We’re a small team with a big heart

2018

Marybeth, Pete, and Stephen start the year off with a bang with a mini-company trip to Disney World. Catherine and Marybeth meet up in May for Write the Docs Portland. The entire team of five meets in London and train hops through Europe for Write the Docs Prague.

We hire Kate, another former customer and evangelist, who just completed hiking the Appalachian Trail. She takes over from Lakshmi.

We're now GDPR compliant and Privacy Shield certified. We start offering an Enterprise plan and paid professional services.

We also branch out a bit and start sponsoring Jacob Moses’ The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast. We love the title as well as Jacob’s excellent focus on issues that matter to a lot of our users.

We release a total rewrite of our search functionality, built on Elasticsearch.

Customer count mildly increases; enterprise and paid professional services increase revenues.

2019

Again, we start the year off with a bang with a partial-company retreat to Disney World (Marybeth, Pete, Kate, and Stephen), where we meet Jerrard, who we hire later in the year to help with support and professional services.

We hire our first additional developer in March. Spicer is from Portland, Oregon, adding another time zone to our owl parliament’s reach.

Catherine, Kate, and Marybeth meet Spicer in person at Write the Docs Portland.

The Write the Docs community keeps on giving; Marybeth hires our first information security owl from a local Write the Docs meetup. (They prefer privacy, as security owls are wont to do, so you can call them OwlSec for short!)

With the 2019 hiring, our parliament is up to 8 owls. And we officially reorganize and retitle a little, with Kate taking over the support knowledge base, release notes, and a more formalized QA process and Stephen officially becoming the head of professional services.

This year sees exciting changes on the product side as well, including the release of three major new features:

• Subscriptions: daily or weekly email notifications that your readers can opt into to receive information on new and updated articles in the categories they care about
• Version Notes: a freeform notes field available for article versions, allowing editors and reviewers to leave notes on what’s changed or what still needs to be done
• The Widget 2.0 beta release: a total rewrite and updating of our embeddable contextual help widget, with a tabbed layout and full navigation support

2020

Oh 2020, what a year you were. We like to keep things positive, so let’s begin with the best part: we have our company retreat in Steamboat Springs with nearly the entire parliament present!

The year has seen some adjustments in some of our owls' roles, and some new faces added to the parliament:

• We hire Sorin, a full time support engineer from Romania.
• Catherine starts our guest blogging program with help from Deborah, Swapnil, and Nick.
• Jerrard becomes Master of Coin and takes on ownership of our billing processes. If you've had an invoice or payment issue, you've probably talked to him!
• We hire David from Pennsylvania to help increase our development velocity.
• Deborah officially comes on board to help with our blog, social media, and updated API docs!
• We hire Zach, a full time support developer in New Hampshire.
• We start working with CloudButton to better streamline and scale our AWS infrastructure.

It’s a year of important milestones for us as a company, too:

• We start our B Corp journey in the midst of the pandemic.
• KnowledgeOwl turns 5! To celebrate, we conduct our first annual customer survey and are amazed by the responses.
• We also officially become a multi-media company by buying The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast from Jacob Moses.

We consider ways that we can use KnowledgeOwl for Good, beyond the B Corp certification. This includes:

• Posting publicly about Black Lives Matter and racial equity in the United States
• Our new 2% for People and Planet donation program
• Creating a mission statement and working on a five-year vision

On the product side, the additional hiring has allowed us to focus on a number of great features, including:

• Major updates to the cookies we use and how we set them, to abide by Chrome’s new tighter cookie enforcement
• An integration with Let’s Encrypt to provide free, auto-renewing SSL certificates to all of our customers
• Ongoing improvements to Widget 2.0, which gets ever-closer to its permanent stable release (too many to reasonably link to release notes on--just trust us!)
• Creating a Recently Viewed Articles widget for use on your homepage/righthand column
• Adding KnowledgeOwl release notes and blog posts to the app dashboard, so you can keep a better eye on what we’re up to
• Tag Library updates (hidden tags; merging/creating tags in the library) and the creation of the File Label Library

2021

This year, we double down on structural and infrastructure changes. This includes some staffing changes, saying goodbye to a few owls and adding some new faces, including:

• Will comes onboard as a fractional Chief Operations Owl

We launch our fully rebranded public website in March. (You're looking at it now!)

We also make significant progress on a series of infrastructure improvement projects, including:

• Successfully transitioning our development and production stack to Docker
• Changes to how our background worker processes long-running jobs to help improve performance
• Implement additional network infrastructure security
• Add on-demand scaling for application tiers
• Upgrades to our database and code base

On the product side, we focus on enhancing a lot of existing features or making the user interface more intuitive:

Editor & editing workflow

• Creating an archived publishing status
• Majorly upgrading our revision history difference comparison
• Allowing you to find and restore deleted files in the File Library
• A tags usage report so you can see how many articles and categories reference a specific tag
• Splitting out the hide from navigation options to have more detailed options (such as hide from home page and hide from table of contents)
• Adding banners and thumbnails to articles and icons to categories
• A new article delete workflow that allows you to set up redirects to still-published content
• Automatic permalink duplicate checking and redirects for permalink changes
• A new create version workflow when you have unsaved changes in the editor

General functionality

• Renaming the New, Updated, Popular, and Related Article lists and making their length configurable
• Adding reader groups and refined categories to the Searches with no Results Report
• The ability to preview changes made in Settings > Style

Glossary

• Showing glossary terms in search results
• In-line glossary controls to edit and delete terms
• A Search Setting so that when someone searches for "glossary", they're prompted to view your glossary

Manage Articles

• Expanding the tags filters to support filtering to articles including some tags and excluding others
• Adding a category filter as well as a category column

Readers

• Adding filtering to the Readers page
• Building out better methods to bulk edit, approve, and deny readers

SAML/SSO

• Smarter welcome emails for SAML/SSO readers
• Creating an SSO-specific menu and supporting Custom SAML mapping rules

Docs

• Deborah releases a total overhaul of our API documentation 
• We start using Redoc to display our API documentation

Security

• The ability to enable server-side HTTP Response Headers

2022

We start the year off on an owl-mazing note by hiring a new Lead Support Owl, Anne.

Much of the first six months of the year is dedicated to finishing the last of our infrastructure upgrades, which we joyfully complete right around the Summer Solstice. (What better way to spend the longest day in the northern hemisphere?)

During this time, we make several notable improvements to our Support documentation, including:

• Overhauling our Getting Started Guide
• Adopting Prism for our syntax highlighting
• Hosting our first KnowledgeOwl Docs Day, an internal day dedicated to documentation. We hung out in the metaverse to each work on updating or creating new documentation for either our support knowledge base or our internal knowledge base!

In October, we release the full redesign of our blog, to bring it fully in-line with the rest of last year's redesign. We also launch our new Wisdom Wednesday drop-in educational series and start our YouTube channel.

At the end of the year, we start looking for new Lead Customer Success Owls and new Senior Developer Owls; stay tuned to 2023 to see how that search pans out!

On the feature side, we released a number of feature enhancements, including:

Editor & editing workflow

• Scheduling an article's publication (voted 3rd in our 2021 Annual Customer Survey!)
• Scheduling an article's archival
• A category icon picker that lets you select Font Awesome icons or icons stored in your File Library and preview what they look like.

General look & feel

• A new article-actions merge code to simplify the HTML used in your Custom HTML > Article template
• Upgrading the version of Font Awesome used in all knowledge bases from Font Awesome 4 to Font Awesome 6, adding a whole range of icons that weren't previously available
• A new template for your home page to display top-level categories with category icons 😍

File Library

• A new List View so you can see more of the metadata about your files and sort them
• Updated file caching rules to help remove cases where updates to files in File Library weren't showing in live knowledge bases quickly
• File References to see all the places your files are being used 😍

Contextual help widgets

• Deprecated the Legacy and Modern widgets
• Compatibility with cookieless browsers
• Updated caching rules to improve performance
• An option to disable learned bias completely

Integrations & webhooks

• An option to designate a reader account as basic auth so that you can integrate with third-party tools (like chatbots, etc.)
• Webhooks to fire when an article is archived
• Webhooks to fire when the New or Updated callout is added to an article
• For webhooks that are unable to send, we added an automatic webhook deactivation process that deactivates webhooks that have failed for more than 24 hours, which can help troubleshoot broken integrations

Manage Articles

• In a custom filter, the ability to exclude all tagged articles
• In Bulk Edit, the ability to add New/Updated callouts in bulk

PDFs

• Including topic articles in PDFs
• Being able to index PDF content when Secure File Library is used
• Adding clickable hyperlinks by default instead of making customers manually add it via Custom CSS
• Properly generating preformatted code blocks in PDFs

Security

• Stopped allowing a range of less-secure cipher suites
• Updated our x509 SAML signing cert to use a more secure format

We also release two highly-requested features from our 2021 Annual Customer Survey:

• Broken link checker & report
• Article Favorites

2023

As often happens, we start off the year welcoming new owls to the Parliament! This year, we decided to give our Support Owls some proactive counterparts and add to our developer talent pool. Please help us welcome:

• Erica, Lead Customer Success Owl
• Veronica, Lead Customer Success Owl
• Sue, Senior Developer Owl

We start the year off on a good note by quickly getting the Customize Text tool released into beta testing.