A Nordic Smart City & GIS software company serving public sector clients across Finland and Sweden
The client is a publicly listed Nordic software company developing Smart City platforms and GIS solutions for municipal and public sector clients across Finland and Sweden. With between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, they operate at the intersection of critical infrastructure and geospatial data — where security, data residency, and compliance are baseline requirements, not optional.
Their product suite includes several independent software applications used by external customers. The documentation team consists of 2 dedicated technical writers supported by 18 SME contributors — product specialists responsible for maintaining user manuals across both desktop and mobile platforms.
Because their clients include public sector organizations operating critical infrastructure, any new vendor had to pass a formal security review before anything else got considered. That bar was set from day one.
Painful, manual documentation updates that didn’t scale
Before switching to ClickHelp, the team used a WordPress-based solution to host their technical documentation. Content was authored in Microsoft Word, then exported to PDF, then uploaded manually to the website. Any update — however small — meant going through the entire chain again.
This approach was time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale as the number of products grew. The team consistently ran into the same set of issues:
- A manual Word → PDF → Upload flow for every change
- No centralized structure for managing multiple product manuals
- Difficulty keeping content up-to-date across desktop and mobile
- A laborious and ineffective workflow for everyone contributing
From a long shortlist to a final two
To replace their outdated setup, the team built a structured list of functional and technical requirements: content reuse, security controls, scalability, and ease of maintenance. They then ran a strict evaluation — any tool that didn’t fully meet the criteria was ruled out.
A strict requirements list, not a feature beauty contest
The team didn’t score tools on shiny features. They scored them on whether the platform actually met the spec the documentation team had written.
By the end, only two tools were still standing: ClickHelp and Document360.
Pricing model didn’t fit a multi-product setup
During the evaluation, Document360 made it to the final two. According to the interviewee, the main reason it was ultimately ruled out came down to how it priced additional projects:
- Charges per additional project
- Cost scales with every new product manual
- Cost forecasting becomes difficult at scale
- Hard to justify across a multi-domain product suite
- One portal hosts all product documentation
- Adding more projects doesn’t increase the cost
- Predictable, forecastable pricing
- Single-sourcing reduces duplication across products
They charge you per additional project… so that would make it cost a lot more in our case, and make cost forecasting challenging.— Documentation Lead, on why Document360 didn’t make the cut
Why ClickHelp was the right fit
ClickHelp stood out as the most complete solution across both technical and operational dimensions. It met the spec, fit the budget model, and — crucially — answered every question the team threw at it.
Single-sourcing across similar products
Reuse content with snippets, variables, and conditions — write once, publish across multiple manuals.
One portal for the whole suite
A single ClickHelp portal hosts every product’s documentation, regardless of how many publications the team manages.
Predictable, project-friendly pricing
Adding more projects doesn’t add line items to the bill — cost forecasting stays straightforward.
Security-ready for public sector
Support for custom login and authentication mechanisms met the team's internal compliance requirements. EU-based hosting: all data and backups are stored within a single European geographic region, ensuring compliance with data localization requirements.
Responsive support, AI-powered help
A responsive human team backed up by an AI-powered chatbot — questions got real answers, fast.
Every requirement, answered
A long list of technical questions came back fully answered. No blockers, no hand-waving — that was the turning point.
I sent a long list of technical questions to all candidates. ClickHelp answered everything thoroughly. There were no blockers. That was a key turning point for me.— Documentation Lead, on the final selection
See what they saw during the trial
Two weeks of hands-on use, single-sourcing tested, every requirement verified — without hitting a single blocker. You can do the same.
How They Migrated more than 2,000 Topics Without Stopping Releases
Incremental migration, zero disruption
For teams moving large volumes of content, the migration itself is often the biggest source of anxiety: will it break existing workflows? Will releases slip?
This team avoided both. Rather than a big-bang cutover, the documentation lead defined an MVP scope upfront (the minimum content needed to go live) and used ClickHelp's built-in import tools to handle the bulk of the transfer automatically. Today the portal holds about 2,400 topics across 12 projects and 15 publications — all managed by a team of 2 technical writers and 18 SME contributors.
How the migration ran:
- Import first, refine later — existing content was brought in using ClickHelp's import tools, handling the bulk of the transfer without manual copying
- Go live early, technically — an initial publication was made live at an early stage specifically to validate the in-product integration (the help button linking directly to ClickHelp pages) before the full content set was complete
- Fill in incrementally — remaining topics were added in the background, without blocking any product releases
- Self-led from start to finish — the documentation team drove the complete rollout internally, moving from trial to full production without external consultants or a dedicated implementation project
The content that took the most time wasn't the migration tooling — it was the content itself. Some topics required more rework than expected once they were in the new environment. That's a content quality decision, not a platform constraint.
Today the team:
- Maintains multiple manuals from a single portal
- Uses single-sourcing to reduce duplicate work across similar products
- No longer relies on Word or PDF as part of the pipeline
- Updates documentation in minutes instead of hours
- Manages 4 separate publications (2 products ? desktop/mobile) through one interface
- Handles fewer support requests thanks to better content discoverability
I use ClickHelp daily. Single-sourcing and output tags save me a lot of time. I haven’t found anything distracting in the platform so far.— Product Specialist, daily user
The platform felt slightly technical at first — but the flexibility and long-term efficiency gains far outweighed the learning curve.
The day-to-day, side by side
The biggest gains weren’t in any single feature — they were in how the entire workflow shape changed. Manual chains became single, conditional sources.
| Metric | Before · WordPress + Word/PDF | After · ClickHelp |
|---|---|---|
| Update process | Manual: Word → PDF → Upload | In-app editing + instant publishing |
| Time to update a section | Hours | ~30 minutes or less |
| Duplicate content effort | 100% manual, per product | 1 source + conditional outputs |
| Collaboration | Fragmented, per author | Centralized, multi-project setup |
| Implementation | External dependency | 100% in-house, self-led |
Next: AI features and localization
The team is now planning to test new AI features — including a built-in reader-facing chatbot — to further improve the customer experience and reduce support load. Language support and localization are also on the roadmap as the product suite scales internationally.
It’s clear ClickHelp isn’t just a better tool — it’s a more sustainable way to manage content at scale.— Documentation Lead
