From product manuals and guides to subject matter expert (SME) documentation to online help, technical documents lay the groundwork for effective customer education, product training, technical training and more.

These documents are important tools that can help educate employees and external users and customers on how to use different products and technologies. For learning tech providers, they can help customers learn how to implement and optimize their platform or tool. For businesses, they can help train employees on how to use new learning technology platforms.

Effective training relies on communication between technical document writers and course developers. However, these two functions are often siloed, and important updates may or may not be communicated to course developers. Other challenges include scalability and efficiency: As new products are released and existing products evolve, creating and updating technical documents and courses can be a huge lift.

Here, we’ll explore how MadCap Software’s acquisition of Xyleme, Inc. is working to solve these challenges and more to improve collaboration and efficiency between technical documentation writers and course developers.

The Opportunity

MadCap Software’s content management solutions are designed to help organizations create, manage and deliver effective technical documentation at scale. Anthony Olivier, MadCap Software’s CEO, has long recognized the opportunity to expand into the learning and development (L&D) space: “We’ve always thought there was overlap between technical documentation and L&D within enterprises.” After all, he explains, the two groups technical writers work the most closely with are the SMEs they’re getting information from and instructional designers creating and teaching related courses.

So, when the opportunity arose to acquire Xyleme — a leading learning content management system (LCMS) provider — “we jumped all over it,” Oliver says.

Solving Shared Challenges

Bringing its technical documentation solutions and Xyleme’s LCMS under a single solutions provider will help solve challenges that both technical document writers and instructional designers face. Specifically, it will help to:

• Integrate content authoring and management capabilities: MadCap Software’s technical documentation authoring tools combined with Xyleme’s LCMS enables documentation writers to seamlessly create and manage technical content within MadCap’s authoring environment. Then, they can publish it directly to Xyleme’s LCMS for content syndication and use in training courses.
• Streamline content reuse: Xyleme’s LCMS enables writers to create reusable components of technical documentation that can be incorporated into multiple courses. This ensures collaboration and consistency across training materials.
• Provide robust analytics and reporting: Xyleme’s LCMS provides analytics and reporting capabilities that allow organizations to track the usage and effectiveness of technical documentation within training courses.
• Consolidate tech stacks: The acquisition will help to consolidate tech stacks — which Olivier notes is a priority for many businesses — bringing technical documentation and course development and delivery under a single solutions provider where the tech stacks integrate and communicate with each other seamlessly.

AI Capabilities and Future Goals

In terms of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), Olivier says they’re taking a “three-pronged approach.” The combined platform will leverage AI:

• For content development.
• For improved publishing, data analytics, content consumption and search capabilities.
• And for leveraging of all the content and data created to train businesses’ own large language models (LLMs).

Although misconceptions persist around AI taking the jobs of technical document writers and instructional designers, this isn’t usually the case. “Most of our customers are creating proprietary content,” Olivier says, and they don’t want to use ChatGPT or another generative AI tool to create it. As more training and technical content gets created, through AI or otherwise, “solutions like MadCap that can maximize content reuse, manage and syndicate all the data components become even more important.”

Looking ahead, Olivier says MadCap Software will remain focused on bringing together the solutions. That said, they aren’t trying to build a “one-size-fits-all” platform and will continue to focus on the needs of the different buyers (with Xyleme targeting instructional designers and compliance managers and MadCap Software targeting tech documentation managers).

“Our priority now is making sure the platforms talk to each other,” Olivier says. This will lead to greater collaboration and efficiency for course developers, documentation writers, and, ultimately, ROI for the business.