Why Use Syndicate?

Syndicate provides a governed, AI-ready knowledge platform enabling RAG, semantic search, and intelligent content delivery across internal and public portals for learning systems and technical documentation.

Syndicate

Syndicate and AI

MadCap Syndicate is enterprise-grade software that provides content delivery to help your organization develop, manage, and share secure digital content with teams worldwide.

Think about content as data. Syndicate offers a way to manage and organize all your content with AI-enabled features. Authoring in Flare and publishing to Syndicate promotes structuring your content with classifications and custom attributes for accurate search results. You can review data analytics from the AI-enabled search to identify if content is being consumed, the patterns and needs of users, or if there are any gaps in the content. Pinpointing data in this way connects people with the information they need.

Syndicate Portals

Syndicate Portals

Syndicate is a web application, and a portal is hosted by Syndicate behind an authentication layer where you can share a document privately or publicly. For example, a company would have a unique tenant URL where users would access the portal.

A portal is a scope of content that you have complete control over, including the display look and feel and a cohesive but flexible “single experience” delivery. It serves as a central place that consolidates different documents that you specify and can surface content dynamically. An example of managing content is to restrict public access and turn off public search engine indexing for each portal. The Syndicate portal has a baked-in AI search. The results shared for AI search are specific to a certain portal, and you can filter your results in multiple ways.

RAG

RAG

The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) component is separate from the portal feature. RAG allows you to include data associated with your Syndicate tenant to use with your large language model (LLM) of choice (e.g., CoPilot). The RAG technique is responsible for 1) retrieving the results (e.g., proprietary information) semantically from Syndicate or any other database via search APIs, and 2) generating a response through optimizing the output of LLM, but you control the configuration of how it generates an answer.

Syndicate Hosting Features

The following is a list of Syndicate hosting features that may interest technical communicators.

Hosting Feature

Description

Access to outputs

Syndicate is a content delivery system. Each document (e.g., eLearning, video, PDF, HTML) can have one or more URLs associated with it. Content can be syndicated out via shared links (public or private) to other places such as LMSs, web applications, internal help desks; and from there provide direct access.

Analytics

Syndicate analytics centers on tracking user interactions with content. It can track how users consume content such as individual topics or videos. For eLearning it can manage millions of records in its built-in learning record store (LRS).

Content delivery network (CDN)

Syndicate uses a global network of interconnected servers that speeds up loading data to end users.

Custom domain

Syndicate supports domain white labeling which enables you to present your organization on a branded, customized URL.

Faceted searches with taxonomies

Faceted Search With Taxonomies

Syndicate can perform content search through a predefined set of attributes such as resource type, format, language, etc. It also offers a customizable taxonomy that can enhance a search. This is primarily useful internally within Syndicate.

Federated searches

Federated Search

A federated search lets you search for content across multiple data sources (in this case, different outputs uploaded to Syndicate). You can search for content in the Syndicate portal directly, but this only looks at documents residing in Syndicate. Therefore, it is primarily useful for internal purposes. However, the entire search experience can be externalized to a third-party application via an integration leveraging Syndicate's expansive application programming interface (API) library.

Headless Content via API Shared Integrations

With Syndicate, you can use application programming interface (API) shared integrations to extract specific pieces of content from your output uploaded to Syndicate. These extracted content objects can then be displayed in other applications or services that your company uses, essentially producing headless content.

Multi-Channel eLearning Management

eLearning packages (compliant with SCORM and xAPI) that originate from Flare Desktop can be published to Syndicate. In Syndicate you can manage eLearning thin packages with learning record store (LRS) functionality.

Permissions

Access to content in Syndicate can be controlled at the folder and document levels using a group-based permission model.

Single sign-on (SSO)

Syndicate supports user login with SSO and can work with more than one identity provider (IdP), including authentication access for non-SSO users.

Schedule activation dates

Syndicate can activate and deactivate documents to make them either accessible or not accessible. You can enable or disable shared links to the document's content through the activation (and deactivation) dates.

Versioning

Syndicate tracks version histories of a document which facilitates compliance and audits. Versions are established when a document is replaced with a newer uploaded document or republished in the same folder and output profile.