How GlobalVision Shares Knowledge Using Confluence and Scroll Viewport
Timely documentation of information and knowledge sharing is more crucial today than ever. Physical boundaries have started to blur as companies start to adopt a remote or hybrid workplace model. In the context of asynchronous work, documentation swiftly goes from being a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’ to ensure efficient team collaboration.
The team at GlobalVision has always believed in the power of good documentation. As a completely remote company with teams spread across the globe, team members often need to collaborate across time zones. The smooth running of projects depends on clear documentation from start to finish and their chosen platform to enable this cross-functional collaboration is Atlassian Confluence.
When GlobalVision decided to redo their customer-facing help center, they knew the ideal starting point would be finding a tool that seamlessly integrated with Confluence. A lot of the team’s knowledge already existed in the multiple spaces and pages they had built over time. So, the question was – could they create this new help center without duplicating effort and creating that content all over again?
They found what they were looking for when they discovered Scroll Viewport for Confluence.
About GlobalVision
Founded in 1990, GlobalVision is a world leader in digital proofreading software and supports over 3,000+ customers around the globe. They are pioneers in the field of inspection technology and built the first inspection systems of their kind. Over the last few decades, GlobalVision has expanded its product suite to offer solutions that span the entire quality process.
A Culture of Documentation and Knowledge Sharing
As a remote company that believes in the value of being 'documentation-first', every project at GlobalVision – no matter how big or small – starts with a document, and each document finds a home in the many pages and spaces of their internal wiki built on Confluence. This was the starting point for Shruti Mukherjee, Manager, Quality & Information Security Governance at GlobalVision, when she shouldered the responsibility of redoing their customer-facing help center.
Shruti knew, right from the start, that the ideal tool would be one that could be built on top of the knowledge that already existed in their internal wiki. Her goal here was to reduce redundancy when creating or maintaining the documentation. She says, “We’ve used Confluence as our internal wiki since the beginning because it helps teams collaborate effectively across projects. Whether it’s a new project or a quarterly planning document – teams ensure that all of it is captured right from the start. It was important that our new help center solution would be one that augmented these benefits that we derive from Confluence. We found that with Scroll Viewport for Confluence."
The first site they built using Scroll Viewport was the simple help center with detailed product documentation for all their products – everything from basic guides and tutorials to FAQs and release notes for their product variants.
The seamless integration between Scroll Viewport and Confluence was valuable to the team because it helped them accomplish many things they were looking for in a help center.
It enabled them to:
Easily edit new and existing articles in Confluence, and saved the team plenty of time.
Extensively use many existing Confluence macros and formatting.
Leverage a pre-set theme that delivered great-looking content without too much additional effort.
A Layered Help Center Experience For Every Type of User
Before Scroll Viewport, GlobalVision had noticed that their help center wasn’t getting much traffic. Both the customers and the team could really feel a difference after the launch.
Implementation was a breeze since a lot of their content was already in Confluence. The theme and styling options available in the editor ensured that the help center looked aesthetically pleasing and was cohesive with their overall online presence, and the structure and layout made it engaging and easy to navigate for customers.
Since every team at the company – from product to sales and customer success – is impacted by the help center in some way, it was easy for other teams to see the benefit of building a site using Scroll Viewport for Confluence. Additionally, the open and transparent culture at GlobalVision also ensures that everyone in the company is aware of tools and technologies being used across different teams.
As a result, when the need arose for a second help center with additional privacy, the go-to choice was Scroll Viewport. The additional privacy layer offered by the tool enabled the team to create a secure admin site with content that could be hidden behind a login and wasn’t publicly available on the internet. “While the privacy feature wasn’t available on Scroll Viewport when we signed up initially, we were told that it was a part of the roadmap and would be coming soon. When the time came to create our private admin site, we were glad to see that the feature had already been implemented. It didn’t take us much time to choose Scroll Viewport again,” says Shruti.
Ease and Simplicity Inspires Other Teams in the Company
There was a time when joining a new company meant being greeted by your HR manager on the first day of work, followed by a laundry list of onboarding activities. A lot of this has changed in recent years, with companies realizing the value in sharing the mission, vision, and values upfront instead of making it a one-time activity at the start of a new job.
Like other remote companies that understand the advantages and challenges of having a distributed team, the team at GlobalVision relied on a series of detailed documents to welcome new employees and familiarize them with the company.
But after discovering Scroll Viewport, the HR team realized – why not create an online destination where we could share the essence of working at GlobalVision? Why limit it just to our employees, when we can share this with everyone?
This led to their next site built on Scroll Viewport for Confluence – their online employee handbook. The site is a one-stop destination for prospects, new employees, and anyone looking for information about the what, why and how they work at GlobalVision.
The Possibilities with Confluence and Scroll Viewport are Endless
The GlobalVision team plans to do a lot more with Scroll Viewport. A partner portal with helpful information for partners and resellers, and other internal and external documentation sites are in the works and will be released soon.
What started as a search for a platform to create a simple, beautiful help center led the team at GlobalVision to find a tool that could help them create multiple online destinations to suit a variety of needs. But the real essence of this story lies in understanding the power of transparency and openness between teams, the importance of knowledge sharing, and the documentation of that collective knowledge.
Whether you’re creating product documentation or building a knowledge base, designing customer-facing help centers or improving internal communication, the most important thing to remember is that it’s never going to be a one-time activity. Modifying and updating these resources needs to be just as simple and fuss-free as their initial creation so that they can continuously support the audience they were meant to serve.