Integrating output with Zendesk

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi everyone. Long time no speak!

I've got a general query that I'm hoping some bright person can provide an insight with.

We are looking to move from our current knowledge base and user community provider. They are on the same platform. The great and the good here started thinking that having the user community and knowledge base on the same platform was the way to go. I've managed to convince them that this may not be the best way to go. The primary reasons for this is that all of the tools I've seen don't have anywhere near the same capabilities as RoboHelp.

Now here's the thing. The community will still exist somewhere, and we want the community users to be able to search for the knowledge base content. Not only that, but support desk staff want knowledge base content to be "publicized" in the community according to the case being raised. They are looking at Zendesk, but I quickly poured scorn on their knowledge base's editor!

So my question is, does anyone have any idea whether it would be possible to take RoboHelp output and feed it into ZenDesk or some other similar tool. This would not be a one-off exercise. It would have to be similar to the FrameMaker to RoboHelp publishing process, as we'd be publishing almost daily. I'm 99% it can't be done out of the box, but maybe there's another way.

Over to you...

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Never heard of it being done in RH-land & a quick google on ZD being able to bulk import content doesn't turn up much from their end either.

[Captiv8r]

I've been pondering something similar to this for a couple of weeks now. Because of a different thread asking a similar question. That one had to do with wiki stuff.

Just tossing this idea out to spur discussion.

What are the benefits of RoboHelp? Nice organized Table of Contents. Easy output to a Responsive site. Things are easy to find with the search and whatnot, right?

The drawbacks, of course, are that end users cannot easily modify the information. And in that train of thought, it becomes problemsome for users to do that anyway, right? I mean, if docs say X=Y and a user mistakenly believes that X=Z and updates the docs accordingly, suddenly we are dealing with misinformation, no?

So I was playing "what if" and pondered the following. What if one created a RoboHelp "shell" project? My thought was that one could create topics for general areas of interest. And in the topics, insert inline frames that present individual wiki pages. So end users could use RoboHelp and maybe its search or index or TOC functions to more easily locate the pages they need, but they could also make modifications to these pages because they are wiki pages presented in the Inline Frame portals.

I'm not sure if this remotely addresses the issue, but perhaps it will spur some other thoughts.

Cheers... Rick

[RoboColum_n_]

That's a great idea Rick, but unfortunately for us the requirement is not that we want users to create content. My team will do that. We want to see if we can amalgamate the advantages of both products. Zendesk has some very useful features too, not for the content creators, but for our Support Desk and user community.

We're at the stage where we are looking at tool that can do what we want. It looks like Flare can do it, via a 3rd party app, so figured I'd ask around to see if the great and good knew whether good old RH could do it. If not, I'll have a job trying to convince the powers to be to go with it.

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Jeff. Zendesk import functionality is virtually non-existent. You can use ProPlus but it is just an import. If you amend the RH output, you have to repeat it all over again. Oh and don't even get me started on Zendesk's editor. It makes this Jive editor look good 🙂

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

LOL! Have you looked at solutions like Mindtouch or Salesforce? - they both seem to have that CRM/content repository feel to them (I suspect they cost a bundle though)

[RoboColum_n_]

Thanks Jeff. Yes we have. You can integrate Mindtouch with Zendesk. For anyone else looking here, see:

     https://www.zendesk.com/blog/love-your-knowledge-base-with-zendesk-mindtouch/