Inability of editors to create pages causing massive pain in our company

Looking for suggestions for how to improve Coda usage in my company.

Backstory is we’ve been using Coda for years. We have some “mini-apps” with some complexity that we built with Coda, but we also were using it as a replacement for Google Docs, each team having a doc and using it to put meeting notes, change proposals, technical documentation, etc.

However, the change to disallow editors to create pages has basically destroyed our Coda usage and turned us back to the dark ages before Coda. First off, we can’t afford 30 more licenses just for people that are going to create a page maybe once every 2-3 months on average. At first, people were just messaging me when they wanted a page added. But slowly people started going back to using other platforms. We started getting lots of Google Docs created again. It’s been a slow process over the last 1.5 years but now we have mostly only legacy / deprecated docs in Coda. We once again have a hard time finding information and having it scattered and disorganized. Even the Coda “apps” started falling into disuse as Coda becomes less of a daily presence and people forget about it. In one department, we had a new department director, and he wanted to build some automations, I told him Coda would be perfect but he ended up choosing another platform. In part because he was already familiar, but also because his team was telling him that there’s a lot of friction to use Coda, they feel they can’t do anything themselves and no one has a good feeling about it. The bad vibes around Coda are palpable, and I believe all stems from the fact that people can’t create new pages. Even if I say, don’t worry, I’ll create pages for you at any time, it’s incredibly inagile and sometimes I feel my colleagues genuinely think I’m an idiot for pushing them to write their docs on a platform where they can’t even own the page structure.

I’ve been despairing about the state of our documentation as a company, it really feels like this one pricing change of Coda has single-handedly created our biggest organization pain point. Yesterday I found myself exploring other documentation platforms to see if we could start unifying our documentation again. But then I thought, Coda has a great community, let’s see if anyone has any advice on addressing this challenge at other companies. WDYT? Is there a way to turn this around?

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:waving_hand: @Henry_Harrison

really sorry to hear about your org’s situation with coda.
it really is an uphill battle with adoption/buy-in :frowning:

for the add page issue, there’s a pack that maybe can perhaps improve the situation

with regards to your colleagues friction to coda…
ive noticed that recently (maybe it occurred way before i noticed haha) coda are getting better with their education.
has your colleagues attended their webinars? Coda webinar schedule, register for a webinar - Coda
majority of them are pre-recorded but there are slots with live support (coda team member available in chat while the webinar plays).
also i recently discovered a new youtube channel from their education team https://www.youtube.com/@CodaSuccess/videos

hope this helps!
and be sure to let us know how you go :slight_smile:

Cheers!
Mel

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Hi @Henry_Harrison
One thing that I do that I find really useful is to just keep notes in a table within a doc. Editors can create new rows in tables with no problem.
A canvas field in a Coda table behaves just like a page canvas, with the benefit of being able to filter and sort the table of notes any way you want it.
You could have a doc per team, with a page/table per person, or a doc per project with a ‘meeting notes’ page/table, or both!
I recently set up a Wiki document that uses this same concept - instead of a page per knowledgebase article, it’s a table row. Check this template out for inspiration:

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I absolutely second the suggestion of @Kayla_Taras2 !

We were in the same place with a page based knowledge hub, when the change hit. Putting everything in a table with the actual content in a canvas column seemed like an awkward workaround then, but, boy, am I not looking back!

You gain so much, like the ability to filter, add any metadata field you like and so on. With this you can easily generate views of recently changed articles, highest rated ones, etc.

You also get to use tags, freeing you from the hierarchical taxonomy of a subpage-tree, which was always a big pain in the behind.

The canvas column does pretty much everything a page does except for table of contents, thus longer articles will ensue scrolling.

We saw this as an opportunity to slice some of our structured long form content into shorter articles more on topic, cuz no one likes to skim endless pages anyway. Worked out really well for us, but of course it depends on your type of content.

To us, it was really a game changer and I hardly structure content by pages anymore.

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Amen brother, amen!! :wink:

As John Maynard Keynes said : “The challenge is not so much to develop new ideas, but to escape from old ones.”

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