Current technical documentation, organised around the decisions customers and partners need to make.
We build technical documentation portals for industrial businesses whose engineers, customers, distributors and installers need the right datasheet, safety data sheet, certificate, manual or CAD file without working through an unmanaged PDF archive. Every document carries a revision, an owner and an effective date.
Six things a technical documentation portal has to settle before a single file is uploaded.
Documentation becomes commercially useful when it is structured, searchable and connected to the product and application context around it. We define document types, access levels, metadata, ownership and lifecycle rules before designing the portal experience.
A document model covering type, product link, language, market, revision and owner; search and filtering that holds up across thousands of files; access rules by role and account; and an administration area where document owners publish and retire revisions without a developer.
Each document is a record with a revision number, an effective date and a status. Publishing a new revision retires the previous one from the public routes while keeping it traceable, so a customer downloading a certificate receives the version currently in force and your quality team can still show what was published and when.
Datasheets and manuals are the starting point. A working portal also carries safety data sheets by language and market, declarations of conformity and certificates with expiry dates, CAD and BIM files in the formats specifiers use, installation and maintenance instructions, spare-part lists and firmware or software releases.
Some documents are public and should be indexed; others belong to a distributor, a service partner or a named account. We model access as a rule on the document and the user rather than as an unlisted URL, and log downloads where the product or quality team needs to know who holds which revision.
Search has to tolerate part numbers, partial references and older designations, and filtering has to work across product, document type, language and market at once. Public documents are given real landing pages, so a search for a part number and a datasheet reaches the current file rather than a PDF orphaned from its product.
Code Industrial is the industrial B2B practice of Code Barcelona, an agency building corporate websites and digital platforms since 2015. The same strategy, design and engineering team works on every industrial project, from the first scoping session through to life after launch.
The document mix differs by what the business makes and who has to act on it. A technical documentation portal starts there.
What comes up when scoping a technical documentation portal.
Yes. Access can be designed around user roles, account status, markets or product relationships. We map the governance and the publishing responsibility alongside the interface so restricted material stays controlled over time rather than only at launch.
Yes, and it is usually the better arrangement. The portal reads document records and their metadata from the system that owns them rather than becoming a second library maintained separately. See industrial website integrations for how those connections are built and monitored.
Not necessarily. The two solve different jobs and often run side by side: the documentation portal governs documents, revisions and technical access, while a B2B distributor portal carries account pricing, stock and ordering. Where both exist, they share one login and one product record.
Yes, and it is a common requirement. Market and language are attributes of the document record, so a visitor sees the safety data sheet or manual variant that applies to their market, with a defined fallback for the cases where a local variant has not been produced.
A superseded revision is retired from the public download routes but kept traceable internally, with the date it was replaced and the revision that replaced it. That keeps customers on the current document while preserving the record your quality function may later need to produce.
Yes. CAD models and BIM objects are held against the product variant with their format and revision recorded, so a specifier downloads the model matching the part they are selecting. Where a generation service produces formats on demand, the portal can request them rather than storing every combination.
Public ones usually should be, because part number and datasheet searches are a real source of qualified traffic. We give them landing pages carrying the product context, correct titles and metadata, so the search result leads to the current file rather than to a PDF with no route back to its product.
Your document owners, working in the administration area rather than through a developer. We set the model up so publishing a revision is one action, assign a named owner per document type at handover, and add expiry reminders for certificates so an out-of-date document is flagged internally first.
A technical documentation portal usually sits alongside these other builds.
Documents scattered across folders, an FTP and old product pages, or a library the team no longer trusts to be current. Tell us the document set and who needs it, and we will explain how we would approach the technical documentation portal.