This document summarizes a case study of a content collaboration council formed at a company to improve coordination between different groups that create customer content. The council was formed to address issues like duplicated content and content being hard to find. It brought together representatives from documentation, training, support, and other groups. Through regular meetings, the council identified problems to solve and achieved benefits like reducing customer cases and improving content findability. The council continues to address challenges like content curation.

1. Building Bridges Across
an Expanding Universe
Case study for a content collaboration council
Mysti Berry, Principal Technical Writer

2. Safe Harbor
Safe harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This presentation may contain forward-looking
statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions proves
incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements
we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including any projections of subscriber
growth, earnings, revenues, or other financial items and any statements regarding strategies or plans of management for future operations,
statements of belief, any statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or technology developments and customer contracts
or use of our services.
The risks and uncertainties referred to above include – but are not limited to – risks associated with developing and delivering new
functionality for our service, our new business model, our past operating losses, possible fluctuations in our operating results and rate of
growth, interruptions or delays in our Web hosting, breach of our security measures, risks associated with possible mergers and
acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability to expand, retain, and motivate
our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our service and successful customer deployment, our limited history reselling
non-salesforce.com products, and utilization and selling to larger enterprise customers. Further information on potential factors that could
affect the financial results of salesforce.com, inc. is included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year ended
January 31, 2011. This document and others are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor Information section of our Web site.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not
be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions based upon features that are
currently available. Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

3. Mysti Berry
Principal Technical Writer
@MystiContent
www.linkedin.com/in/mystiberry

4. Before we get started…
How many groups create customer content at your company?
Doc/Dev/QA Support Marketing Sales Customer Training
Success
Groups
Legal Customer
Readiness
Product
Management
How many do you interact with directly? How often? Who curates their content?

5. Case Study: Collaboration Council to the rescue!
The Case Study Why it matters Handouts and Takeaways
Why we had to do something
Our first project
How well it worked
How we continued
Results to date
Customers need content that’s
findable, helpful, and accurate
Not every group knows how to do
all three
Sample mission statement
Sample agenda
Ideas for how you can start
Ø Cooperation across groups can be lightweight.
Ø Cooperation across groups helps groups.
Ø Cooperation across groups helps customers.

6. Why we had to do something

7. Why we had to do something
Some small customers got lost
Groups created and published
content in different places.
Sometimes hard to send a
customer to the right content
Content was published, but not
always updated or removed.

8. Example: importing data (in the help portal)
Where should a beginner start?

9. Example: importing data (in Salesforce, outside the help portal)
Salespeople combined existing
content, saved as PDFs, and
gave to customers.
Ancient content lingered on the
Web.
Customer cases often resolved
by sending customer a link to
existing content.
Lesson: good content was
sometimes hard to find.

10. Example: importing data (Google results)
Non-Salesforce content
shouldn’t ever be in the top
results for an important search
like “import data Salesforce.”
If they are, it means too many
customers aren’t finding and
clicking on our great content.

11. Our first project

12. How we started
A customer success VP funded
an FTE, Michael Kirschner.
Michael gathered together reps
from Doc, Training, and
Support.
We committed to a lot:
Ø Short deadline (3 months)
Ø New type of doc with old tools
Ø Some developer, UX time
Ø Mad HTML skills from Doc

13. Michael’s first steps
Michael’s team audited content and removed the old stuff.
Support audited and removed duplicate knowledge
articles as part of another initiative.
Our unnamed team designed a brand new deliverable
type with no new tools or processes, designed to help
customers find content related to a goal like “import data.”

14. Our new deliverable: the quickstart
Ø Content gathered according to
customer need, not by which team
created the content.
Ø Only one paragraph of new content
Ø Include content from anywhere!

15. Quickstart details
Ø Help, training, and support content
delivered in one portal, authored in
three different environments.
Ø UI team created a new CSS, and the
portal team created a new article type,
which required a bit of back-end
development work.
Ø Documentation wrote the HTML
based on sample from UI team.
Ø Curation is still a challenge.

16. How well it worked

17. VPs and customers agreed—we filled an important gap
Ø The number of relevant customer cases decreased.
Ø Customers used our new quickstarts.
Ø Other groups sent their customers links to the quickstarts.

18. We noticed other benefits to meeting regularly
Ø We learned a lot about each other’s roles, challenges, and cadences.
Ø We shared valuable information that otherwise would have stayed in one group.
Ø We learned that different groups define success differently—and we’re all correct.

19. How we continued

20. Birth of the Content Collaboration Council
We decided to keep meeting and looked for problems to solve.
Our process:
Ø Chose a name and agreed on attendees.
Ø Met for an hour once a month, to keep requirements lightweight.
Ø Started by defining our mission (three sessions).
Ø Started by having each team member present their content challenges and
opportunities.
Ø Made time for informal sharing and questions.
Ø Chose a facilitator (Doc!) who committed to a year.

21. Results to date

22. What we achieved
Opening doors to communication on a rocket ship is challenging.
Technical Sales Customer Success Training
Ø Doesn’t waste time putting
PDFs together. Sends customer a
single URL.
Ø Technical Sales knows who to
ask for missing content, and other
teams get precious customer
input. Everybody wins!
Ø Advertised new customer
success communities across the
company by sharing with our
council.
Ø Clarified how writers should
contribute to forums (they don’t
need us to hover, but we didn’t
know that!)
Ø Made some headway toward
sharing examples.
Ø Improved access to changes
before they’re released
Ø Investigated how localization
might be improved for training.

23. More achievements
Avoided a lot of duplication of effort in creating videos and walkthroughs! Plus…
Technical Documentation Legal Marketing
Ø Learned how customers use our
most valuable deliverable, the
Release Notes.
Ø Coordinated a major change in
help/support portal for search.
Ø Identified the next likely
“ask” (need for metadata and
taxonomy that can support all
content-generating groups).
Ø Doc easily solved a content
problem for Legal using
quickstarts, just months after they
were invented.
Ø They’re using our style guide.

24. One ongoing challenge: curation
Only a few quickstarts are explicitly owned, and
therefore updated regularly.
Current solution
Internal or external customers send us requests
to update, and we follow up (make the change
or route it to the correct person).
Future goal
Find owners and automate steps in the review
cycle so that quickstarts are always as fresh as
possible.

25. Handouts and takeaways
Start your own Collaboration Council!
Getting Started Sample Agendas Sample Mission Statement
Ø Tell your boss that it’s an
industry best practice.
Ø Pick one or two groups with the
most overlap and need.
Ø Give yourself time to learn each
others’ language, cadence, and
challenges.
Ø Pick a small, easy win to start,
for example: “Reduce duplicated
content between Tech Doc and
Support.”
Slideshare download
Slideshare download

26. What we learned
Ø Cooperation across groups can be lightweight.
Ø Cooperation across groups helps groups.
Ø Cooperation across groups helps customers.

27. Thank you
Mysti Berry
Principal Technical Writer
@MystiContent
www.linkedin.com/in/mystiberry