I'm excited that today my team, Documentation, is beginning our concerted blogging effort. It's not that we like to talk about the stuff we're working on (well, it's not just that). We're excited to have another avenue to hook our users up with resources to make the best use of our email software, text messaging tools, Twitter marketing, and all the other online and social marketing tools that ExactTarget has to offer.
If it also helps prospective users in their product research, all the better, which gets to an important aspect of our documentation -- its open availability -- but I'll come back to that. First, let me tell you a little about our team and what we produce.
Documentation is a small team: just three writers, one automation engineer, and me. Our primary offering is the Documentation Wiki, where we publish reference information (What Is, Why Use, and How to) for all of our product features, including the application interface, the integrations with other products, and our APIs.
The wiki grows so fast that I don't even know exactly how many topics are in it, but I know it numbers in the thousands. Each topic is updated at least every six months, though with as fast as product development happens around here, most are updated a lot more often than that. New content is published every Tuesday, on the Friday of a release, and as needed if something urgent comes up.
Each page of the wiki contains a feedback form at the bottom where you can send in your suggestions for the documentation. With so few people working on such a large body of work, it's never "done" -- it is constantly evolving.
We love to hear back from readers. It's not that it validates our work by proving someone is reading it (well, not just that). Feedback helps us to know what's most important to our readers so we can spend our time on the projects that are most useful to you.
A few improvements that have been introduced thanks to reader suggestions are:
ExactTarget customers can access the documentation wiki by clicking the Help button in the upper right hand corner of your ExactTarget account, or by searching the University in 3sixty. Everyone, including prospective customers, can also access the documentation (see, I didn't forget :) ) by pointing their browser to wiki.memberlandingpages.com.
It's not that we're so confident in our product that we don't mind telling the world all about it (well, not just that). Having our documentation openly available is a documentation best practice. It opens up the opportunity for feedback conversations, and it helps to hook you up with the resources to make the best use of our tools, which, as you may recall from the first paragraph, is the whole point.
If it also helps prospective users in their product research, all the better, which gets to an important aspect of our documentation -- its open availability -- but I'll come back to that. First, let me tell you a little about our team and what we produce.
Documentation is a small team: just three writers, one automation engineer, and me. Our primary offering is the Documentation Wiki, where we publish reference information (What Is, Why Use, and How to) for all of our product features, including the application interface, the integrations with other products, and our APIs.The wiki grows so fast that I don't even know exactly how many topics are in it, but I know it numbers in the thousands. Each topic is updated at least every six months, though with as fast as product development happens around here, most are updated a lot more often than that. New content is published every Tuesday, on the Friday of a release, and as needed if something urgent comes up.
Each page of the wiki contains a feedback form at the bottom where you can send in your suggestions for the documentation. With so few people working on such a large body of work, it's never "done" -- it is constantly evolving.
We love to hear back from readers. It's not that it validates our work by proving someone is reading it (well, not just that). Feedback helps us to know what's most important to our readers so we can spend our time on the projects that are most useful to you.
A few improvements that have been introduced thanks to reader suggestions are:
- Linking to 3sixty tutorials from the documentation of the same topics, so you can see from the topic in wiki when a tutorial is available
- Adding best practices for various features in the product
- Specific use cases for API code samples
ExactTarget customers can access the documentation wiki by clicking the Help button in the upper right hand corner of your ExactTarget account, or by searching the University in 3sixty. Everyone, including prospective customers, can also access the documentation (see, I didn't forget :) ) by pointing their browser to wiki.memberlandingpages.com.It's not that we're so confident in our product that we don't mind telling the world all about it (well, not just that). Having our documentation openly available is a documentation best practice. It opens up the opportunity for feedback conversations, and it helps to hook you up with the resources to make the best use of our tools, which, as you may recall from the first paragraph, is the whole point.
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