How Babel Street Built a Secure Documentation Hub With a Team of Two 

Executive Summary

Babel Street, a leading AI-native risk intelligence platform trusted by government agencies and global enterprises, needed a documentation infrastructure that matched the security standards of its own product. With a two-person writing team and limited IT and engineering support, Babel Street consolidated a fragmented, documentation landscape into a single, SSO-secured, analytics-driven knowledge hub using Fluid Topics, without adding headcount, re-platforming its authoring environment, or sacrificing content governance. 

Babel Street at a Glance 

Babel Street is an AI-native Risk Intelligence Platform trusted by organizations across government, defense, and the private sector. Its platform provides access to critical digital environments, multilingual data, and online sources across the surface, deep, and dark web, enabling organizations to safely engage, collect, and operationalize intelligence at global scale. Combining unparalleled data access with advanced analytics and agentic workflows, Babel Street delivers mission-grade risk intelligence that supports informed, defensible decisions. 

Kathy Czeck is the Principal Technical Writer at Babel Street. With just one other writer by her side, she is responsible for all technical documentation across the company’s entire product portfolio. 

Broken Scripts, PDFs, and an Unmaintainable Documentation Environment

When Kathy joined Babel Street, the documentation landscape was fragile. The team had multiple products, all documented using DocBook scripts driven by command-line tooling.

As the sole technical writer at the time, Kathy needed a solution she could operate and maintain independently, without engineering support. She first migrated all documentation into Paligo, a structured authoring tool, which immediately gave her a stable, writer-friendly content base.

For delivery, she initially published to Zendesk, which served its purpose but came with limitations. Documentation was also published as PDFs that met the needs of customers receiving Java SDKs. As a start, the solution worked.

Growth and the Need for a Scalable Platform

When the company moved away from Zendesk, a new documentation platform was developed using sites generated directly from Paligo. There were multiple linked sites, with no cross-product search capability.

“To find things, you had to be in the right place to search.“

New products were added to the technical documentation, with new audiences and content access requirements. These products had their own complex requirements. Open, unauthenticated access to documentation was no longer acceptable. Authorization, role-based access, and visibility controls became non-negotiable requirements.

Fluid Topics, the Knowledge Platform That Works Without an IT Team 

Kathy had been evaluating content delivery platforms for some time. What ultimately drove her to Fluid Topics was simple: she needed a platform she could operate entirely with minimal support. 

The native Paligo-to-Fluid Topics integration was decisive. Kathy’s entire content library was already structured in Paligo, so her documentation was published seamlessly into Fluid Topics without requiring any re-platforming of her authoring workflow. 

Kathy credits Paligo as one of the best technology decisions she made, since it allowed content to evolve independently of how it was published. 

Just as importantly, Fluid Topics doesn’t require IT involvement or a dedicated engineering team to manage, essential for a two-person team without dedicated support infrastructure. 

From Documentation Repository to Customer Success Platform 

Fluid Topics transformed Babel Street’s documentation from a static repository into an active part of the customer experience. Instead of expecting users to know where to look, search across separate sites, or wait for help, the knowledge center brings product information together in one place and makes answers easier to reach at the moment of need. 

This new approach reduces customer effort and shortens time-to-answer by helping users find relevant guidance faster, whether they are learning a product for the first time, checking release information, or trying to complete a task inside the product workflow. By making documentation more discoverable, searchable, and connected to where customers already work, Babel Street can help users learn products faster, support stronger product adoption, and position documentation as a built-in part of the product experience, not a destination customers visit only after they are stuck. 

The platform also expanded beyond its original technical scope. When Babel Street’s marketing team learned about the project, they saw an opportunity to replace their SharePoint-based content repository with a better alternative. Marketing now independently manages and uploads content to Fluid Topics, restricted to internal employee access. 

Meeting Government-Grade Security Requirements 

Babel Street works with government agencies for whom content visibility is a serious operational concern. The ability to control who sees what, down to the individual document, product or even topic level, was a core requirement that ruled out simpler hosting solutions. 

Fluid Topics’ Role-Based Access Control gave Babel Street the administrative control needed to serve multiple audiences with different access levels: open content, restricted internal documentation, and secured customer-facing product guides, all within a single portal. 

Single Sign-On (SSO) has been central to this rollout. Kathy’s entire internal organization is now authenticated via SSO. More recently, engineering helped integrate SSO access directly within Babel Street’s SaaS product, where a “Knowledge Center” menu option lets customers click directly into the portal with seamless authentication. 

Smarter Self-Service: An AI Chatbot That Guides Users to Answers 

Fluid Topics also transformed how users interact with documentation. Rather than relying solely on a traditional search bar, employees and customers can ask questions in natural language through an AI chatbot that delivers answers based on Babel Street’s trusted documentation. For Kathy, the chatbot has become a valuable navigation tool, helping users quickly find the right guides, release notes, and product information. 

The chatbot’s quality has also held up well in testing: “I was actually surprised at its ability to answer some of the questions we threw at it.” 

Analytics as a Documentation Improvement Engine 

One capability Kathy has embraced most enthusiastically is Fluid Topics’ built-in analytics. Document-level and even topic-level visibility gives her direct insight into how users navigate the portal, what they search for, and whether they’re authenticated; intelligence that directly informs documentation decisions. 

Analytics helped Kathy diagnose a real usability problem: unauthenticated users were searching for content they couldn’t see, receiving zero results, and leaving without realizing they simply needed to log in. Her fix was practical: a prominent prompt on empty search result pages encouraging users to sign in. 

Kathy has gone further, using Fluid Topics’ API to pull analytics data into a custom dashboard built with a third-party tool, giving her a consolidated, on-demand view of the metrics that matter most. 

Bringing API Documentation Into the Unified Ecosystem 

One of Kathy’s near-term priorities is migrating Babel Street’s API documentation, currently hosted on a separate tool, into Fluid Topics, creating a truly unified experience for all content types. 

“I’d really like to just have it all in one place. That’s the main push.” 

The goal isn’t just consolidation for its own sake, but discoverability, having API reference content searchable alongside user guides, release notes, and marketing collateral within a single query. 

What’s Next: Case Deflection Through Salesforce Integration 

The integration Kathy and her team are most excited about is embedding Fluid Topics directly into Babel Street’s Salesforce-based support center. 

The strategic opportunity lies in surfacing relevant documentation and chatbot-powered answers at the moment a customer is about to open a support ticket within the support center itself. This integration represents the moment the knowledge hub becomes a true support deflection engine, meeting customers with answers before they need to ask. 

“Our goal is to help customers resolve questions before they ever become support issues.” 

A Platform That Enables a Small Team to Punch Well Above Its Weight 

Perhaps the most telling measure of Fluid Topics’ value at Babel Street is what it has enabled a team of two to accomplish: a multi-product, multi-audience, SSO-secured, analytics-driven knowledge portal, built and managed with minimal IT support and engineering resources, and without sacrificing the authoring workflow Kathy had spent years optimizing in Paligo. The team has evolved into a strategic capability, instead of simply a group that produces documentation.