Protecting business in the digital age

The digital age opened doors to greater freedom in commerce, communication, and much more, but those open doors also invite some unwelcome risks. Cyberthreats are top of mind for every business in the digital age.

As the global cybersecurity leader, Palo Alto Networks® helps organizations prevent successful cyberattacks and protect our collective way of life in the digital age. The company provides its advanced cybersecurity offerings to more than 50,000 organizations in 150 countries, including 85 of the Fortune 100 and more than 63% of the Global 2000. Along with its excellent products and services, Palo Alto Networks provides technical documentation to help customers successfully deploy its Security Operating Platform.

“One of the reasons that I love working on technical documentation at Palo Alto Networks is because I really believe in our mission of helping prevent successful cyberattacks,” says Laralyn Melvin, Senior Director, Technical Documentation at Palo Alto Networks. “Our technical documentation isn’t just about explaining all of the buttons. We use our technical documentation as an opportunity to show how our products can solve customers’ security problems. That’s why we feel that technical documentation really needs to be at the forefront of our users’ journeys.”

Palo Alto Networks has seen remarkable customer growth, expanding its customer base by more than 250% over the past five years. To meet customer demand for access to more best practices information, Palo Alto Networks decided that it needed to make technical documentation more readily available on the same website as its product and service information. Adobe solutions enabled this shift in content strategy.

Technical writers now create and publish technical documentation quickly through a seamless workflow using Adobe Experience Manager Guides, the full-fledged DITA component content management system (CCMS) from Adobe.

Adding structure to technical documentation

Previously, web content and technical documentation were kept siloed. For web content, Palo Alto Networks relied on the integrated Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Experience Manager Assets allows web content authors to easily create, manage, and publish web content with the help of reusable templates and assets. Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Campaign help Palo Alto Networks understand who its audiences are, what they want, and how to market to them more efficiently.

For technical documentation, technical writers rely on Adobe FrameMaker to construct complex books that can easily reach hundreds or even thousands of pages. Palo Alto Networks strongly believes that subject matter should dictate the content. That’s why technical writers originally produced unstructured FrameMaker documents, taking advantage of the more flexible structure to allow a more innovative and creative flow of information.

When Palo Alto Networks decided to start uploading this information to the web, the company worked with a vendor to create a custom connector tool to convert those unstructured documents into web-friendly PDF and HTML, but the workflow was time-consuming and required frequent troubleshooting. Technical writers spent a significant amount of time trying to troubleshoot issues and publish content, leading to slower content updates.

To help solve this problem, Palo Alto Networks decided to switch to structured DITA content. The company hoped that this additional structure would add consistency without restricting writers’ individuality. The company approached a vendor to create an updated connector tool when it discovered that Adobe already had a solution: Experience Manager Guides.

Rather than continue to develop its own tool, Palo Alto Networks approached Adobe about helping with feedback on the development and testing of the solution. Palo Alto Networks provided test cases, met weekly with the Adobe development team, and set up a server for in-house beta testing.

“We knew that we could rely on Adobe to develop a superior solution,” says Bernadette Javier, Senior Web Experience Manager at Palo Alto Networks. “Adobe is fantastic at pushing the envelope and integrating its products. Adobe also has teams of developers and experts in both Adobe Experience Manager and FrameMaker to develop a truly seamless solution. In the future, Adobe will provide updates and maintenance to the solution, while we can concentrate resources on delivering world-class security solutions and documentation.”

Thousands of pages published quickly

With Adobe Experience Manager Guides, technical writers now have an easy and streamlined workflow for authoring and publishing content. Technical writers take validated DITA content developed in FrameMaker and use Experience Manager Guides to manage content using Experience Manager Assets and then generate and publish content directly to Experience Manager Sites as PDF, HTML, XML, and images. With all content managed through one platform, Palo Alto Networks can better support the needs of all customers, including in the pre-sales and post-sales cycles.

“Having a unified publishing platform through Experience Manager Guides has really helped us with the efficiency of our publishing by allowing us to reuse content, leverage tags, and build dynamic sets of content,” says Melvin.

Unlike the previous publication workflow, which required time and experience to successfully troubleshoot the process, any technical writer can quickly learn to use the Adobe solution to publish content. Writers can even make small updates by uploading specific topics rather than republishing the entire book, leading to much faster time to market for changes.

Using Experience Manager Guides, Palo Alto Networks delivered 26 books of technical documentation — nearly 7,000 pages of content covering 6,000 topics — in a quarter of the time compared to the old workflow. With fast publishing workflows, technical writers can better stay on top of last-minute changes, listen to customer feedback, and update content quickly to support a growing number of customers and industries.

“The biggest benefits from Experience Manager Guides are flexibility and peace of mind,” says Matangi Vaidyanathan, Senior Manager, Technical Writing at Palo Alto Networks. “We’ve reduced the number of man-hours needed for troubleshooting. Writers can concentrate on creating dynamic content without getting dragged down by technical details. We’re able to create more content and deliver it in a more efficient way for a larger experience base, thus improving the customer experience.”

The Palo Alto Networks writers focus on writing in a friendly, conversational voice. Couple this with the rich metadata available in DITA XML and the result is a documentation set that is highly searchable, which makes it much easier for customers to find what they are looking for and improves search engine optimization (SEO). This has enabled Palo Alto Networks to break its monthly technical documentation site traffic record, with over 1 million visitors, including over 200,000 unique visitors.

Experience Manager Guides is also helping Palo Alto Networks rethink how it leverages its wealth of technical documentation in the digital age. By streamlining workflows and consolidating content management systems, the solution makes it easier to deliver translations for global websites. Palo Alto Networks is also considering how it can develop more reusable content from its technical documentation to deliver relevant topics dynamically depending on a user’s products and configuration.

“Moving to Experience Manager Guides has helped us build a solution where technical documentation is a more central part of the website and a bigger part of the customer journey,” says Melvin. “Authors are writing in a familiar environment — FrameMaker — but then uploading to Experience Manager where our content fits in with the rest of our marketing content. Working with the Adobe solution allows us to keep pace with the industry and provide dynamic information for our users globally.”

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