General-Purpose Documentation Platform

The general-purpose documentation platform is the platform that is purposely designated as the bedrock of an enterprise documentation system. Most DocOps efforts focus on creating automation processes either in the form of platform extensions, or by creating external automation processes—for instance, implemented as CI/CD pipeline—to generate, convert or bring content into such platforms.

General-purpose documentation platforms are classified as follows:

• Wiki engines: they embrace the principle of shared responsibility by promoting the notion of ‘all hands on deck’ approach to the creation and maintenance of documentation.
• Static site generators: SSGs embrace the principle of truth proximity and the tenet of decoupled rendering by generating documentation directly from source files.
  
• Content management systems: CMSs have, in general, an antithetical approach to documentation given their intrinsic, less collaborative, ‘author vs reader’ paradigm but are still found at the heart of older enterprises.
• Jack of all trades platforms: these applications cover a wide range of use cases, such as project management, calendaring, and videoconferencing, presenting themselves a ‘one stop shop’ for all enterprise needs, including documentation. In all cases, they are substandard documentation platforms and the least aligned to fundamental DocOps principles.

Pros and Cons

The choice of an adequate main general-purpose documentation platform is essential and will have an impact on:

• The number of positive documentation experience outcomes as a result of the platform’s conformance to documentation system tenets. For example, the inclusion of a contemporary search and AI-prompt, embedding, and compositional capabilities out of the box.
• The number of DocOps mitigations (e.g., writing of custom SDK plug-ins or DocOps automation tasks) that must be implemented to compensate for gaps in the platform. For example, having to integrate a 3rd party text search engine.
• The ease with which DocOps engineers can consume and generate documents for said platform, and the control they have over document encoding and formatting. For example, whenever the platform natively supports DocOps-friendly formats such as Markdown or AsciiDoc.