Listen to this post: You can download the MP3 file, subscribe in iTunes, or listen with Stitcher. Beginnings Up until two years ago, Anders Svensson and his colleagues, based in Sweden, provided DITA and XML consulting full-time to European companies looking to migrate and manage their content in an XML structure. Although many companies could understand the DITA spec, migrating content to DITA in bulk, managing it in a user-friendly content management system, and building out the PDF and HTML deliverables were more complex and daunting tasks than companies could handle themselves. This was the focus of Svensson’s company, Expertinfo. After years of steering companies toward custom setups or existing CCMS systems, which often cost a small fortune to use and included a host of problems (long deployment projects, steep learning curve, poor user acceptance, etc.), Svensson felt it was time to build their own system. Having been on the lookout for good systems for a long time, he finally came into contact with Frank Arensmeier, who Svensson describes as nothing short of a programming genius. Frank had been working on exactly the type of system Svensson was looking for. They teamed up and, starting with the existing foundation code base that Arensmeier had built, they put together a group of engineers and set out to build an affordable, easy-to-use CCMS that would solve the many problems Svensson and his colleagues had encountered through their years of DITA consulting. This is how Paligo started. The release Paligo is an XML-based component content management system (CCMS) that users access entirely in the cloud. Paligo’s team built on top of a custom topic-based version of Docbook XML to create a number of user-friendly features. Paligo's user interace With Paligo, you can do the following: Drag and drop topics into publications (similar to DITA maps) Configure variants for different products and/or output formats Easily find strings and text snippets that can be re-used Render attractive, responsive HTML5 websites as well as print quality PDFs and several other formats Collaborate with other users and reviewers simultaneously on the same project Manage translations to any language Manage versions and branches Tag topics with taxonomy categories to surface related content, and more You can see a more detailed list features here. Since its launch in 2014, Paligo has been steadily growing and has just released Version 2, which provides a significant revamp to their code and makes authoring and content management in the interface smoother and easier. Who uses Paligo Paligo primarily attracts documentation teams who want to take the next step beyond help authoring tools (HATs) toward a content management system. The most common customers are those using Flare, Robohelp, Author-it, or DITA and need something more robust to handle their content. These customers usually have heavy single-sourcing requirements for their content, often including translation as well. While these customers want a CCMS, they either don’t have budget and resources to implement high-end CCMS platforms like IXIASOFT, Trisoft, or others (which can cost $100-200k per year), or they want to avoid the threshold and complexity of an installed system. But they still want a fully featured system to handle every documentation need. On a platform and price comparison, Paligo’s most comparable competitor would probably be easyDITA, which is a cloud-based CCMS that has also been growing. Both systems are XML-based, with easyDITA being based on DITA and Paligo on Docbook. But the products differ in other ways as well. easyDITA follows more closely the DITA content model and the DITA Open Toolkit, whereas in Paligo the DocBook content model only provides the document structure, and the features are developed around it in the database programming paradigm. Because of the database model as the foundation, where each individual text string is actually stored separately