first quarter of 2022 and we are still recruiting in various fields such as engineering, software testing and professional services among others. You can find all our offers on our dedicated career page.
The people who make up Fluid Topics are our most valued asset and it’s truly what defines and drives our company.
That’s a Wrap!
On December 16th and 17th, right before the holidays, we’ll be hosting our annual Ship-it Days. During 24 hours, our team will drop their daily routine and work on anything related to our product and deliver it during that time. It promises to be exciting!
We look forward to starting up again in 2022 with renewed vigor and more ways for you to benefit from our Content Delivery Platform.
Until then, we hope you take some time off to relax and recharge. Have a Happy Holidays, from all of us at Fluid Topics!
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