Product Documentation at Forescout
Forescout provides automated cybersecurity and tool orchestration by continuously identifying, segmenting, and enforcing compliance for every device connected to an enterprise network. I worked at Forescout from 2019-2023.
Platform Documentation
Major contributions to these guides from Version 8.2 to Version 8.4.3:
Other Plugin Documentation
I contributed to the documentation of a wide range of plugins and created initial versions for the following:
-
Endpoint Visibility Behind NAT/SASE How-To Guide for V8.4: Document was removed from site. I can provide a PDF copy.
-
Forescout Cloud Multifactor Risk Scoring Service How-to Guide: Document was removed from site. I can provide a PDF copy.
Content Conversion Project (Microsoft Word to DITA)
During my stay at Forescout, we converted our content from Microsoft Word to DITA. I played a part in the following tasks:
-
Selecting a target documentation tool and platform: I presented and tested several candidate tools to the team. We decided to go with Heretto (previously known as EasyDita). Heretto is a Component Content Management System (CCMS). We liked the user-friendly interface, the native, non-proprietary DITA support, and smooth integration with our Zoomin documentation portal. Later, we obtained licenses for Oxygen XML Editor and connected Heretto to Oxygen via WebDAV, which enabled us to exploit Oxygen's more advanced XML manipulation, custom scripting, and offline editing.
-
Our contractor converted over 2000 pages of Word content from the current published version of the platform and components. However, there was still much heavy-lifting to do, due to:
- Word garbage remaining after initial conversion
- Word variables
- Simple snippets of reused content, mainly in the form of admonitions or partial sub-sections of procedures, such as the first three steps repeated in many procedures
- The sections in the Word files were not constrained to a strict information type, but we managed to apply labels to sections prior to conversion according to whether they were conceptual, task-oriented, or reference information. We wanted to apply DITA information architecture templates in Heretto from the start.
The conversion engine was able to discern similar or identical sections by giving the section a Reuse Score. If the score for a section was 98% or 99%, then we could assume it was a good candidate for creating a reusable snippet in Heretto. However, such reusables often contained conceptual, task-oriented, and reference information, and needed to be broken down into their constituents before importing to Heretto.
The heavy lifting was estimated to take several months, so each of the 10 writers had to continue working in Word and ensure they logged their changes during this time.
If AI had arrived two years earlier, the turnaround time could have been considerably shortened, as I discovered in later conversion projects. We could have done much of this quite easily using prompts.
Converting the raw material was a multi-stage process, partially built on scripts and partially on manual procedures. This included both adding artifacts needed for Heretto and removing garbage that was exported from Word.