Release notes

Fluid Topics Version 3.0

As we announced when releasing v2.7, Fluid Topics has engaged in a major technological redesign, and version 3.0 is the result of that work. Fluid Topics was already fast and easy to use, making it the most advanced content delivery solution on the market. Our new major v3 is even faster and simpler to use.

Usability Improvements

First and foremost, Fluid Topics has been redesigned as a single-page application: The search and the reader are now part of the same web page so that the switch between the two environments happens in a snap, with no page reloading. At the same time, we managed to slim down the logic and code embedded on the client side. We also moved it to the server to ensure that the experience was equally fluid on less capable devices, such as tablets and mobiles. We took advantage of this redesign to integrate feedback from our clients, resulting in multiple modifications of the UI, making it more readable and intuitive.

Unified Search

The search result page layout has been optimized to display any type of content as elements of the results list, including structured topics, knowledge base entries, community content, and unstructured documents like PDF, Word or PPT. Thanks to AFS multi-agent search capabilities, the nature of each type of content is leveraged for increased relevance.

From 3 to 8 UI Languages available

languagesFluid Topics User Interface is now available in eight languages, including English, German, French, Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Spanish and Italian.

Language Management

We have also added new language management capabilities:

  • UI language can be inherited from that of your portal, and automatically set to provide a more seamless experience.
  • Ability to automatically filter content in the search results based on either user language preferences or the UI language.

The underlying AFS semantic search handles more than 25 languages. It brings a new Japanese language analyzer, making it ideal for the different alphabets — Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji — and properly handling complexity such as tokenization, normalization, compound splitting and transliteration. Buckle up! Fluid Topics takes you to the Land of the Rising Sun.

Content Processing reinvented

We’re not just another DITA Web help system: Being able to aggregate any type of technical content is a core capability of Fluid Topics and a strong differentiator. We have the vision, knowledge, and a tremendous roadmap for building a true cognitive system that will support your customer support operations. Version 3 is another major step in that direction. We have entirely redesigned the content processing backend: It’s faster, more open and more powerful. The first results are:

  • More detailed processing reports with the possibility to go back in time
  • Shorter persistent URLs

New APIs for managing the knowledge hub — create content sources, push and delete content, trigger tasks, monitor processing jobs

New Author-IT Connector

logo-authorit

For those of you that use Author-it, we have developed a totally new Author-it ingestion engine with the help and support of the Author-it European technical team. We have greatly improved the support of variables assignment and variants, including baseline facet values and on-demand facets.

Versatile DITA support

For DITA content processing, Fluid Topics v3.0 ships with multiple DITA-OT runtimes (the latest of each major release: 1.7, 1.8, 2.1, etc) and offers the capability to activate the version corresponding to your content.

Upgraded to Antidot v7.8 platform

Fluid Topics leverages version 7.8 Antidot technology platform (the leading content processing and semantic search technology), which was released in November 2015.

Please give this new version a spin
and let us know what you think.

If you want to know the roadmap and participate to the choices of the next features, feel free to contact us.
We develop Fluid Topics for you.