.. post::
:tags: beta
:category: drafts
:author: Anthony
We are excited to announce Read the Docs for Business private beta today. Read the Docs for Business started over 3 months ago, before we entered PIE. Both of us were focusing on Read the Docs full time, with plans to grow an offering for companies that would foster the documentation ecosystem at readthedocs.org.
Our primary requirement when we started this journey was to only affect Read the Docs for the better. Our ideals didn't align with the traditional startup, which seemed contridictory to supporting open source communities. We envisioned a business that was a life-style business more than a startup, and what we call success is supporting full time development on Read the Docs, not being aqcuired.
Today, PIE's Demo Day has come and passed, and we're back to developing a product in the PIE office. We've spent our time in PIE building our product, and along with tremendous help from PIE and all of our mentors, planning it's future path. When we weren't building features members of readthedocs.org could use, we were focusing on building features companies would need to use private documentation.
Read the Docs has the notion of co-maintainers, which is best used by open source communities. But this doesn't work as well for companies, where central access control is required and projects are often owned by teams. Aside from user access control, organzations, teams, and sharing support control who has access to your documentation. Companies can give access to teams, members, or people outside their organization completely.
We spent a lot of time figuring out how to handle private documentation, which is a large departure from what we're doing on readthedocs.org. Though companies might need to host documentation publicly, to support software they maintain or sell, more universally, companies need to host documentation privately. This required secure transfer and access to private repositories, as well as security features to make the documentation build process more secure.
We hope to make finding documentation as easy as possible, because that's one of our largest gripes with documentation today.
Documentation can now be searched by facet, with basic support for searching documentation type.
We love rST, especially when using it with Sphinx, but Markdown support is a common request we've wanted to address for some time now. Communities are already using Markdown for their documentation efforts, so we wanted to add indexing and search to make Markdown documentation highly usable. One-step setup from Github is supported with Markdown, so now, you can easily get started on Read the Docs with your existing documentation.
Our private beta is now open. We'd like to welcome you to join us in writing great documentation. We're slowly rolling out access to the private beta, you can sign up with the button below and we'll contact you soon with access.
Also, here's the video of Eric's pitch from PIE's Demo Day, be sure to check it out, along with some of the other groups in this year's class.