Suppose you are the administrator of a customer service support solution. Now, you have an expert team but all their efforts are being thwarted due to the lack of comprehensive enterprise software. It's definitely not an easy task, but you first need to get clarity on what your goals are to provide superior content experiences to your teams and clients.
What do you need help with? Designing? Publishing? Maintaining your documentation?
Shed all your worries and introduce HAT to your team members! Use a HAT and get ready to fine-tune your content with powerful features that improve collaboration between teams and create the most effective technological documents. It also simplifies technical content in such a way that most teams prefer them over tools like MS Word documents or simple HTML.
With the help of Help Authoring Tools, companies can effortlessly produce and maintain documentation with detailed description and that too, for diverse platforms such as PDFs, eBooks, mobile, web, printed documents, etc. It helps in eliminating the use of platforms like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
This article takes you on a quick journey of what a HAT (Help Authoring Tool) is all about and how Docsie has started sounding synonymous with being a HAT.
What is a HAT (Help Authoring Tool)?
The Help Authoring Tools are the permanent companions for technical writers. This software program helps authors design, write, edit and publish their documentation digitally. Authors can also accumulate the software help documentation and convert them into a single source database using it in various formats, including PDFs, HTML, XML, etc. They are much more than simple word processors as they sometimes also have a built-in image tool that can save hours. It's indeed a life saver for small businesses.
Some of the most popular HATs are Docsie, MadCap Flare, Adobe RoboHelp, Author-it, Doc-To-Help, and HelpNDoc, among others.
Five Key features of HAT To Produce High-Quality Documentation:
1. Finding errors:
In the case of HATs, code editing and text editing are the principal features. HATs eliminate errors and break down the complex writing process into simple steps. They offer grammar suggestions and create templates which companies can work on to create customised content. Most HATs also provide step-by-step instructions so that teams can learn and get familiar with them to create great products.
By developing automated language style guides with the help of HATs, companies can develop their brand language. When it comes to code editing, front-end web developers often use such tools. HATs also help brands in maintaining their documentation tone, format and appearance intact.
2. Content Management (End-to-End):
A lot of the Help Authoring Tools available in the industry today share a set of similarities with content management systems (CMS). Shadowing the main function of CMS tools and platforms, HATs assist technical writers in managing their content projects, storing and tracking their progression.
The point where a HAT differs from a CMS is that a HAT has every content project linked to a particular set of files, helps, manuals and software explanation guides. While using a HAT, you can prevent data loss and also restore the last saved version of your documents. This is a super benefit of a HAT that lets you access valuable information even after facing an unpredictable technical glitch. Moreover, they provide single sign-on support to ensure things run smoothly.
Most of the HAT platforms provide topic-based authoring, wherein you can break down the documentation into smaller, byte-sized pieces that can be easily grasped by your clients.
3. File Transactions:
When you use HATs, you can easily import and export your files, ensuring seamless file transactions between multiple platforms. The good part is that you do not need to do convert each of your file manually. Through HATs, you can effortlessly work on the same file content and create multiple formats of the same document.
Once you have multiple formats, what happens to your original document? Fear not, for the automatic conversion feature of the HATs lets you preserve the original documentation, keeping the structure and format intact. This decreases the possibility of errors, reducing time and effort. This feature becomes even more significant when content authors need to share their project files with other contributors.
4. Improve Content:
When it comes to content creation, nothing can beat the importance of brainstorming to churn out fresh ideas. Software solutions such as HATs streamline communication between teams, making remote working easier and ensuring constant collaboration between team members. There are other remarkable features like real-time editing, commenting and version control. Through these features, you can reduce miscommunication amongst your team members, increase productivity and reduce time and effort considerably.
HATs are great tools that keep team members well-knitted in a close group. One of the noteworthy features of HATs includes track changes. This lets users switch between various versions of the same document, creating comprehensive and well-documented content irrespective of what topic you're working on.
Moreover, you can use elements like videos, animations, and interactive simulations to improve the learning experience for you teams or customers by using HAT tools.
5. Publishing and Maintenance:
Updating and maintaining documentation regularly is a tiring process. To ease things for its users, a HAT lets writers make changes to the preliminary source file following which updates are made to all the file formats. This ensures that all users remain up to date regarding the changes that are made and can access the final version of the file without any hassle.
In the case of publishing, HATs often provide templates so that technical authors can work on the already existing base-level formatting. The templates also suggest various kinds of visual layouts, making it easier for technical writers to pull videos, motion graphics, videos, etc. from other sources.
Why Use Docsie as Help Authoring Tool (HAT) to Produce High-Quality Documentation?
With technology and innovation at its core, Docsie is one of the leading software companies, offering Help Authoring Tools (HAT) that creates new ways for teams to collaborate, create and implement product documentation. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Docsie, one of the most popular authoring tool, is a self-writing documentation service that allows companies to write, translate and improve their documentation via simple user interfaces.
Five Effective Ways on How Docsie Help Your Business?
1. Quick Deploy and Custom Knowledge Portal:
While the internal knowledge portal of the platform helps companies to share self-service knowledge with their entire teams, the external customer knowledge bases help and user guides in documentation sharing among teams and minimizing customer support workloads. The knowledge management and technical documentation are easy to understand and are packed with help topics for better understanding of the portal. It has all the HAT tools that one needs to power their content processes and create better products for their customers.
With the Docsie portal, you can use default designs or implement a custom knowledge base design as per your brand personality, style, and image. The software product also provides a free custom domain as a part of its free plan. It also offers additional domains which users can avail of by subscribing to the paid plans as well as provides online help for all your queries. But that's not all as it provides advanced features such as auto-translate, UI Customization, publishing options, powerful editing options, documentation analytics, interactive knowledge portalsand much more. It also has support for different languages, making it the top choice for companies with diverse teams.
Long story short, Docsie is a powerful tool that can provide effective help with all things documentation. The portal can be easily accessed on different devices such as a desktop tool via your web browser, even on mobile devices without the need of any mobile app. It has one of the most prefered customer relationship management and provides the best help to all its clients so that they can achieve goals without any hiccups to serve end users.
Free Onboarding, Importing, and Portal Design:
The key elements of customer onboarding documentation are clear instructions, online user manuals, troubleshooting guides, product tours, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). With Docsie Pilot, companies can ensure free onboarding. After going throught the effective help documentation, Users can import their content from multiple platforms and reap the most value from their created content.
Are you worried about How to train your employees to maximize their productivity? Use Docsie's optional training session so that your staff can work with the software and make the most of the software solution. Its knowledge base content helps teams get the hang of how things work in a snap.
Enterprise-grade Documentation:
Included with all paid plans, Docsie provides migration support with Docsie Pilot. From importing existing content, entire knowledge portals, knowledge bases, and many more, to designing custom portals and training staff - Docsie provides a complete toolbox that helps enterprises grow their functionality. The platform also packs a dynamic content support.
With simplified documentation workflows, Docsie helps you enhance the effectiveness of all your documentation. Apart from the free custom domain, the platform also provides 3x custom domains for small teams and 10+ custom domains for businesses and organizations.
Custom Domain with SSL:
Docsie lets all its users own a custom domain with absolutely no additional cost. Every company with a plan for the platform can own a customized domain where it can host a knowledge site.
By offering its free Startup plan, Docsie encourages all small and medium-sized enterprises to get a custom domain name and use that to increase its visibility and improve its brand image.
Version and Language Management:
Nowadays, many companies are using AI language translation. All thanks to the massive transformation that AI has witnessed in the last couple of years. If your company also works with a lot of content and struggles with copy-pasting and duplicating issues, choose Docsie as your professional partner. Integrate languages and versions and consolidate them with Docsie, translating them into one particular URL. What's the benefit? You will no longer need to bang your head on the wall regarding being on top in SEO ranking.
Final Thoughts
So, that was a sneak peek into the world of HAT. What's next? Select a reliable and efficient Help Authoring Tool. Make sure that it understands your business requirements, your company objectives and provides all the features of an effective HAT within your budget. Before finalising any HAT, ensure that it offers comprehensive customer support along with undoubtedly efficiency and scalability.
Choose Docsie as your professional partner and witness your business achieving new heights of excellence. Providing a unified documentation experience to its global clients, Docsie provides the solutions to all your documentation needs under the same roof with support teams working round the clock to ensure your success.
Frequently Asked Questions on (HAT)
Question 1: What is a Help Authoring Tool (HAT)?
Ans: A HAT is a software that helps technical writers in creating, editing, and publishing documentation for various platforms such as PDFs, HTML, and XML. Question 2: How does HAT improve Content Management?
Ans: HAT provides content management solutions similar to CMS (content management systems) platforms, but with a keen focus on documentation. The platforms helps you manage content projects, tracks progress of work, and also prevents data loss.
Question 3: What are some of the popular HATs?
Ans: Docsie, MadCap Flare, Adobe RoboHelp, Author-it, Doc-To-Help, and HelpNDoc, among others, are some of the most popular HAT tools.
Question 4: How does Docsie help as a HAT?
Ans: Docsie helps companies provide their teams with features like collaboration, content creation and documentation implementation.
Question 5: How HAT enhances collaboration between teams?
Ans: HATs improve collaboration between teams by offering real-time editing, commenting facility, and version control features.