Discover how Rocketlane used CKEditor 5 to build a unique product offer swiftly
“Most people who look at our product don’t believe that we built it in the time frame we built it.”
Srikrishnan Ganesan CEO, Rocketlane
Outcomes
-9 months launch lead time
-Leading-edge collaboration features
-Saved months of custom development
-Full control with on-premises installation
-Modern, reliable WYSIWYG editor
-Code customisations to suit requirements
The challenge
Build a collaborative customer onboarding platform from scratch – fast
Rocketlane is a leading B2B software product for customer onboarding and professional service teams. When CEO Srikrishnan Ganesan started building the company’s signature software, he set himself a challenge. Srikrishnan wanted the first release to be a fully featured SaaS platform, including project management, documentation, and chat, with collaboration as standard. And he wanted to build it as quickly as possible.
For an all-in-one platform like Rocketlane, document collaboration was a key requirement–allowing people to leave notes on files, share onboarding documentation with clients, and keep track of changes and updates. Building these collaboration features from scratch simply wasn’t possible in a tight time frame. So, Srikrishnan looked for a rich text editor which could serve as the backbone of the platform.
Rocketlane needed a rich text editor that was:
The solution
A customizable, collaborative rich text editor
After evaluating a range of rich text editors, Rocketlane opted for CKEditor 5. Plugins like Comments and Revision History allow for the seamless collaboration Rocketlane was looking for. In addition to that, CKEditor’s limitless customization was a big attraction.
“The fact that a lot of features came out-of-the-box along with the customization potential allowed us to innovate and achieve experiences that are not available in other products,” says Srikrishnan.
Precise control over the integration gives Rocketlane the flexibility to not only change the look and feel of the editor, but add extra features as well. For example, Rocketlane customized the Comments feature to allow people to make some comments visible to clients and keep others internal-only. “This is something that differentiates us and even Google Docs doesn’t have today,” says Srikrishnan.
What we provided
-Customizable WYSIWYG editor purpose-built for collaboration
-Real-time Collaboration (Premium)
-Comments plugin (Premium)
-Revision History plugin (Premium)
-On-premise, self-hosted installation
-Commercial license
The result
A fully featured product launched in just 9 months
With CKEditor 5, Rocketlane’s developers were able to get the key features they needed with minimal development, freeing them up to work on important tweaks and customizations. Integrating CKEditor 5 instead of building their own rich text editor gave the team a big headstart – they were able to launch the first version of Rocketlane in just 9 months. Srikrishnan says the short development time still impresses customers: “Most people who look at our product don’t believe that we built it in the time frame we built it.”
Real-time Collaboration features make it easy for teams to use Rocketlane together, while Comments allow people to update client files quickly, and Revision History ensures proper document version control.
The option to install CKEditor on-premises rather than use the cloud-based version suits Rocketlane’s ongoing customization needs. The team are looking at implementing the Track Changes feature next, to broaden Rocketlane’s appeal as a solution for the legal sector. Looking to the future, Rocketlane will continue to depend on CKEditor to keep world-class collaboration at the heart of their platform.
“If we tried to build everything from scratch on our own, we definitely wouldn’t be able to do that.”
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