Vaisala x Fluid Topics Case Study

Vaisala is a global leader in measurement instruments and intelligence for climate action. Vaisala equips its customers with devices and data to improve resource efficiency, drive energy transition, and care for the safety and well-being of people and societies worldwide. With almost 90 years of innovation and expertise, the company employs a team of over 2,300 experts committed to taking every measure for the planet. Vaisala series A shares are listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki stock exchange.

Vaisala offers a large and diversified product portfolio with a high volume of documentation addressing a wide customer base, such as clients, distributors, support teams, sales, and marketing teams. Such volume created a real challenge in trying to provide a relevant and personalized content experience. What started as a challenge for the documentation team turned into company-wide benefits when Vaisala chose Fluid Topics as its Content Delivery Platform for all its products.

We sat down with Katy Greatrex, Commercial Product Information Manager and Titta Majala, Documentation Manager at Vaisala to discuss how the implementation of Fluid Topics changed the game for the content team and beyond.

Scaling the Content Experience

Historically, the company published static PDF documents through various channels, including the Vaisala corporate website, print, and dedicated repositories for partner documentation. The main challenge was the website, which wasn’t designed to handle large volumes of product documentation. As the documentation grew in complexity with more products, versions, and document types, the search experience quickly deteriorated. Vaisala realized that the website couldn’t meet the evolving requirements or provide an optimal user experience.

As the company’s digital presence expanded, managing technical documentation across multiple touchpoints—such as websites and partner folders—became increasingly complex. The team faced a significant amount of duplicate effort each time information needed to be updated across all relevant documents and repositories, all while managing dozen of languages. “Often, if information needed to be updated, content owners had to make changes in multiple places and manually publish it,” said Katy Greatrex. This manual process was time-consuming and increased the risk of outdated documentation.

Searching for product information within lengthy PDFs was also not user-friendly and often led to frustration for users, particularly in support situations.

Given these challenges, Vaisala’s documentation team began evaluating content delivery offerings that could safely and reliably serve the right content to the right users at the right time and improve the product content experience.

In a nutshell

The challenges

A corporate website not optimized for the delivery of high volumes of product documentation in PDF format
Duplicated publishing effort required for all channels
Improve the search experience to answer specific product support questions

The results

A unified documentation portal
Self-service information with reliable access to up-to-date and detailed product information
Ability to deploy the portal in several languages in a snap and without IT support
Reliable link generation for sharing content over long period times and across channels
Decreased printing volumes by utilizing QR codes

Get the PDF

Implementing The Fluid Topics
Content Delivery Platform

The company launched the Vaisala Documentation Portal in 2021, initially for internal use, and made it publicly available in early 2022.

Acting as a central knowledge hub for all Vaisala-related product content—such as user guides, technical notes, datasheets, and more—the Vaisala product documentation portal, is now a place for both internal and external users to find product information.

Publishing

All content—including structured modular content created in RWS’ CCMS Tridion Docs and existing PDFs—is published on Fluid Topics’ Content Delivery Platform. Users can access the content through dedicated channels or directly from the Vaisala documentation portal, which also features streamed videos. “Many of our customers evaluate the product on a technical basis. They now have ungated access to public datasheets, user guides and technical notes and have a good insight of the product experience before purchasing”, said Greatrex.

Metadata Management

Vaisala has developed a strong metadata strategy to improve searchability and accessibility of documents within their organization. With Fluid Topics, the documentation team can easily define which content each user group is authorized to retrieve ensuring the right information reaches the right user while providing a personalized experience. For partners and distributors, some products are now tagged by access groups. They can also put a label on each document for better governance. “The metadata management system in Fluid Topics is designed for simplicity and efficiency, allowing us to configure everything quickly and effortlessly through the Admin UI,” said Titta Majala.

Search

One of the key capabilities that convinced the team to select Fluid Topics is its cutting-edge search engine. Users can create simple or complex searches that filter technical information by product, content type, or keywords to quickly find exactly what they need, tailored to their profile, in just milliseconds. The search engine also features smart autocomplete, spellcheck, search suggestions, and the use of business dictionaries to dynamically refine search results.

The user experience has been noticeably enhanced. “We have seen great improvement in content findability”, noted Katy Greatrex. The company has also integrated pre-built filtered searches into the website through links on the main corporate site.

Finally, users also value the alert feature, which sends email notifications when new or updated content matching their search criteria becomes available.

Interactivity

Beyond support, the knowledge center proves valuable during the sales process. Sales teams can leverage the portal to prepare tender responses. “Our team must create a tender response in a short time frame. With the documentation portal, they are sure to find the most up-to-date content. They can build their own collections of documents or create bookmarks for instant access to their most important documents” highlighted Titta.

Sustainable documentation

Vaisala’s strong commitment to sustainability has driven its documentation team to find ways to cut down on paper-based materials. They have identified several products where printing volumes can be substantially reduced by utilizing QR codes that direct users to content on the documentation portal. For example, while the content needed for regulatory compliance is still printed, the QR code provides access to additional languages and digital-only content, thereby reducing the volume of printed material needed for shipping.

Vaisala anticipates that this initiative will not only yield positive environmental benefits but also reduce printing costs.

“As a no-code cloud-based solution, Fluid Topics is very easy to use and maintain for our team. We can customize the front-end but also business functionalities with full autonomy, and have a low dependency on IT support. »

Katy Greatrex

Offering a Modern, Easily Searchable Knowledge Center

The Fluid Topics implementation was a fairly light project for the IT team and has been a real success. Today, Vaisala has over 2700 publications in the portal, in 20 languages.

“As a no-code cloud-based solution, Fluid Topics is very easy to use and maintain for our team. We can customize the front-end, such as the portal’s look and feel. But we can also customize business functionalities, like the metadata-driven filtering, from the administration console, with full autonomy, and have a low dependency on IT support. This autonomy is one of the main reasons we chose Fluid Topics”, explained Katy Greatrex. In fact, Katy was able to localize the portal’s user interface in 8 languages in about 30 minutes.

In February 2024, Vaisala unveiled its new brand identity. With the help of the Page Designer – Fluid Topics’ portal design tool – the rebranding of over 2,000 HTML publications was completed by a single person in just one day.

The solution has also helped the company streamline its digital publishing processes. The team now avoids duplicate publication efforts and can publish and update content consistently for all users, keeping its documentation live on the user side at any time. Vaisala also benefits from reliable link generation that ensures content is always accurate and can be shared indefinitely across channels.

About Vaisala

Vaisala is a global leader in measurement instruments and intelligence for climate action. With almost 90 years of innovation and expertise, the company employs a team of over 2,300 experts committed to taking every measure for the planet.

www.vaisala.com

What’s Next?

As the company continues to scale, Fluid Topics will be key in helping Vaisala build a rich self-service experience that can handle more content formats, more products, and more users. “We chose Fluid Topics for its capacity to rapidly scale our technical documentation. Our successful test of a mobile app that pulls content from the documentation portal demonstrates that we now have a tool capable of delivering an exceptional content experience across our ecosystem,” added Titta Majala.

As Generative AI technology advances, Vaisala is also exploring how to integrate these new capabilities across various touchpoints, including their documentation portal.

“The metadata management system in Fluid Topics is designed for simplicity and efficiency,
allowing us to configure everything quickly and effortlessly through the Admin UI. »

Titta Majala