Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch, is joined by the full EDU team to discuss the launch of the new Vermont Systems Knowledge Base powered by HelpJuice. The team highlights why we chose to switch to the new platform, what you can expect to see when you first access the site, and what kinds of content is already available to you!
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:09
Oh yeah. I always love hearing that, especially after you've taken a little bit of time off. But we're back. And we have something very excited to say, tell everybody about happy December, December the month of help juice, as it will soon be known across the annals of history. We're joined by basically all of edu here. And even though it's just edu, that's on the call today, the announcement that we're talking about helped us has been a big project with a lot of people involved. And we're just going to get right start there started almost immediately with us. Bret always does a much better job at this than I do. But I'm going to point out that we can use the q&a Button down at the bottom to ask any questions, you can use chat, if you just want to kind of converse about things. I'm actually going to paste a link into chat right now, which will get you to an article in helps us. So with that being said, let's start out with kind of a why we're doing all of this, Cullen?
Cullen Barber 1:05
Great. Yeah. Thanks, Zach. Thanks for joining us, everybody. Yeah, we're really excited as you can hear the excitement in Zach's voice about, you know, announcing this, this big project that the edu team and many others at Vermont systems have been working on for many months. So help juice as Zack mentioned, is our new self help tool. It's a third party kind of cloud hosted application, that we're gonna combine all of our current self help tools into one spot with, and we're in the beta mode now. And then this month, we're ready to really fully launch this into really full production and use for you as customers and our staff internally. In, you know, big reason we were doing this is we heard from you the customer that, hey, you've got some good tools out there. But sometimes it's hard to find them or wish we wish it was easier to find them. You know, even though we think we're in the right tool, we can't seem to locate what we're looking for. So this product has taking taken all of our current knowledge base articles, our videos, so self help videos, including the Fast Track videos, which have been greatly expanded on recently, as well as our inap help. So we're taking the Field level in app help from within RecTrac 3.1. And that's also going to be presented into this application, as well as a bunch of other reports, articles topic docs that you couldn't easily find without contacting support in the past. So we're really excited about launching this and we, we look forward to having you use it, we think it's going to provide an easier avenue for you to give us feedback on it's going to have some analytics, which I think Zach is going to going to touch on and Julia is going to touch on how much easier it will be to manage hopefully, and that will make it so we can get things out there quicker, and hopefully get more stuff out there. So I'll pass it back to us Zack, and I'm not sure who was up next is to present their little section.
Zach Malloch 3:14
Well yeah, you're talking about kind of consolidating all this sort of stuff. And Bret has been a key part of especially taking the in app help out but tell us a little bit more Bret.
Bret Alarcon 3:25
All right well firstly I want to kind of start with talking about 10.3 and 3.1 articles in helped us knowledge base. So basically what we heard that it was a big problem like you know trying to research something, find the answer to something and you think you found the answer but it's for 10 Three and doesn't really help for 3.1 so we decided you know 10.3 is kind of in the past enough that we're not going to mess with 10 Three anymore all the 10.3 articles we removed from the knowledge base so everything in the knowledge base right now is going to reflect upon three one now when you get in there you will see some things about 10.3 but it just means that it applies to both 10.3 and three ones so you'll see some of those articles that applies to both but for temporary only we've went ahead and removed all those.
So as Cullen said before we decided you know we needed to have a place for one stop shopping for everything that we needed to do or you needed help for so that's why we decided to put everything in the same exact spot so you don't have to go you know go to an FTP site or you have to go to you know our knowledge base or you have to go to who knows something else. So we compiled our knowledge base articles are in up help and which we call our Field help or topic Doc's are mod listings fast track and other videos and rec chat so you no longer again have to go to different places to find out what you want. It's all in one location. So speaking of the in app help, which again, we're calling the Field help now, that was a big undertaking that I went through. So basically, we needed a way to export all the in-app help out of RecTrac. And important helped you. So there was no direct import export for that. So we had to go through and kind of massage the data as we went. So you'll notice that as actually right now, everything that we imported in is now in an accordion Field. So that means instead of just getting a big pile of words, right on your Screen, for you know, information, you might not need, you know, you just need a particular area, you can find that particular area using one of these accordion Tabs, Click on it, and then you'll get the information about that. So to get this compiled to look in the veal was did take some work. I'm sure there's still some links in here that need to be ironed out to get corrected. But just know that you know, it's not 100% right now that we're still working on things, but hopefully in the near future should be completed. And I think thats all I had.
Zach Malloch 6:19
Yeah, absolutely. And talking about some of the other pieces so Bret kind of focused a bit on the the Field level help the the helps that you would get to through little eyepieces right here. One thing that we we are losing slights capability, because we're not displaying all of the help just in the hover over but for the benefit of getting you to everything. So you can find the Field level help. And from there, you can get to a topic doc. And from there, you can get to a RecChat video, and from there, you can get to a fast track video, we thought it was definitely worth it. Particularly when we talked about all the other things that will Ben will gain from this. I did want to toss it over to Seth real quick. He's going to talk about some of the videos and a neat new thing that we're including with all of our video recordings in here. Tell us about about that Seth.
Seth Warren 7:05
Yeah, thanks Zach. First of all, I just want to say how excited I am about help juice I think light Cullen's mustache, it's going to be new for a lot of folks coming into this. But I think you'll find like us that it's for the best in the end in the end of it. So so. So Dan and I worked a lot on our RecChat and fast track videos, transcribing them. So then you not only have access to the video itself, but also a transcription of said video. So if something isn't quite so clear, or after you watch the video, if you want like a copy of that text from that video, it's all translated in here. So if we could open up a RecChat here, can so when you come in, so you'll have a summary of the episode itself, the video itself, and then you can expand this transcript that gives not only the people that are talking, but the text of you know, the context of what it is that they're saying throughout the video. So kind of kind of a nice thing, which did take some time, listening to X number of videos and transcribing them just take a little bit. So. So obviously, you know, hopefully everything is spelled correctly. And in the right context, I think it should be but you know, you never know. Along with that you do have related articles. So if you're looking for a specific RecTrac on something, and that covers most of what you're looking for, and maybe you're looking for a little bit more information beyond that, you might look to the related articles just right next to that video. So maybe there is a topic doc that coincides with that RecChat or that fast track that you can then access. And then and then get more information from there. So so a lot of great stuff with the video aspect of things. Beyond that to Dan and I and Julia have all been working on topic docs, as well. And if we can just go to a topic doc maybe like background visit processing, I know is a is a good descriptor is a good option for one here
Zach Malloch 9:18
a little deeper, there we go.
Seth Warren 9:23
And so so with the topic docs, we have a table of contents that you'll see on your left hand side that does link down to different parts of the document itself. The images we've been going through and updating and replacing any image that has the old UI with the new UI, where I think maybe I think it's safe to say like 87 to 90% of the way through the images maybe even more than that. So most of them should be updated. So in the case where we had old images before you should see you know, real printed images to the new user interface. Also a lot of these topic Doc's have links as a part of them that might bring you to a specific aspect of help to give you more information about static parameters, for instance, is a common one, or might also link back to other topic Docs as well. So if you need to be familiar with how to use Profile assignments, in order to do background visit processing, you can link back to you know, our, our topic doc on Profile assignments, and then then go and do the background visit processing afterwards. We also have some key words in each of the topic box as well. So when it comes to searching for them, you know, hopefully one of the words that you search for will hit one of those key words, and bring up that document. And so now some of that is kind of best guess on our part there. So you know, sometimes I might refer to something as a Profile, you might still refer to something as a device if you were 10.3, centric. And so you know, like, there's a little bit of wiggle room there for us to add more key key words. And I think, and hopefully, I'm not stepping on anybody's toes here. But after you read a document like this, or like a fast track, or RecTrac, at the bottom, you'll have this was this article helpful. So if you find that we're missing, if you find that we're missing a key word or an aspect to it, you can also give feedback to it as well, which we will get, and then can go and look to make those changes going forward.
Zach Malloch 11:34
Yeah, and we'll get a little bit more into this in a moment here. But you can either post anonymously, or if you'd like to get our feedback about your feedback, you can get a little note here, but we'll be talking about this in just a moment. Seth, did you have anything else you wanted to mention there,
Seth Warren 11:51
um, just that I mean, like, even with this going live, I know there's still a couple topic, Doc's that we've got to, we've still got, like a few keywords to add in, or maybe like images to update there. So certainly, as we're, you know, as we're live, and you're going through, if you do notice something like that, you can make a note of it. And then, you know, anything that we're missing there, you know, we'll certainly, you know, have updated here over there. You know, as as we started out, this help juice journey. You know, I guess the only other thing maybe to note too is if you are looking at these you know, I know some of the topic Doc's are from like an older time, so even though they're in helped us now maybe they do refer to like certain paths to, you know, older, you know, the older UI in terms of accessing things. So if you didn't notice something inconsistent there to just please make sure to leave feedback for us. And we can get the added in and updated and edited so. So they're all up to date. So other than that huge thanks to Dan and Julia, for for helping with it too. So I know I did all the talking, which I, which I apologize for I tend to blabber on. So anyway, that is that's me.
Zach Malloch 13:07
You always contribute very important stuff. Seth, we're happy when you talk. But I think that that actually leads us so I'm going to change the order just slightly. Julia, if you're ready to go with it, because Seth mentioned that one of the other benefits that we have from this is an easier path towards updating documentation, putting in new documentation. And Julia is probably the person who was most affected by the difficulty that we currently have in doing that, and I think is maybe the most excited about. The improvements are going to have Julia.
Julia Shefcheck 13:43
Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving. If you're like me, you're not ready for Christmas. If you are, you can throw some tips on how you did that into the chat. But most exciting definitely for me. And I think for you as customers ultimately is the old way as I'm already referring to it, because I'm so excited to put new help in whether it be Field level help a new topic doc, it had to go through the whole development process of first being coded and then being put into the database and going through the QA process. So it took an unnecessarily long time, at least for my view as a writer. So what's so exciting now is when you want help changes if you make a request, we work with our development team, if we're working on a new feature, but essentially now, if you have a simple update, if you note something in a topic Doc is outdated. And if you put that in the article feedback, the change can happen. Pretty lickety split, depending on priority of other changes, similar changes we have with updates but I can go straight into the tool and write it and publish it and it will be done. So it is going to make the process go much faster and be much more streamlined so and get help to you much faster. So
Zach Malloch 15:17
yeah, and that's a, then that leads into my most exciting feature of help juice is, and that ties into that article help and feedback. But we have analytics now. So that's maybe, you know, we can see exactly what people are searching for. And we can see if there's no clear no articles that are coming up. If we were only putting in SMS, whenever we were talking about our messaging capabilities, and we saw somebody typing in text messaging as the search in that wasn't bringing up the right article, then we can see that right here, we can go through these things. And we can just make sure that we're getting pertinent results by kind of recreating these searches ourselves, or customizing them adding keywords to the appropriate articles as Seth mentioned, but also because we're transcribing the record chats, because we're transcribing the Fast Tracks, it's going to search the content of what said in each of those situations, as well as just you know, providing the video itself. And so this is kind of, we're basically wrapping up phase one, which is all the consolidation of all of the different information that we have in all of these disparate areas, and presenting it to you with the minor updates, like the the images that Seth mentioned, I think most of those are there. Phase two is coming with going live. And this will be a default as part of the December RecTrac, release two, that's going to be 3.1.10.16 to 16, I believe. And, but as long as you're on 14 3.1.10.14 or newer, we can enable this for you, if you want to get started with help juice and you don't want to wait until the December release. To release the call, if you just get in touch with support, they can walk you through it. It's just a Toggle and your license Profile. So you do need somebody from support to decode you to get into that. But once you have gotten into it, you can start using it. And then once again, 3.1.10. 14, or newer. And that happens to be unfortunately, I have too many zoom windows open here.
So let me see if I can get to my search easily ready to go. There it is. If I go back to the FAQ FAQ, which is right here, welcome. Welcome to help juice, I posted this link into the chat, I might do that again, just real quick, because if anybody joined after I posted it, then you wouldn't be able to see it. So here we go to everyone, there's the link once again. And so you can access this. Now this is currently an unencrypted link. So this you can copy and paste it. Theoretically, if you wanted to, you could send it to people that we don't want you to send it to. So it's going to be encrypted before it is officially released in the default. But RecTrac is kind of calling home to get that URL. So as soon as we encrypt it, it'll just start working with the encrypted URL, you won't have to do anything to update your RecTrac. At that point. We have all the details in here. So if we talk about how can I access helped us this is where we have that version number. So if you can't remember what I said, it's just right in this article itself. And I also wanted to just mention a couple of things about making this work a little bit better for us. So we talked about the in app help. And this is really great because we left the Field name here. So if you're doing custom reports or anything like that, that's one of the most useful things is being able to see what the actual Field names are. So you know what you're looking for what you're pulling in, we Click on this, we get into the fees Screen, there's our amount, we can get all the details about what we put into that amount Field. Now where it doesn't work 100% The way that we'd ideally like it to, let's say I wanted to figure out what's going on with this minimum payment amount. So I Click on that, and it brings me to the SAFee Help and that's great. But I don't see the minimum amount here. It's not highlighted or anything. So we have a workaround that has a good success rate, but not a perfect success rate that should be released with the December release. So that should highlight and center. So you know, if we do a CTRL F, this is going to be the kind of the shortcut that I would recommend that you guys get kind of used to with this. And then I Type in minimum or minimum Mini, then we get our minimum payment amount and then have a payment option. So basically, what's coming out in 3.1 point two and point 16 is kind of passing this search parameter to highlight the appropriate Field. So you basically see this high lighted, it would be collapsed. But you would at least see the Field that you clicked on to get to the Screen, and then you'd be able to expand it. Of course, it's not as much of a deal, or as an issue when you have shorter Field help screens. But in this case, it is kind of important, we just want to be upfront about the the awesome stuff that we're super excited about, but also that there are a couple of things that we're going to be looking to enhance and improve as we go. So I think that that is most of what we wanted to cover.
Cullen Barber 20:31
I was gonna maybe just step back a little bit, if somebody asks a good question about well, how do you how do you access it, and we, we provided a direct link right now, right, and you talked about accessing it from RecTrac. And in the future, or if you're on that 14th version, we can turn it on to have access to it so. So kind of the long term idea is to access helped us and really our new knowledge base, you would be inside of RecTrac, to basically get authenticated to it. And we're also working on, you know, if you log into our current support portal, where there's a current knowledge base, giving you access from there as well. And we're working to kind of remove some things in the current support portal. So that, you know, if you're looking for a knowledge base, or you know, a video, eventually we're going to redirect you right to help juice for those things. And we're going to basically take away the old knowledge base from the Support Portal, if you will. So those will be the two future access points. Currently, as Zach has posted that URL in the chat, you can just hit it directly without, you know, without RecTrac or support portal access, but down the road that will will change. So hopefully that that helps people a little bit. So you're going to gain access from you know, being inside of RecTrac. Three, one, or going to support portal.
Zach Malloch 21:57
And I had support portal written on my notes just forgot it. Thank you very much.
Cullen Barber 22:01
Sure. I think somebody did have a question about is helped us gonna track, you know, are their contact information? Could they potentially get spammed from this? You know, that's, I think it's a good question. But from my understanding, no, you should not be getting tracked, and you should not be getting any spam, you're actually going to be moved into help juice anonymously. Okay, we're not actually tracking you. It's if you decide to leave feedback, I think there's an option in the comments, you could, you could put in your email address, if you wanted us to directly get back to you on something, but I don't believe we're actually going to be tracking any emails or contact information. Zacher anybody knows anything differently? Definitely speak up. But that's, that's what I understand.
Zach Malloch 22:48
Yeah. So this is if you do this, and you and you want to be notified about the change, that's the only way that your email will ever get associated with helped us. And the only reason it's there is so that we can let you know, when we have done something with your feedback. Now, most likely, you're just going to get a message from us letting us or saying like thank you for that information, we've entered into our our document queue to get addressed and updated as we go. So totally up to everybody, if you want to be anonymous with it. Or if you want to leave the notification about changes the one benefit, I'd say that maybe we would ask you to leave the notification there is if if you feel like it might be difficult for us to understand what you mean as far as what your responses if it would be better to have a bit more of a conversation that or if we had questions about what you meant we would be able to potentially get in touch with you. But that would be us getting into touch with you not help juice getting in touch with you. So hopefully that answers that question, but a good one. All right. Julia, did you have something else you wanted to mention?
Julia Shefcheck 23:57
Yes, I had neglected to mention that we also are going to be including release related information and help juice so you will be able to access the modification listings for each release. So thinking that that could help you if you want to see if an issue has been fixed, you will have access to the full Modifications Listing with all the changes. And then also, not currently, but down the line we're going to look to also include the vs connects mainly vs connects that require action items on your end so you have access to them easily in addition to just email but typically also there's a VSI Connect that goes out with each release. And it will notify you of key changes, high level changes so that way you'll have access and helped juice to release information as well as via email.
Zach Malloch 24:56
Yeah, the idea being if you're looking for background is it processing information Then you find the topic doc. But you also see that there was a recent Modifications Listing that had something to do with background visit processing, you Click on that, and you see the listing. And that's exactly the problem you're having. That's also part of the solution is understanding that there was a bug for it. So just update to this version, and then that will get resolved or that there's a special comment that or there's a special notification that went out, it says there's a patch file available to resolve a particular issue. So once again, it's that whole single source goal, to make it so that you can find everything about the thing that you're looking for in one location without having to switch back and forth between different sites and different portals.
Seth Warren 25:39
If I can add one thing, Zack, and I apologize that somebody's already mentioned this, but I think one nice thing that a lot of customers are going to get out of help juice from, like a user experience standpoint is that regardless of what your experience level in RecTrac, is, there's kind of something for everybody, like, if you're bringing on new users like to your location, like, there's a lot of good video resources that they could watch and see kind of like in real time, like how, you know, these basic kind of functions in RecTrac work. But then, you know, if you are a RecTrac wizard, you know, from, you know, with years of experience, you can still go in, I mean, I go in to help juice, you know, now when troubleshooting support cases, and can look up in reference information. So just, you know, it's, I think it's going to be a positive change for everybody, regardless of what your experience level is. And, you know, certainly, you know, certainly, I hope everybody takes the at least take some time to take a look at it, regardless of you know, that experience level to kind of poke around and, you know, see what works best for you in there.
Zach Malloch 26:50
And we didn't get another question here, he has some good ones coming in. So asking if we can sort by the latest document, for instance, searching for Modifications, Listing is just all the documents unsorted unitedsteel, to sort by the newest or latest. So one thing to address here is that because we've been kind of backloading, all this information, it's not necessarily chronologically accurate. And we're really relying on the a little bit more of a search to get you to the thing that you're looking for. So you know, if you know that 3.1 point in that 16 just came out, if you do a search for 3.1, but 10 dot 16, then that should come up with the Modifications. Listing is one of the first things it's not in there right now, don't do it, you won't find it. It's not released yet. But that's as we keep going, then we'll get to see a little bit, I guess, now I'm transitioning to the second part of my response to this is as we keep going, and as we make requests of help juice, we could ask them to prioritize if they don't already, and I believe that they probably would. There's some of these like more nuanced levels of the search logic that we're going to need to get some experience with. But they're also a responsive company that is looking to grow their product. And we can make enhancement requests based on your requests as far as what you think would be useful and beneficial. And just personally from the backend of the system, some of the analytics stuff, some of the ways that they sort articles, and like being able to filter or like control the display in that side is definitely something that I think would improve the experience of us working on it and organizing these 1000s of articles. So hopefully, when we make those types of enhancement requests, it could trickle down into the in user experience that you're seeing here. All right. So we've heard from everybody except Dan, and Dan has unfortunately been well, I mean, fortunately recovering from having the flu unfortunate that he's had to recover from the flu. But we're very glad he did. But we're not going to make him talk too much today.
Daniel Rotondi 28:49
I will just add one thing, Zach. If I've spent some time and help juice, searching for my answer, and I feel like I still need some clarification from a support tech. How can I submit a case from here?
Zach Malloch 29:03
Well, let's see. Let's do a CTRL F and just submit. Oh, it's right there. Especially if I spell it right, it's actually always going to be there, you don't have to use the Ctrl F, I just wanted to kind of hit that again. But this this will bring you to our support portal. So up until this point, you haven't had to log into anything I was already logged in here, you would need to log into the support portal. So you're at theoretical you're accessing helped us because you're logged into RecTrac You Click on something that brings you to this helped us then from health juice, you can Click on the Support Portal, and then you have access to everything you're expecting. So you have chat so you can start talking to somebody. We will be this is the part that Cullen was talking about that we're going to change because we're not going to be updating these articles anymore because they're coming from a different source we're going to basically make helps use our single source for public facing self service help. So instead of seeing all All these articles are going to have an article that will most likely tell you all about helped us and then direct you to help you. So you can access it from here as well. And then that's, you know, if you're coming from help juice, you need to start a case, then you can just start chatting, or you can go directly to case creation. But if you're coming here, because you're used to going to the support site, and we can see, Hey, there's this new support option, there's helped us that's out there right now, or there's the Vermont systems enhanced knowledge base, whatever, we're going to end up calling it, and you'll be able to access it from here. So thanks very much for bringing that up, Dan. And thanks everybody else for participating and sharing your perspective and the things that you're excited about. Thank you for the questions, especially keeps from bringing some of those in today. And for some of the comments in chat and for the people that have been working with help juice in helping us get some feedback already. Very, very useful and very, very helpful. And of course, if it was not for your customer feedback coming to us, then we wouldn't even necessarily be doing this project. So thank you for encouraging us to improve this for you. I think that's basically it. Does anybody have any final thoughts before we sign off?
Cullen Barber 31:10
I just got word from development. They they want to have the 16 release done well before the Christmas break. So they've got high hopes of having it out there maybe a week before that. So exciting that they've got a date potentially in their head. So it's on its way,
Zach Malloch 31:33
only there's a way to wrap that executable up and early Christmas present. Okay, well, I think that that's going to be it then. Thanks, everybody, for participating, everybody for listening, everybody for joining us on this journey. And Bret, I think we're ready for coming in for a landing.
Bret Alarcon 31:53
All right. Thank you, everyone.
Cullen Barber 31:54
Thanks, everybody.
Julia Shefcheck 31:55
Thanks, everybody.
Daniel Rotondi 31:56
Thank you