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How to know which website or platform to use?

  • 6 January 2023
  • 2 replies
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Rogier
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So, we’ve just joined Freshworks and are implementing our CRM (“Freshsales suite CRM”). And first of all, I would like to emphasize this post is not a big rant, I’d just like to clarify things on where Freshworks is having documentation at. It is all very very confusing and difficult.

Developer docs

According to your own developer portal at https://developers.freshworks.com/documentation/ I should use https://developers.freshworks.com/crm/api/ for my REST API documentation, if I want to mutate data programmatically. However via an article on https://community.freshworks.dev/ I was referred to the CRM API reference on https://developer.freshsales.io/api/ . (https://community.freshworks.dev/t/custom-module-query-freshworks-crm/5618)

 

Almost the same documentation, but with some key differences. 🤷‍♂️The suggested answer with filtered_search does not seem to apply to my product somehow.

 

Community

Furthermore, right now I’m here (and you too reading this) on the community at https://community.freshworks.com/ , but I could also create an account for a totally different community at https://community.freshworks.dev/ Last seems to be for DEV only, but there’s also dev community on this current one 🤷‍♂️

 

Missing documentation

Finally, on you developer portal at https://developers.freshworks.com/ there’s lots of resources, but also pointing to non-existing things like https://www.freshworks.com/platform/low-code/ (404 not found) 🤷‍♂️

 

Questions

Regarding all this, some questions I have:

  • Wouldn’t it be possible to just have ONE Freshworks community, with a sub-topic for DEV?
  • Wouldn’t it be more logical to just have ONE website with one current version of developer API reference?
  • How would I know that the Freshsales developer docs on https://developer.freshsales.io/ would not be the right ones (apparently, by trial and error)? It is never stated that this is old stuff and should not be used 🤷‍♂️

My findings

The only pattern i can deduce is the following:

  • everything with .io in the domain name is old and can be ignored
  • Fresh has 2 communities: one general one (this one) and one specifically for DEVs. They are totally separate, need separate accounts/login, etc. Which one is the correct one to use or to post on is unclear.
  • The whole Freshsales, Freshsales suite and CRM offerings are so complex, even people working at/for Freshworks are not able to tell them apart, as shown by responses by Fresh staff themselves.
  • The main entry point for regular documentation is at https://crmsupport.freshworks.com/, not at e.g. https://support.freshsales.io/ (that’s the .io again), but there is no reference to the correct developer docs there. But, to be fair: Kuddo’s for putting the warning on top of this “Freshsales Classic” website, to show that this second link is indeed the faulty one (.io). Is “Freshsales Classic” another product offering though? 🤔
  • Freshsales Suite is a combination/mix/love-child of Freshsales and Freshmarketer, but having it’s own API doc and feature set, while this is not clearly communicated though.

Allright, quite a big story to tell, but my point is this:

Please, please, please, have an easy way of putting all docs in 1 spot and mark old things as old in a clear way. Because e.g. Google, but also people in the community will send you to any random page not knowing the differences between “Freshsales (suite|classic) / CRM” and you end up reading/interpreting/using things that are not applicable. Thank you! 

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Best answer by saifali.shaik 10 February 2023, 11:11

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S
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Hey Rogier 

 

Hope you are doing well. I am Saif from the Developer Relations team in Freshworks. My team is responsible for owning and driving the developer experience- with a goal to make it better one step at a time. Please treat my response to be more personal.

Thank you for your observations and for detailing out some of the gaps we have as a growing organization. Customer feedback is an important catalyst for change for us and we intend to action on your inputs to make the experience more seamless for you & other users.

Your description could be in a different tone altogether. You chose not to. So I will thank you by responding to you in a non-templated answer.

Who we are and what we do: 


As a growing team, we are constantly working to influence and strengthen the developer experience for the Freshworks community. Four years ago, we started as a small team (with less than 10 people) to focus on how various developer personas (including customer developers like you) consume our content & experience building using our tools. Developer experience is an essential priority for our product & engineering teams as much as customer experience. We’ve come a long way from where we were 4 years back and we still have a few miles to go to deliver the ideal developer experience. Our teams invite and love detailed feedback such as yours and we are always learning, growing, and brainstorming for ways to improve the user experiences we provide. Thank you for being an invested and valuable customer of Freshworks. We hope you will be able to empathize and provide us some time to action upon your feedback. 

 

Thoughts over specifics:

  1. I understand you wanted to consume a filtered_search API for your product instance. Unhelpful or confusing documentation is frustrating. We are constantly working with our product API engineering teams to strengthen the feedback look and unify documentation (this is a priority and a work in progress). 

  2. Regarding having a  sub-topic for a developer community within “https://community.freshworks.com/”, development conversations across the board are extensive and will need be resolved at different layered talent groups. Developer relevant answers and discussions we realised will therefore need to be part of the dedicated developer community which is at “https://community.freshworks.dev/”

Where our attention is:

  1. To build a unified documentation for developers. This should focus on Missing Documentation & Have ONE website.

To enforce an advocacy program with Product API engineering teams. Action items I see in near term:

  1. We should ensure the Freshworks Community has a developer section that points you community.freshworks.dev - which is THE portal for all Freshworks developers. 

Once again, I will thank you for your comments. Our team will do whatever we can under our influence & promise you of it. 

 

Rogier
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Userlevel 1
Badge +2

Hi Saif, thank you for your reply! I value your personal approach very much. My only goal for my post was to point this out to you, so you can improve. Not to rant, not to blame, just making clear that it would help me (and others!) very much if this gets the attention it needs.

 

I understand the growing pains and I'm looking forward to seeing what will be coming in the near future!

 

About the websites/domains, cool to see that I can find the DEV portal on freshworks.dev (next to developers.freshworks.com) and the dev community at community.freshworks.dev. → This means I can always look within the freshworks.dev area as a rule. Perhaps you can redirect developers.freshworks.com also to freshworks.dev to make this more explicit 💡

 

Finally, as an update from my side: All API stuff is working as it should now, I've built a beautiful integration with your API's.

 

Thank you again, keep up the good work and we'll keep in touch! 👍

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