#469 – Pages at the U.S. Department of Defense

This week we collected feedback on our first production deployment of Parabol Pages at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Parabol Pages is our self-hostable knowledge management feature, included in our application, which allows people to collaborate on creating documents, publish them to the web or their secure intranet, and access a growing suite of features unique to Parabol, including AI-powered analyses of team behavior.

We built Parabol Pages not only to serve as the foundation of our upcoming next-generation meeting and collaborative workflow features, but because we saw an underserved need in the market. Early this year, some of our users and customers began telling us they were nervous that Atlassian was preparing to end-of-life Data Center Confluence (Atlassian’s self-hostable knowledge-management product), especially as pricing continued to rise. All doubt was removed when Atlassian announced the end-of-life schedule for their full Data Center product line, intending to migrate everyone to the cloud.

There is a lack of viable on-prem alternatives. Most large players in the space—such as Notion—are closed source and do not provide a version that can run on-prem. Other solutions lack the security accreditations required to operate in the strictest security environments, such as the U.S. Department of Defense’s IL4 or IL5.

We worked with many of our customers to develop a feature set for an awesome on-prem, secure knowledge base. After months of development and testing, we launched Parabol Pages and Insights to Parabol’s SaaS. Our focus then shifted to ensuring these new features passed our most security-conscious customer’s hardening and validation processes at the U.S. Department of Defense. After several more weeks of effort, Parabol Pages became available at U.S. DoD Platform One last week.

The feedback on Parabol Pages has been overwhelmingly positive — “This is so much easier than Confluence!” We’re confident this is going to open Parabol up to many more users among our managed single-tenant and on-prem deployments. We’re just getting started with outreach campaigns to ensure our users, and the broader market, know about Parabol Pages and what it can do for them.

Web visits and top-of-funnel user registrations dropped off a bit this week, typical of the week leading into Thanksgiving. On the other hand, the number of meetings ran ticked upward.

…wrapped up another product cycle. In our latest cycle we’ve focused on database UI. We’ve explored workflow UX that allows teams to process data from those databases in order to brainstorm, plan, and make decisions as a guided group activity. We’ve focused on delivering Pages in the public sector. And we’ve focused on some enhancements for sharing and security.

…go into our cool-down cycle. Our cool-down cycle corresponds with US Thanksgiving and EOY holidays allowing us to catch up on loose ends, research and explore, and plan for next year, while folks take time off for family, vacations, and celebrations.