How documentation can be left behind when the software industry has started practicing Shift-left, a new way to improve efficiency, throughput, and quality?

Infinity empowers you to practice Shift-left by starting to create documentation early in your product development life cycle. With Infinity, you don’t have to worry and plan about site design, version control, security, and the hosting of your online help. The writers can just log in and start writing – it’s that simple.

With the help of the built-in GoogleDocs-like commenting tool, reviews can be initiated as early as when the writers start “putting words on paper”. Reviews can run parallelly to the writing efforts, potentially eliminating the to and fro that happens when reviews are done through PDF via a ticketing system like JIRA.

Documentation updates and publishing in Infinity are instant, so you don’t have to use the painful process of rebasing, changing, and recommit as is required when using a docs-as-code toolset.

All in all, Infinity can help you practice Shift-left in the documentation process and reap the benefits of starting the documentation early, bake-in quality sooner, and publishing the documentation on time.

Technical and Editorial reviews are an essential part of the documentation process. As necessary it is to develop an excellent first draft, it is equally important to ask for and get feedback on what you have written. With traditional tools, it is a cumbersome process consisting of multiple steps:

• Generate output.
• Upload the output to a reviewing/ticketing tool, like uploading PDFs or HTML files to JIRA.
• Somehow enable adding review comments in the output itself or provide comments in the reviewing tool.

It is very easy to add review comments with Infinity, similar to how you add comments in Google Docs. You can tag the respective writer and provide feedback on specific parts of the content.

When a comment is added, the technical writer gets a notification as well as they can monitor the comments on the Infinity documentation list.

Being a cloud-based authoring and hosting platform, one of Infinity’s most significant plus points is quick updates and instant publishing. 

Let’s consider two scenarios:

1. You just completed work on a release and published the output, but then you notice there’s a missing period (full stop), incorrect version number, or any other trivial change which you cannot ignore.
2. You may need to delete a few sections instantaneously. These sections may sometimes consist of a large number of topics (1000+).

Scenario 2 could be rare, but scenario 1 is a common occurrence during a release. In an on-premise/offline tool workflow, you’ll have to traverse through multiple steps just for making that trivial change:

Update content > Make local build > Verify the output > Publish the help on a web server.

There’s also a separate step to upload the updated source files to a VCS such as SVN, Perforce, GitHub, or others.

Infinity proves to be a big time-saver and comfort in this case for two reasons:

• Being database-driven, Infinity works at a topic level. You update and publish individual topics instead of creating an entire help build (sometimes consisting of 100s of topics) just for making that trivial change.
• Infinity has built-in version control and publishing options – instant or scheduled publishing. 

With Infinity, you need to perform only two steps: Update > Publish.

Examples of on-premises/offline tool workflows are:

• An offline help authoring tool with a separate web server for hosting the output and a separate version control system.
• A docs-as-code setup with a separate text editor, a separate version control system, a static site generator, and a web server to host the html output.

Infinity doesn’t require so many individual components. It provides all the above-mentioned tools built-in as a single solution.

In-app / embedded help is all the rage these days. Instead of making the user navigate to a different window for help, companies now want to provide a cohesive and complete in-app experience in the product itself.

While providing entire help content on the product website may not be practical, a product user interface can still accommodate a few helpful links or text here and there to ensure that there is some contextual summary available to read and select through before the user is taken to the actual documentation page to read the entire content.

Infinity makes this possible with the use of its Search API. A developer can use the Search API to fetch relevant topics based on context-sensitive keywords.

QuickDraft creates a customized documentation site for you when you subscribe to Infinity. Customization is part of the subscription package and is provided to you in both cases:

• Using Infinity in DIY mode, and
• Using Infinity combined with technical writing services from QuickDraft.

Site customization is an important service for our customers. They may want their site to look in a particular way or to match their corporate website as closely as possible. This is crucial for branding purposes.

Click on the image to view sample customization.

Creating content in the Infinity topic editor is as easy as using a full-featured word processor. In fact, it is better than a conventional word processor, as you can use blocks to add your content.

Infinity content blocks are independent elements that can either contain text, lists, notes, images, videos, tables, and much more. You can create your own customized blocks, for say API documentation, or release notes that require a well-defined topic structure. These blocks can be moved to visualize and restructure your topic the way you want it, without the need to cut-paste any content.

Get a glimpse of what you can achieve using Infinity content blocks. Here is the information on using the Block Editor.

We have recently opened up free trials for Infinity. If you are interested in experiencing the authoring environment yourself, contact us to get the login credentials.

QuickDraft customizes the look and feel of your documentation site for you, so as a technical writer, once you get the login credentials, all you have to do to get started is simply start adding the topics.