Ep 406 - AI Powered NetApp Docs

If you've ever tried to find documentation to answer a NetApp question in the past, you may have had some issues finding what you were looking for. But with the changes to how NetApp does documentation over the past few years, your results have gotten faster and more accurate.

The NetApp Docs team joins me to discuss how they've completely revamped the NetApp documentation experience and where generative AI fits into their future plan. app. I love NetApp because it's so fun.

Alright, I am here in my studio in my house and I have a whole bunch of people here today to talk to us about NetApp Docs, which is one of our things we offer here at NetApp to help enhance your overall experience. And we'll get more into that later, but first I want to go through the room here

and introduce everybody. So we'll start with Axel Davis and see the first person listed here. Axl, what do you do here at NetApp and how do we reach you? Hey, thanks, Justin.

I'm a software engineering manager here in Information Engineering at NetApp. So I run all of our supporting services for our documentation program. And we also run our content automation program, which works for other engineering teams to produce our API and CLI and

other auto-generated documentation. Okay, excellent. Also with this Grant Glass, Grant, what do you do here at NetApp and how do we reach you?

So I work as a applied and data scientist at NetApp. So I work a lot in generative AI and governance. I'm reachable at NetApp at the easiest possible email address grant.class at netapp.com.

I'm very happy to be here and excited to talk about our PROC documentation. So you're a data scientist, but I don't see any Bunsen burners

or glass beakers behind you. What's going on there? of that. Well, Data does it, you know, we have our spreadsheets and databases and arrays and Python notebooks

right that are all on the computer in front of me. So the magic really happens behind the screen, the most of behind it. All right. So you mentioned Gen AI and we have the original Gen AI here, Jen Kaufman.

Jen, what do you do here at NetApp? How do we reach you? Well, very much the way Grant is a data scientist with no science, I'm an information engineer

without engineering. I'm the director of the Information Engineering Organization at NetApp. That's our fancy terminology for tech pubs.

So all the content that is generated to help customers and employees and partners use NetApp products successfully. We have a small but mighty team of content creators

and Axel Davis's development team working to make sure that we can have everyone use our products successfully out there in the world. All right.

And last but not least, Adam Newton. Adam, what do you do here at NetApp? How do we reach you? Currently, the most important thing I'm doing

is trying to prevent my cat from coming across to the screen here. So I'm holding my hand out. My name's Adam Newton.

I'm the senior director of our Global Content Experience Services team, which comprises Jennifer's team, the Information Engineering team, Pubs, and globalization. We handle all of the product

and collateral globalization needs for the company and also all the data scientists helping us on the new frontiers of gender to the AI. All right, so we're here to talk about NetApp docs

and I don't know if you're familiar with the documentation of NetApp or the history of the documentation, but it has come a long way from previous times.

I mean, I've been here a long time. I've seen the documentation in previous iterations. And I could say confidently that's gotten better because you can actually find stuff now, right?

I mean, before it was tough, we'd shove things in PDFs which aren't searchable, web searches wouldn't find things. So we're making a lot of progress in that regard. But NetApp Docs is a little bit different, I think,

than the overall documentation effort at NetApp. So Adam, tell us what NetApp Docs itself is. So I'd actually like to start by going backwards a little bit and just say there were some guiding principles that informed where we are today, not the least of which was that we realized

several years ago, primarily with the advent of the cloud portfolio and that our bespoke system that we were using that was sort of a walled garden, which we authored content was a private domain that we weren't really able to move out of the business nor we were able to invite people in

to help us produce documentation. So we said, hey, we're gonna go to a more open mindset. And accordingly our systems and processes followed and Axel here on this call was pivotal

in helping us move from that closed XML based system to hub and open source standards. And so that was the mindset that led us to where we are today.

And then another big thing that we did You alluded to it, Justin, about findability, searchability was all of our content is freely available on the internet. And that was a huge change for us and has once again, I think, been part of our openness.

And it has led to a lot of the innovation we've had in the last two, three years. So we are a GitHub based organization called NetApp Docs. The site itself, docs.netapp.com is by far and away the most used web-sourced at NetApp the most visited website and we have content through Build Automation being

continuously built in nine languages. So it's quite a powerhouse and we see it's creating value in the pre-sales context. Let's say Justin Parisi is a skeptical prospect customer, prospective customer. I can't believe Justin Parisi ever would be but let's say for the sake of argument he were that person. We do see people using this site to really learn about

about the products before they bought them, but also to use the products after they bought them. And we see a huge constituency also within NetApp support and other organizations extensively use our documentation.

I'll stop there, I could go on for a while, but hopefully that's helpful. Yeah, it's helpful. Absolutely.

So, Jen, you've been involved with information engineering for a long time. I think you started out as... Oh, 20 years.

Sorry.