I’ve held off on posting a blog related to this topic for quite some time, but now that our official Knowledge Base Redesign is underway, I thought I’d share a few things with all of our Cascade users and prospects. The vastness and enormity of documentation on Cascade Server is evident. I’m sure all of you who currently use our Knowledge Base as a means to answer FAQs or to look up system requirements and features are aware of this. As our system and its functionality have continued to grow based on your needs, suggestions, and requests, so too has the amount of documentation describing it.

As we are planning for continued growth for both our product and company, we are also planning on the growth of our Knowledge Base and the documentation within it.  The plethora of information available on Cascade and the bits and pieces that come together to form our CMS is expansive; and in an effort to improve the usability of our Knowledge Base, we’re changing things up a bit.

Currently, when you enter the Knowledge Base, it is clear that content is divided into seven main categories: Install, Users, Admin, Advanced, Videos, Glossary, and Past Versions. System Administrators who use Cascade frequently are familiar enough with the system to intuitively navigate to the locations of most items they need. However, because with every new release of Cascade we are aiming to make the system as easy as possible for the least technically-savvy user, our goals with the KB Redesign are the same. We are aiming to make it as easy, intuitive, and quick as possible to find any piece of information about Cascade you may be looking for.

So, without giving too much away, all the content in our new Knowledge Base is going to stem from four basic ‘sections’:

Digest

The digest will feature a brief glossary-esque summary of every concept in Cascade. So, let’s say you’re a university professor and aren’t particularly interested in how assets make up Cascade, but you’d like to know what assets are and how you can use them to create your course web site or catalog – the Digest is for you!

Content-Conceptual

If after reading our Digest summary of Assets, you’re compelled to learn more and want to proceed to learn more about each type of Asset, you can proceed to our Content/conceptual section to find more of a discussion/explanation of the roles Assets play in Cascade, insight into the different types of Assets, and the like.

Content-Technical

For those users more interested in the technical steps involved with Cascade, such as how to create an Asset, page, stylesheet, etc., the Content/technical area of the KB is populated with pages, diagrams, descriptions, and steps to aid you in creating, editing, and managing your web content. If we revisit the previous example, the university professor who previously wanted to find a general summary of assets, is now able to navigate to the technical side of our Content section and create an index page for his course, add images and links to resources, and publish a page to his/her organization’s site.

Context

For the system administrators, consultants, developers, and more technically-savvy individuals using or prospecting Cascade, we present the Context section. The Context section of our new KB Redesign will feature one over-arching project that incorporates all of the fundamentals, concepts, and technical steps you have previously visited in the Digest and Content sections of the KB. This section puts all the information you’ve learned into Context by providing a real-world hands on example project to practice/demo creating and managing web content in Cascade. There will also be a version of the Context section available for business users; it will provide a more conceptual version of the step-by-step guide to completing our example project.

If you’re ever unable to find the information you’re looking for in our new KB, we are also improving our search functionality to enhance result relevancy, accuracy, and order when searched for.

We’re confident that the steps we’re taking with the Cascade Knowledge Base Redesign will make finding any information you need relevant to Cascade simple and easy. We have numerous ideas to incorporate with our four preliminary sections that will serve to provide the most comprehensive, intuitive, and fluid CMS Knowledge Base in the industry. We welcome your thoughts, suggestions, and feedback as to how we can even further improve your user experience with Cascade and our Knowledge Base.

The KB Redesign is expected to be completed and available via the Hannon Hill Web Site at the start of the 2^nd quarter this year. We hope you’re as excited as we are about this Redesign; be sure to check our Team Blog frequently for KB-related updates.