Hey folks,
Wanted to give an in-depth update on the current state of our documentation efforts, especially when it comes to the Banno Knowledge Base. There’s a lot to share, so I’ll do my best to keep this readable.
Banno Knowledge
Let’s start with the easy one: we’ve had a ton of names for this help site. Now we have one: the Banno Knowledge Base, or Banno Knowledge for short. Banno Knowledge is how we will communicate about this product to customers, and it’s where we will direct people with questions.
Banno Knowledge is meant to house all information about our products and how they work. It has both internal documents visible only to us as well as external facing product documentation, which will generally be in-depth and meant to answer specific questions about the “hows” of our products and features.
What about the other documentation spots?
Yeah, we have more than just the one site, so we’ve done our best to divide them by purpose. The important ones are:
- Banno Knowledge - Everything about our products and how they work, whether for customers or ourselves. We own it, it’s extendable, we can do whatever we want to pretty it up or make it more usable.
- How-to Guides - The step-by-step guides to using our apps will remain at banno.com/a/help, but we will link to those guides from Banno Knowledge to keep an easy browsing experience for our customers. This will allow us to still use all the work Katie Bennett has done without extra overhead.
- Banno Docs (aka The Wiki) - This contains anything we need to keep our teams running. Team-based processes, onboarding docs, internal tooling we use, meeting notes, they all live here. The documentation team will continue maintaining this, but keeping everything up-to-date is the task of everyone at Banno.
And that’s it! You’ll notice I didn’t mention Google Drive. That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop using Google Drive, at the very least not any time soon, but we have functionality in Banno Knowledge to house Google Drive, giving us better indexing of the docs that still need to live in Drive. For the most part, we’ll move those docs toward Knowledge or Docs. In fact…
Ops Docs
You might have noticed that every existing Ops Doc exists in the version of Banno Knowledge available at docs.banno.com/help right now. Hopefully this has been communicated to those that use them, but this will be the home for Ops Docs going forward. We have some great functionality to automagically index these docs in one place. Since these are internal-only docs, the goal is for everyone who works on and maintains them today to be able to keep doing so. If you need help kicking this off, let us know, but for the most part, you can just reference…
Banno Knowledge Usage Guide
Yep, we put together a nice little page to run down how to use and contribute to Banno Knowledge. It’s not perfect yet, but we’ll continue to improve it. It’s for use by people both inside and outside of the documentation team, so be sure to take a look. But hey, what if your question isn’t answered there, or you have something you need the Documentation Team to work on? Well…
How to Request Work from the Documentation Team
Our team sweeps through our GitHub Project every Monday to prioritize incoming work. If you need something, you can always add a card to the Inbox and we’ll be sure to get it slotted in. In the near future this will be moving to Jira, and we’ll be working on some templates so you can give us all the info you need up-front. If it’s intimidating to learn a process that’s gonna change soon (which, hey, I totally get), you can always use the reacji channeler tool. Just add a :documentation-team: reaction to a message in Slack and it’ll ping us in #org-documentation. We’ll gather the info we need and get it slotted into our queue from there.
Sooooo… when does this all go live?
The internal-only version of Banno Knowledge can already be viewed at docs.banno.com/help. The public-facing version will be available soon. Sooner than you’d think. I’m not being coy, it’s just dependent on some other busy folks so I don’t want to promise on their behalf, but for reals… real soon.
What docs are available now? What’s in progress?
The front page of Banno Knowledge always shows the most recently published docs, but that doesn’t tell you about things that are currently in progress or available in draft format. We’ve got ya covered there:
Done in the last two weeks:
- Mobile & Online - The Mobile & Online section has landings for every feature section listed, giving a brief description of each feature. Not every section has docs, but quite a few do. Several also have general FAQs over the features listed. We’ll continue to fill this backlog out this year, though it’ll take some time as our priority will generally go to new features shipping in a given month. Feel free to poke around and see what’s there!
- Marketing and Ad Builder - We also have docs available for the Marketing product, as well as the ad builder within that product. Other products will be getting landing pages in the near future, but their detailed docs will come as new features ship for them.
- Cash Management Permissions - A bit of a bear requested by Simmons, this is complete and will shortly be available in the NT Integration section of Banno Knowledge.
- Usage and Style Guide - The aforementioned usage guide for Banno Knowledge is new and shiny. It’ll keep getting newer and shinier. We’re open to feedback and happy to make it as usable as possible!
- Ops Docs - All existing ops docs have been ported over to Banno Knowledge, and more will be added every week. In fact, I just merged a couple in today! Big shout out to folks working toward moving these into Banno Knowledge!
In Progress/Starting Soon:
- Banno Support - This doc is actually done, but with some new features this month (case tagging and routing) we’ll be punching it up a bit in the next week.
- Form Builder - We’ll be kicking off the Form Builder docs in the backlog in the next week. If anyone has input on info needed in this doc, feel free to let us know!
- Transfers - This doc (or more accurately, these docs) have been in limbo for a bit as priority work has bumped them down. Right now, the outlines/info is all there, and about a third of the required docs are in draft mode and ready for review. We’ll be trying to push final versions out in March as we get other priorities off our plate.
- Several ops docs - I can’t really list all of these in flight, but we’ve gotten quite a few requests for help on getting ops docs into Banno Knowledge. We’ll be working on these as we can and helping to build out education so folks can pick these up without needing us over the next several weeks.
- And even more internal/process improvements - We’ve had a lot of requests for changes to the Wiki/Banno Docs, which are at a lower priority, but we knock out as we can since these are often pretty low hanging fruit that can be knocked out at the end of a day. We’re also improving how we process requested docs to speed up our output, including better guidance as to the information we need from you all when you request docs. We’ve come a long way since we got started, but we’ve got farther still to go!
For our full backlog, or to add to it, check out our GitHub project.
That was a lot!
Hopefully it was useful! The docs we’ve been working on will be publicly available really soon, and we’ll be ramping up work on the backlog from there. If you feel there are needs we aren’t addressing with our current go-forward plan, please let us know! We’re happy to make sure our documentation solution is solving as many problems as possible, and we want to make sure it’s something people will be happy using.
Alright, that’s enough of this writing, I’ve got to get back to the other writing.