Building our own applications: Nextworld’s journey to Content 4.0

Denver/Boulder Write the Docs welcomes Carrie Sheaffer for a live and in-person event. Don't miss the first known post-pandemic, in-person WTD talk in Denver!

Arrive and socialize starting at 6:00. The talk starts at 6:30. We'll have light snacks.

We wrote our own content applications: Why we did it and how we're leveraging content 4.0

It’s one of the perpetual challenges of technical content: how do you keep content up to date, when field names and UI elements change rapidly? At Nextworld, this problem is compounded by a platform and applications designed from the ground up to be highly customizable. How could we effectively (and efficiently) create content when what a customer sees in their environment is unpredictable? We solved this dilemma by fully integrating our documentation in the platform. Our content is aware of the environment and responds to changes. A few of the things we have been able to achieve through this approach:

• Field names that automatically update in the documentation when the UI changes.
• Automatically generated reference tables that include all field-level help for every application—out of the box.
• Process flow diagrams that dynamically update when the process definition changes.

No existing content management or authoring solution met our needs—so we built our own. In this session attendees will learn:

• The biggest challenges we’ve faced when designing our own applications.
• Strategies for carving out development resources.
• A look behind the scenes at our content applications.
• An overview of the benefits we’ve reaped from this approach.

Getting there

Nextworld office building

8200 E Maplewood Ave, Greenwood Village, CO 80111

https://goo.gl/maps/Zhzb7Z8SFHURAb838

Entrance is where the star is in the parking lot photo below.

Please park in the lot in front of the entrance (green box in the photo below).

Late visitors, please post a message on Meetup or post to the #denver Write the Docs Slack channel.