We’re happy to release another set of features today. Most of the features in this November 2018 release taken directly from customer feedback.

• Author details page on your knowledge base
• Custom footer navigation
• Appearance settings, preview in the Portal
• Advanced Caching to improve performance
• Enhanced editing experience
• Simplified payment option for additional accounts
• Offline payment support

Author Details Page

Now we have a dedicated page for every author. It enlists all the articles contributed by the author along with the bio. Contributor images on any article linked to their author page. You can check one of our profiles here Lex Hegt.

Custom Footer Navigation

In the previous version, we had the option to add some basic footer navigation like links and social icons. We received requests from customers where they wanted to mimic the footer section identical to their original website. Hence, we brought this new feature where you can insert your custom HTML section.

Appearance Settings, Preview In Portal

In Document360, you can easily change the appearance of your knowledge base, things like logo, favicon, primary colour, and secondary colour. In the previous versions, every time you make a change you need save the changes and go back to the knowledge base to visualise the changes.

Now with this release, we introduced the live preview option within the portal itself, so you can immediately see the impact of your changes.

Advanced Caching To Improve Performance

For a product like Document360, it’s super important to deliver a high performance, fast response, low latency knowledge base for our customers. In modern development, this can only be achieved by techniques like caching, where the articles are served directly from the memory rather than fetching from backend databases every time a customer/user navigates to an article in the knowledge base.

In the previous version of Document360, we were using some basic in-memory caching techniques, which served the purpose and it was performing well, but as we add more customers to our platform we also need to have a scalable caching infrastructure in the backend to support it at scale.

After a few months development and testing, we successfully released our backend caching infrastructure in today’s release.

If you are curious, we are using Azure Cache for Redis a fully managed, in-memory data store to power fast, scalable applications. It covers all the core aspects like enterprise-grade security, reliability, scaling and performance.

Enhanced Editing Experience

We use Markdown as the standard syntax for creating documents. There are great advantages in using markdown for this purpose. The content writers love its simplicity and speed at which you can produce documents without worrying about formatting.

Behind the scene, for the markdown to work properly, it needs to be parsed and converted into HTML dynamically.

So far, we were using two different parsers between the portal (the editor) and the knowledge base (customer facing). It was working well for the majority of the time, however in a few instances there are some discrepancies in the look and feel.

Now we made some architectural changes so both the portal and user facing knowledge base uses the same parser. So, what you see in the portal is what the user will see in the customer facing knowledge base.

Simplified Pricing For Additional Accounts

We have different tiers of pricing for Document360, the customers move to a higher tier for a couple of reasons, either they need some additional capabilities like private knowledge base, a longer analytics period etc, and also they might want more team accounts (the users can edit/publish articles) or additional readers (for private knowledge bases, in public facing knowledge bases there is no limit on the readers count).

Some customers highlighted they are happy with the features on a particular pricing tier and they only need additional team account/readers. So now with this release, we introduced the option for the users to simply purchase additional team accounts and readers instead of moving to a new pricing tier.

Offline Payments

In some large enterprises, sometimes they don’t prefer to use the credit cards as the mode of payment. We had multiple such requests and now we have established a flow for offline payments to cater to such customers. With this release we have made this process seamless.

Once you have made the payment via the offline mode, our accounts team will give you an access code. Apply the code via the Document360 portal payment page and you are all set.