Tools Merge, Teams Unite: Emplifi's Enablement Journey with Confluence and the Scroll Apps
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Tools Merge, Teams Unite: Emplifi's Enablement Journey with Confluence and the Scroll Apps
Emplifi helps thousands of companies manage their social media presence – from creating meaningful conversations with their audiences, to providing customer care and powerful analytics. Their social marketing and customer engagement platform is used by thousands of well-known brands like Delta, Mercedes-Benz, and Domino’s to keep their brands and customers connected.
While Emplifi’s solutions are busy keeping audiences connected and engaged, the Empilfi team relies on Confluence and K15t’s Scroll Apps to connect teams internally and to create and deliver the information their users need to be successful. For Emplifi this means clean, accurate, and up-to-date documentation.
Unifying Documentation and Information Post Acquisition
Emplifi underwent massive organizational change when they acquired four different product companies to integrate into a single platform. Merging so many different teams and tools meant that Kristian Klima, Emplifi’s Senior Technical Writer and Content Strategist, had his work cut out for him.
Merging four companies was no easy task. Each team brought along their own diverse set of information processes and five different content management and documentation tools that included Atlassian Confluence. Kristian knew right away that they would need to settle on a single solution to help unify the enablement experience for their customers.
Emplifi also needed to find ways to keep maintenance costs and overhead as low as possible. Deciding on a tool for Emplifi’s single source of truth would help do just that.
Confluence Emerges as Emplifi’s Tech Doc Tool of Choice
While navigating a labyrinth of choices, Kristian steered the team towards Confluence. The scalability, modular nature, and seamless integration with Jira made it a great choice to support their documentation strategy.
Atlassian’s diverse app ecosystem also gave Kristian confidence that there would always be ways to extend the tools to meet the needs of a diverse set of teams.
"For pretty much anything one might need, there's an app in the Atlassian Marketplace."
– Kristian Klima, Senior Technical Writer at Emplifi
For example, the team went on the hunt for an app that could easily share the Confluence documentation online with their customers. Enter Scroll Viewport for Confluence—a powerful publishing solution from the Scroll Apps suite. Scroll Viewport enables Emplifi to create a distinct online help center and documentation site while still being able to maintain their underlying Confluence structure. Check it out:
Tailoring Experiences with the Scroll Apps for Confluence
Emplifi embraced a number of Scroll Apps for Confluence, namely Scroll Viewport, Scroll Documents, and Variants for Scroll Documents.
Scroll Viewport: Enables Emplifi to deliver a consistent and polished look across multiple sites. They’re able to customize domains, implement authenticated access, and integrate powerful features that enhance Emplifi's documentation experience for both internal teams and external users.
Scroll Documents: Emplifi creates documentation collaboratively in Confluence, which means they need a setup that can support various contributors that include writers, managers, and technical roles. To help manage this complexity, Scroll Documents provides clear content structuring and advanced authoring features that ensure consistency in the documentation process and coherence with company-wide standards – regardless of who is writing or contributing to the docs.
Variants for Scroll Documents: Some of Emplifi’s documentation is used solely for services and support, yet still needs to be connected to and linked with other Confluence content. Variants for Scroll Documents helps everyone easily distinguish between the publicly available content and internal documentation without duplicating content or introducing more complexity. With the app, Emplifi can maintain documentation in the same Confluence space and simply use the conditional content features to tag which pages or sections of a page are for internal use only.
From seamlessly handling migrations from other tools to maintaining different styles for internal and external content, the Scroll Apps offer the flexibility Emplifi requires.
Simple Workflows for Controlled Content Publishing
In tandem with the Scroll Apps, Emplifi also relies on Comala Document Approval to maintain control over their publishing process. There are up to 15 different development teams working along multiple swim lanes, so Kristian and his team need an easy way to determine what should be published and what is still in progress.
To do so, Emplifi maintains a space for authoring documentation and another space for publishing. When content is ready, Comala Publishing syncs it to the target space that has Scroll Viewport enabled. Thanks to Comala Publishing, all the versions, variants, and other metadata are maintained which helps the team keep the content structured across all spaces.
This workflow is simple enough to maintain, while also providing basic control and an added layer of security to ensure there are checks in place before content is published to either internal or external audiences.
The Scroll Apps Advantage: Emplifi’s Favorite Features
Flexibility and Customization: Emplifi appreciates the flexibility offered by Scroll Apps. They can tailor the documentation experience for the users but also maintain the structure and processes for their authors. This customization extends to different domains, authenticated access, and diverse styles for internal and external content, allowing them to meet the various needs of their users and teams.
Unified Knowledge Across the Organization: Emplifi’s team has their documentation stored, displayed, accessible, and manageable all at the same time, using the same tool for everything: Confluence. Being able to point to a single source of truth is a huge benefit, especially amidst the challenge of merging multiple teams.
A Highly Cost-Effective Solution: Compared to the per-seat pricing of other tools, Confluence and the Scroll Apps win out easily on cost. Not only is the sticker price more attractive, but the ease of use and low-effort maintenance saves Emplifi both the headache and the resources of maintaining more complex alternatives.
Scroll Viewport for Unified Styling: Scroll Viewport enables Emplifi to provide a consistent and polished look across multiple sites. Having a unified styling and user experience is crucial in presenting diverse content and enablement across various Emplifi products.
Scroll Documents for Managing Complexity: Emplifi’s documentation process may seem complex – DocOps, conditional content, multiple sites, etc. – but Scroll Documents and other apps make it all very easy to manage. Kristian and his team don’t have fight the tools to make the process work.
Seamless Integration with Confluence and Jira: The integration with Confluence and Jira is a standout feature for Emplifi. Leveraging Confluence's native capabilities alongside the Scroll Apps suite allows them to build on their existing infrastructure without the need for complex integrations or third-party connectors. The biggest benefit? The whole team is already using it!
The DocOps team owns and manages their Confluence tooling themselves: This reduces the overall maintenance burden for the IT department.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Documentation at Emplifi
As Emplifi enjoys the stability they’ve achieved through Confluence and the Scroll Apps suite, they set their sights on future enhancements both to the documentation site and workflow. The Scroll Apps are constantly releasing new features, a few of which haven’t yet been incorporated into the team’s process:
Design tokens: Scroll Viewport offers a design token system to create new theme styles that better align with your brand. As this feature was released only after the Emplifi site went live, the team plans to invest time in migrating to the new system to more easily maintain and customize their theme.
Embedded help: Emplifi wants to explore new ways to surface the documentation directly in the product to better enable users.
Improving information flow for teams like HR, Marketing, IT, Legal, and more: In order to get everyone up to speed and fight the learning curve that comes with new teams and processes, Emplifi is looking into new ways to share information across these key internal business teams. Solutions here are in an early state, but the team is keen to find ways that the Scroll Apps can support this.
Emplifi will also continue to refine and improve their internal documentation processes to ensure the tools work great for every team. Their story is an example of how great documentation can help conquer the complexity of a merger, unify diverse information processes, and create a seamless experience for their users across a whole platform of products. We’re excited to see what Emplifi does next.
