Slide deck - TechSource: Stonly Session 2023 Dec 14
Core project team for the Tech Source site
- Beth McCullough
- Melissa Doernte
- Karen Bettucchi
- Sarah Willson
Improving Student Technology Support Initiative
- Important to do a lot of user testing with student
- Student Technology Support Coalition was the driving group in the project
High level goal to provide students ability to Self Service whenever possible
Content Types
- Alerts and announcements
- Help Guides and short answer questions
- Resources
- Information guides
Stonly
- A tool with a feature rich environment
Features TechSource site utilities
- Guides
- Knowledge bases
- Insights
Very responsive company to help with questions and needs we had during this project.
Stonly Demo
- Login and go to Guide management.
- Knowledges bases can be sliced in to smaller knowledge bases
- Current license allows us for unlimited guide creation
- We do have limited logins though
- If people are interested in checkin out how to use it, in the future we may be able to allow others to test out functionality
- Stanford Webservices team did custom work on Stonly to look very similar to Drupal page.
- Two ways to access the Stonly content
- Search the knowledge base
- Browse
- User interface on Stonly is very simple. If you’ve used Drupal, it’s similar.
- You can create buttons and move them around on the page
- Can go to different steps in a guide
Create a new guide demo
- Important how you name guides
- Stonly ranks words in the guides for search optimization
- Internal name does not need to be the same as the visible name on the site
- Super easy to go in and change guides and have it go live immediately.
- As IT things change quickly in IT it’s great to be able to
- Ability to add tags - but better to get the terms in the title or text of the guides
- For searching optimization use as many shorthand terms and names in guides.
- Make a multistep guide
- Can have many branches and there is a helpful flowchart view to see all guide branches
- Put in your content —> Decide next steps —>
Question: if you wanted to use it for knowledge management. Is there functionality to alert to review old documentation
- It’s on the their roadmap to add as a functionality down the road.
Our intent is to review the content once a year.
Insights you can see when users consistently get stuck on a guide
- Stonly considers an active guide if it’s gone into and moved through.
- You can see the most popular guides in the insights
Questions: Content on Stonly.com, can it be found through Google.
- It can be found on the search in Google if it’s unique enough.
Question:
- Licensing group. What does that entail? Whom?
- Answer: Stanford does. 15 User Licenses and unlimited development of Guides
Question: You had a database before. Did everything get migrated to Stonly? How did it get created?
- It was made by hand, not sure of if there is a migration tool.
- We didn’t want to create a lot of original content or duplicate too much content.
Question: Does it support using screenshots?
- You can use different media types imported.
Question: Was there usage of the Knowledge base feature?
- The knowledge base is the container
- The whole site is essential is a knowledge base
Question: Anything dynamic on using the FAQs?
Other features like a Widget - it can be embedded on your site
- Guided walk thru
Questions: can you limit searches to just Stanford people?
- We could put the site under SSO, we chose not to due to issues with SUNets.
Question: what was your process to vetting this tool?
- Accessibility was key
- We did look at many other tools
- Important tool was Decision trees.
- Ability to branch
- Zingtree and Ocelot
Accessibility review of Stonly - the company made changes immediately and so willing to work with them.
We did not want to reinvent the wheel of information - we created guides that link outward.
- we link to a lot of articles in ServiceNow
Question: How do you track broken links?
- Site improve will tell you if there is a broken link on your site
Question: what is site improve?
- Site license with Stanford web services
