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Documentation Center

Ian Alexander
  • Updated

 

The Documentation Center lets you store free-form text like help documents, customer information, user guides, and more.

What it Does

  • Gives you a place to put content for your team with a nice HTML editor so you can create all kinds of nice-looking content, including images and videos.
  • Easily create parent pages and link them to children pages to create a hierarchy.
  • Add links to other pages, websites, custom widgets, booking calendars, and more.
  • Set document privileges to give all, one or no customers access to certain documents in their customer portal.
  • Add a navigation sidebar to organize your documentation internally.
  • Create customer-specific documentation for each customer utilizing our template tags, making cloning documents for each specific customer that much easier.
  • Create templates to quickly set up new articles for customers.

What it Doesn't Do

  • Cannot link documents to assets.
  • Automatically write down your grandma's favorite recipes. But you can!

 

Table of Contents

 

Enable the Documentation tab

This will enable a top-level tab so you can access both customer and internal documentation pages.

  1. Navigate to Admin > Tabs Customization.
  2. Check the Documentation box.
  3. If desired, drag the page with the "hamburger" icon on its right to the order you want.
  4. Click Save.

Now click the Documentation tab (you may need to click More to access it) to see it.

Here are the various features.

  1. Search for a document.
  2. Add a new page.
  3. You can add a left hand navigation section. After adding, click left-nav in the pages to edit it.
  4. Home page content. Click Welcome in the pages to edit it (or its name if someone changed it).
  5. Click a name in the CUSTOMER column to navigate to that customer.
  6. Edit the selected page—clicking the page name does the same.
  7. Clone or delete a page.

 

Edit the Documentation Center home screen

By default, the top level Documentation Center home screen looks similar to the above screen shot. You can change this to make it say whatever you want.

  1. In the list of pages, find the Welcome page and click it, or to its right, click Edit.
  2. Change the content as desired.
  3. When finished, click Save Page.

 

Add left-hand navigation section

After adding many pages, you may want to add a navigation menu to the left of all the pages. You can actually put whatever content you want, but it's intended to link to pages within the Documentation Center. You can also link to external pages or other pages within your site.

  1. Navigate to the Documentation tab.
  2. You may want to open this page again in a second browser tab before proceeding if you intend to link to various pages, as you will not be able to see the page names once you proceed to the next step.
  3. In the upper right, click New Page.
  4. For the page name, you must enter: left-nav
  5. In the content area, type the titles of pages you want to link to. Keep the titles short because the navigation section is narrow. Tip: To drop the cursor down a single line instead of double spacing between lines, press Shift+Enter.
  6. For each page you wish to link to, highlight the page name.
  7. Click the chain link icon button.
  8. For the Url, if you are linking to an internal Documentation Center page, just type the page name. Otherwise, type/paste the full URL.
  9. If you are linking to an external site, you may want to set Target to New Window so that clicking the link opens the site in a new browser tab.
  10. Click Ok.
  11. Repeat for each page you want in the navigation.
  12. After adding all the links, click Save Page. You will now see them listed in the left-hand navigation section.
  13. In the upper right, click Back to return to the Documentation Center home page.

Enable Adding Customer Documentation pages

The customer documentation, located on all customer detail pages, is a place to include many details about your customers both internally, and externally in the customer portal. To enable it,

  1. Navigate to Admin > Customers - Preferences.
  2. Click Additional Settings.
  3. Check the Enable a Documentation Page link for each customer box.
  4. Click Save.

 

Add Customer Documentation pages

Once you have enabled this setting, go to the Customers tab, then click any customer's name. You will be see a DOCUMENTATION section on their profile page.

To add a new customer documentation page,

  1. To the right of the DOCUMENTATION section, click New.
  2. The Page Name defaults to the customer's name. Change it if desired.
  3. The Page Type defaults to Internal, where only your staff can see it.
    • Change it to Customer Portal to make it visible to this specific customer in their portal.
    • Change it to All Customer Portals to make it visible to all customers in their portals. This will erase the Customer name field and disable it.
    • Change it to Template to create a template you can later select with default content. This will also erase the Customer name field and disable it.
  4. Type your page content in the editor.
  5. To add an image, place the cursor where you want it and click the mountains icon in the toolbar. Note: Follow the instructions to add your company logo to the page instead if you want to do that.
    1. You will need to upload an image to an image hosting site.
    2. After doing that, copy the image URL.
    3. Back on your Syncro site, paste the image URL in the Source field.
    4. We recommend adding an Image description, such as 500 watt power supply.
    5. If you want to display the image smaller than its actual size, type in the width or height in pixels.
    6. Click Ok.
  6. In the upper right, click Attach File to add file attachments to the page.
  7. You can add template tags to your content from the list on the right.
  8. When finished, click Save Page.

View customer documentation

After creating your article, you can revisit the customer,

...where you will then see the link to view their customer documentation.

And if you set it to be visible in the customer portal (as is the case above), click the Customer Online Profile link to see what the customer will see in their portal at the bottom.

Note: If you do not see the DOCUMENTATION section (along with hardly anything else), are there any Portal Users for this customer? If not, then when you access their portal, it defaults to the Non-Portal User Group permissions. You will need to edit those permissions (found in Admin > Customers - Portal User Permission Groups) to enable the Documentation - View Public setting and any other sections you want those Portal users to view.

Click the document's link to see the customer's documentation as they will see it. The proper information will replace any template tags you added.

 

Add Internal Documentation pages

You can create as many pages as you want for internal use by your staff, such as policies and procedures. First, enable the Documentation tab if you do not see it in the top navigation bar or More menu.

Now click the Documentation tab in the top navigation bar or More menu to get started.

To add a new internal document,

  1. In the upper right, click New Page.
  2. Fill in the Page Name.
  3. Leave the Page Type as Internal.
  4. Type your page content in the editor.
  5. You can create hyperlinks and add images.
  6. In the upper right, you can click Attach File to add file attachments to the page.
  7. You can add template tags to your content from the list on the right.
  8. When finished, click Save Page.

 

Documentation Templates

You can create templates to quickly generate a new article on the fly for customers.

  1. Head to the Documentation tab.
  2. Edit an existing Document or click New Page to start a new one.
  3. Click the Page Type dropdown > Template.
  4. Next, add in the structure of the template.
  5. When finished, click Save Page.

Once the template is created, a tag will be displayed next to the title when viewing the template on the editor page to help call out that it's a template.

 

Now when you want to create a new document for a customer all you need to do is head to the Customer Detail screen, scroll to the Document section, and click New. On the following page, there will be a drop-down where the template can be selected to generate.

 

Masked Credentials

You can add Masked Credentials to the Documentation section. Masked Credentials are a way of safely storing customer credentials to make providing assistance or Asset management as easy as possible.

  1. Head to the Documentation tab.
  2. Edit an existing Document or click New Page to start a new one. If it's new, you will need to save the page, then edit it.
  3. In the bottom right, click New Credential.
  4. Fill in the various fields.
    1. Name: This is there to help categorize the credentials so you know what it's for.
    2. Username: Type the username to log in, whether an email address or traditional username.
    3. Host/URL: URL of the site to log in to.
    4. Password: Click the field to enter a password. Next time the page loads, this field will be starred, and you can click it to see it.
    5. Notes: Uhh, you know what this is...
    6. Public: This changes to "Public on Customer Portal" if the credential field is visible on the Customer Portal, or if you simply click it.
  5. The fields save as you type them, so you're ready to go after filling them in.

This is what the Document will look like when a tech is viewing it.

 

This is what the document looks like if the customer has the appropriate Portal Permissions.

 

Speaking of Portal Permissions, here are the options at Admin > Customers - Portal User Permission Groups. These are not enabled by default.

Credentials - View All
Credentials - View Mine

 

User Permissions

In Admin > Security Groups, there are several ways to customize what access a non-Admin has to the feature.

Credentials - Delete
Credentials - Edit
Credentials - New
Credentials - View

Learn more about Masked Credentials on Customers.

 

Add Your Company Logo to a Page

To add your company logo to a documentation page (or any other place in the app that uses the content editor), you will need to follow these steps due to a bug in the content editor.

  1. Navigate to the page you want to edit, or add a new page.
  2. In the content editor in a blank area, type {{logo_url}}.
  3. Click Save Page.
  4. Copy the URL that gets generated.
  5. Above the content, click Edit.
  6. Delete the {{logo_url}} tag.
  7. Place the cursor where you want to add your logo.
  8. Click the Add/Edit Image mountains button.
  9. In the Source field, paste the URL you copied in step 4.
  10. Fill in the Image Description if desired.
  11. Click Ok.
  12. Click Save Page.

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