Help Authoring Tools & Software for Technical Writers

Help Authoring Tools & Software help your organization to create and maintain incredible support content on help center software.

Thousands of companies rely on Deskpro's help authoring tools

We've created a support Help Center and that's been a wonderful feature for our customers to use.

Sarah Kippernes Head of Support

The guides feature is one of my favorite things on Deskpro and our customers really love it too.

Luke Bryant Customer Support Manager

50% of inquiries were questions people could answer themselves, making the implementation of a knowledgebase priceless.

David Brooks 247Time, Leicestershire

What are Help Authoring Tools & Software?

Help Authoring Tools are software solutions or platforms that help writers and technical writers to produce support content. They allow for editing, updating, collaborating and maintaining of online help articles that are ultimately there to help solve customers problems with self-service support.

Some Help Authoring Tools, like Deskpro, also provide Knowledge Management Tools and Help Center Software as part of the tool that hosts the content created by writers and technical writers on a structured platform for a single source of truth.

Create help documentation and format useful user manuals or user documentation with powerful help authoring tools that allow technical authors to provide online documentation.

Benefits of using a Help Authoring Tool

Improve Your Support Content

Rich text editor - giving you and your writers the tools to create and decorate your technical documentation that is displayed to your end-users.
Options for designs - decide how you want your content to look and the style of how it is displayed to your end-users.
Different Content - the ability to publish support content as Knowledge base articles, Guides, News, Blog Posts or on Community Forums.

Easily Manage Content Projects

Plan articles - setting out your content roadmap is easy, with the ability to have collaborative drafts and pre-set publish dates. Roles and permissions.
Review articles - review dates can be set on articles so that they never go stale and are always kept in the best shape for your end-users.

Ensure Brand Consistency

Article Templates - by utilizing and creating your own templates, you can ensure everything that is authored, fits in with your brand guidelines to create help files and formatted web help articles. Help sites can contain easy to use table of contents, documentation in multiple languages in a simple user interface.
Help Center Design - some Help Authoring Tools, like Deskpro, include a help center, where authored support content can be shared. The design of this can be fully customized to your brand.

Collaborate With Other Technical Writers

Teamwork - collaboration tools allow team members to work simultaneously on articles, with live editing on a single-source content authoring tool.
Instant Feedback - collect comments and metrics from end-users and how useful support content is, so that it can be tweaked and improved.

Help Authoring Software vs Technical Writing Software

Help Authoring Tools, like the publishing feature that is included in Deskpro, can be used by teams of content writers and technical writers alike. Often, Help Authoring Tools are more generic, and can sometimes only provide very basic editing and publishing features, whereas Technical Writing Software might have more specific options (such as sharing lines of code e.g. HTML) within the editing suite to provide more accurate manuals through topic-based authoring.

Unlike Deskpro, help authoring software solutions such as HelpnDoc, MadCap Flare, and RoboHelp don't provide helpdesk software alongside the documentation tools and are just about creating documentation. With Deskpro, you get knowledgebase software that helps technical writers and customer support teams in one easy-to-use tool.

Help Authoring Tools for Localization and Multi-Language

Help authoring tools help with documentation for multi language customer support.
Provide articles in certain languages.
Answer more of your global customers questions.

Extensive Features of Deskpro's Help Authoring Solution

Deskpro provides comprehensive Help Authoring Tools as part of all-in-one helpdesk software. Alongside help authoring features such as a Help Center, that includes the ability to publish articles within a knowledgebase, news blog, guides and community forums, there are plenty of other benefits to choosing Deskpro.

Glossary - Ability to show definitions of terms to end-users (via mouse-over) to help reduce any confusion.
Embedded Media - Add context to articles and support content with inline images and videos.
Custom Fields - Additional information fields can be added to content, to improve its usefulness to customers and end-users.
Feedback - Deskpro provides a help authoring tool with real reporting and metrics, alongside the ability for end-users to provide instant feedback on the helpfulness of articles.
Attachments - Formatted help documents and files can be added to support content articles.
PDF & Print - Downloading of content can be enabled to provide end-users with formatted documents.
Drag and Drop - Manage how content is organized and how it appears on the Help Center, with nesting.
Review Dates - Set review dates to ensure that any content published, is regularly reviewed and kept up-to-date.
Templates - Consistent formatting is key for enjoyable and effective user experience, templates can be created as part of the help authoring tool that can be used again and again.
Ticket to Article - With an integrated helpdesk software, any tickets received from customers can be turned into pending articles that can be written by authors and help content created.
Easy to use - Content management system that provides one tool to replace and improve using a word processor or Microsoft Word.