Five reasons to choose Superdesk for your next collaborative project
Superdesk's key features
We’ll admit it: software user manuals can make for tough reading. While they’re always packed with helpful tidbits and smart insights, most technical documentation is also riddled with jargon and complexity that obscures product features, usability tricks, and other useful details.
Aware that these digital goldmines are rarely page-turners, we recently curled up with all 145 pages of our Superdesk Manual – so you don’t have to. In the process, we unearthed a few hidden gems that we thought were worth (re)sharing.
Overview
Superdesk is simultaneously a KMS (knowledge management system) and a CMS (content management system), which makes it suitable for organisations such as research institutes or collaborative projects that may publish a high volume of content in the same way as a newsroom, albeit not publicly. What’s more, its API-first structure provides flexibility for the evolution of content management and publishing needs. With a content API that is read-only, Superdesk has the ability to share content with project members or other stakeholders even before it is published, a handy feature for organisations that need to keep customers aware of what’s coming up, but don’t want to share it with the world.
Easy Content Collaboration
Another great feature of Superdesk is its collaborative tools. For instance, you can create “shared discussions” by tagging and notify colleagues in the body text of a story that is being edited. This is done through the “Inline Comments” feature in the Editor pane. You can also use the “Comments” feature to flag and share a story in its entirety.
Multilingual
Superdesk encodes multilingual support in the user-interface (UI) as well as for published content. For instance, users working in the same installation can set the UI to their preferred language, even when colleagues are using different languages. Superdesk can also publish content in a variety of languages.
Powerful Search
Combining the indexing capability of Elasticsearch with the parsing capability of the NewsML-G2 news metadata standards makes it easy to search and locate content in the CMS.
Versioning
Every time an article is saved, Superdesk retains a copy of the article in its previous form, making it easy to find and reference past versions of your content.
Superdesk Publisher
Superdesk Publisher (yes, it has its own user manual) is a lightweight open-source renderer for news articles and other content delivered via an API feed. It is designed to work natively with Superdesk but can also be adapted to work with any compatible API. Superdesk Publisher serves as a central dashboard to route and manage content to a variety of media assets. In other words, it is the front end of the CMS.
Among its key features is multi-tenancy, which gives organisations the ability to manage multiple websites or output channels from a single Superdesk Publisher instance. Publisher’s templates were also built with mobile devices in mind, ensuring that websites will automatically be displayed correctly no matter a user’s screen size.
There is of course lots more to discover in our (very readable, we believe) user manuals. Of course, if you ever get stuck or need us to explain something in more detail, get in touch; we’re here to help.
Is Superdesk right for your organisation? Visit https://www.superdesk.org/demo to schedule your free Superdesk and Superdesk Publisher demos today.
