edited hsf content for clarity and removed what is no longer needed (#101195)

* c6ff57 Apply suggestion from code review

* ccb4ff edited hsf documentation

* b6224a updated for hub support and removed content that is no longer needed

Author: Ashley Kim

docs/harness-solutions-factory/content/upgrade/2-3-upgrade.md

@@ -27,8 +27,9 @@
         | hsf_idp_resource_mgr_image | harnesssolutionfactory/harness-idp-resource-manager:latest |
         | hsf_iacm_manager_plugin | harnesssolutionfactory/harness-manage-iacm-workspace:latest |
         | enable_hsf_mini_factory | false |
-        1. Save Changes
+        | should_use_hsf_hub | false |
+        | should_use_harness_idp | true |
+        - Save Changes
 6. Run `Deploy Solutions Factory` 
 7. If you’re doing an upgrade from pre 2.2 run `Bulk Workspace IDP Registration`  
-8. Run `Register Official IDP Templates` to get all the new templates from `harness-template-library`
-9. The upgrade is now complete!
+8. The upgrade is now complete!

docs/harness-solutions-factory/content/upgrade/pr-upgrade.md

@@ -33,12 +33,15 @@ Starting from HSF 2.2.5 you will get a pull request notification email when a ne
 6. Run `Manage Pilot Light` → Approve Changes (Review) → Approve Now
     <DocImage path={require('../../static/PR-upgrade7.png')} title="Click to view full size image" />
 
+6. Go into IaCM Workspaces → `Harness Solutions Factory`
+    - Go into Connectors and Variables and add the variables:
+        | Variable Key | Value |
+        | --- | --- |
+        | should_use_hsf_hub | false |
+        | should_use_harness_idp | true |
+    - Save Changes
+
 7. Wait for `Manage Pilot Light` to finish and then run `Deploy Solutions Factory`
     <DocImage path={require('../../static/PR-upgrade8.png')} title="Click to view full size image" />
 
-**Refresh IDP Workflows**
-
-8. Because we updated `harness-template-library` run `Register Official IDP Templates`
-    <DocImage path={require('../../static/PR-upgrade9.png')} title="Click to view full size image" />
-
-9. Update is complete!
+8. Update is complete!

docs/harness-solutions-factory/faq.md

@@ -25,9 +25,9 @@ HSF is provided as a no-additional cost solution delivered as part of an existin
 </details>
 
 <details>
-<summary>Do I have to purchase HSF? Is there a cost associated with HSF?</summary>
+<summary>What modules do I need for HSF?</summary>
 
-No, you do not need to purchase IaCM or IDP modules to use HSF, but you can only use the modules to manage the Harness Platform.
+HSF leverages Harness Internal Developer Portal, Infrastructure as Code Management and Harness Code Repository. You do not need to purchase additional modules specifically for HSF. If you do not have IDP, IaCM or HCR licensed, we will provide you a limited license in order to use HSF and manage Harness entities.
 </details>
 
 ---
@@ -86,4 +86,10 @@ Harness Solutions Factory supports integration with all **OpenTofu** versions<Ha
     parse='.[-1] | " (latest: v\(.))"'></HarnessApiData>.  
 
  Due to licensing and legal limitations all legacy Terraform versions under the MPL license are supported (up to **1.5.x**), any BSL versions (from 1.6.0) are not supported.
+</details>
+
+<details>
+<summary>Can HSF manage cloud resources, not just Harness entities? </summary>
+
+Yes. Because HSF is built on OpenTofu and IaCM, it can provision any resource that has a Terraform provider — AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. However, you will need a paid enterprise license for IDP and IaCM if provisioning non Harness entites.
 </details>

docs/harness-solutions-factory/new-to-hsf/get-started.md

@@ -7,23 +7,24 @@ sidebar_position: 20
 
 Welcome to the HSF onboarding guide. Discover how Harness accelerates onboarding and adoption by reducing setup time and maintaining best practices
 
-## Pre Deployment of HSF
-### Prerequisites
+## Prerequisites
 
-Before beginning, ensure you have: 
+Before HSF can be deployed, confirm the following:
 
-- Access to a Harness Account
-- Ability to create an admin level token
+- Your Harness account has the IDP and IaCM modules enabled.
+- Harness Code Repository is enabled on the account.
+- You have an account with admin-level permissions, or can coordinate with someone who does to generate a temporary Personal Access Token (PAT).
+- No account-level OPA policies are in place that would block pipeline execution.
 
 If you do not meet all these prerequisites but think your organization could benefit from HSF, please reach out to your Harness account team.
 
 ## Post Deployment of HSF
-Now that HSF has been deployed, what’s next? Below are a couple things to get you started using Harness Solutions Factory:
+After deployment, complete the following steps to configure your account and verify the installation.
 
 - Create Organizations and Projects. [This lab](../hands-on-labs/getting-started-lab.md) goes over some details. 
 - Add users to the HSF Admin, HSF Users (account level) and HSF Mirror Reviewers (organization level) groups
-    - This can be bound to SSO Provider Groups
-    - Decide on the notification preferences for HSF Admins (Slack, Email, Teams) 
+    - This can be bound to [SSO Provider Groups](https://developer.harness.io/docs/platform/authentication/single-sign-on-saml/)
+    - Decide on the [notification preferences](https://developer.harness.io/docs/platform/role-based-access-control/add-user-groups#edit-notification-preferences) for HSF Admins (Slack, Email, Teams) 
     - You can also change the mirror schedule by going into Harness Pilot Light and finding the `mirror_schedule` variable 
 - Change token configurations
     - You can change the rotation schedule or if it should rotate on a schedule by going into Harness Pilot Light and finding the `should_rotate_on_schedule` and `rotation_schedule` variables

docs/harness-solutions-factory/new-to-hsf/hsf-upgrade.md

@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ import DynamicMarkdownSelector from '@site/src/components/DynamicMarkdownSelecto
 We are constantly adding new features and functionality to Harness Solutions Factory. Below are the detailed steps on how to upgrade to the latest!
 
 <DynamicMarkdownSelector
+    defaultOption="PR Process Upgrade"
     options={{
         "PR Process Upgrade": {
         path: "/harness-solutions-factory/content/upgrade/pr-upgrade.md",

docs/harness-solutions-factory/new-to-hsf/overview.md

@@ -7,21 +7,17 @@ redirect_from:
     - /kb/reference-architectures/hsf/overview
 ---
 
-Harness Solutions Factory (HSF) is a scalable automation framework designed to help organizations rapidly deploy and manage **Harness resources** through **self-service workflows**, **governance**, and **best practices** — all out of the box.
-
-Whether you’re enabling new teams, setting up golden templates, or driving adoption of Harness at scale, HSF provides a repeatable, governed foundation to help you get started faster and stay standardized across your organization.
+Harness Solutions Factory (HSF) is an automation framework that deploys and manages Harness platform resources through self-service workflows, governed templates, and Infrastructure as Code. It gives platform engineering teams a repeatable foundation for onboarding teams to Harness at scale, without requiring each team to configure their own pipelines, projects, or environments from scratch.
 
 ### Key Capabilities
-- **Self-Service Enablement:** Empower development teams to deploy their own Harness resources using guided workflows — no YAML editing or pipeline scripting required.
-- **Governance by Design:** Enforce organizational standards automatically through reusable templates and pre-approved configurations.
-- **Accelerated Time to Value:** Reduce setup from days or weeks to minutes using out-of-the-box automation.
-- **Continuous Standardization:** Ensure all Harness resources stay aligned with best practices.
+- **Self-service workflows:** Development teams can request Harness resources — projects, pipelines, environments — through IDP workflow. No direct platform or Terraform knowledge is required.
+- **IaC-backed governance:** Every resource HSF creates is backed by a Terraform workspace in IaCM. Changes go through plan-and-approve cycles, and drift is surfaced in the IDP catalog.
+- **Out-of-the-box templates:** HSF ships with pre-built templates for common platform operations: project setup, CI pipeline onboarding, security scanning, build farm configuration, and delegate management.
+- **Managed updates:** When Harness releases new versions of HSF, a scheduled pipeline creates a pull request in your custom template library. You review and merge on your timeline — nothing auto-applies.
 
 ## Core Concepts
 ### 1. Self-Service Workflows
-Workflows are the user-facing automation steps in HSF.
-
-These guided processes help teams create, configure, and deploy new Harness resources — such as projects, pipelines, and repositories — following approved standards.
+Workflows are the user-facing entry point to HSF. A user selects a workflow in IDP, fills out some details, and submits. HSF then triggers a pipeline that creates the requested resource, registers it in the IDP catalog, and optionally gates on an approval before applying the changes. Users can watch the execution in real time and access outputs directly from the catalog entry once provisioning is complete.
 
 Example workflows include:
 
@@ -30,7 +26,7 @@ Example workflows include:
 - **Deploy Harness CI Golden Standard Templates**
 
 ### 2. Harness Template Library
-Harness Template Library houses all the templates that are created by Harness. They reflect best practices validated by our Center of Excellence (CoE) and implementation engineering team. These templates serve as the foundation for all workflows created through HSF.
+Harness Template Library houses all the templates that are created by Harness. They reflect best practices validated by the Harness Center of Excellence (CoE) and implementation engineering team. These templates serve as the foundation for all workflows created through HSF.
 
 This repository is stored in Harness Code Repository and is copied over locally when you first deploy HSF. 
 

docs/harness-solutions-factory/static/hsfhub.png

@@ -31,6 +31,8 @@ To support IDP workflows, account-level variables are created. These variables s
 
 All HSF-related resources are organized under a newly created organization named `Harness Platform Management`. This organization serves as the central location for all projects, configurations, and access controls associated with the HSF deployment.
 
+HSF is intentionally isolated into its own organization rather than placed inside an existing one so that platform-level management concerns stay separate from everything else in your Harness account. This also makes RBAC cleaner — HSF Admins can have org-admin rights scoped to this organization.
+
 **User Groups**
 
 Within the `Harness Platform Management` organization, two user groups are created at the account level: 
@@ -60,7 +62,6 @@ The Solutions Factory project includes sixteen pipelines, each designed to perfo
 - The `Manage Pilot Light` pipeline applies updates and changes to the core HSF framework. It is used to maintain and evolve the foundational infrastructure that supports the overall platform.
 - The `Mirror Harness Official Solutions Factory Repository` pipeline is responsible for cloning and copying data from the official HSF repository into your target Harness account. It also manages the synchronization of updates during future releases, effectively keeping your local copy aligned with the source of truth.
 - The `Unpack Solutions Factory` pipeline unpacks the Solutions Factory.
-- The `Register Official IDP Templates` pipeline automatically imports all available templates from the harness-template-library and registers them into your IDP instance. This ensures that your IDP has access to the full suite of templates required to power self-service workflows.
 - The `Register Custom IDP Templates` pipeline automatically imports all available templates from the custom-harness-template-library and registers them into your IDP instance.
 - The `Rotate HSF Token` pipeline handles secure token rotation for the `harness-platform-manager` service account.
 - The `Create and Manage IACM Workspaces` pipeline is invoked at the start of each workflow execution. It provisions and manages IACM workspaces, ensuring that the required infrastructure is in place before any resource provisioning begins. It also registers resources in IDP.
@@ -86,4 +87,4 @@ There are three repositories included in the deployment and exist under the orga
 
 - The `harness-solutions-factory` repository houses all of the source code that is required to standup and run Harness Solutions Factory. A code branch rule called `harness_solutions_factory_codeowners` is created in this repository.
 - The `harness-template-library` repository houses all of the scaffold and templates for how to manage Harness resources. A code branch rule called `harness_solutions_factory_codeowners` is created in this repository.
-- The `custom-harness-template-library` repository houses customized templates created to support Harness entity management and provisioning.
+- The `custom-harness-template-library` repository houses customized templates created to support Harness entity management and provisioning. It is created via a point in time mirror of `harness-template-library` when your instance of HSF is deployed.

docs/harness-solutions-factory/use-hsf/created-resources.md

@@ -28,38 +28,21 @@ With HSF Hub, we changed how permissions are implemented since we no longer coul
 - A role called `Shared_Resource_Access` which allows access to shared resources in the project such as secrets and templates
 - And a resource group for each of the HSF Hub pipelines. By combining a role and resource group you are able to control which pipelines a user can run.
 
-### Operating Modes
-
-With the creation of HSF Hub, HSF 2.4 introduces the concept of operating modes. The different operating modes allows usage of HSF with and without Harness IDP.
-
-HSF Core are the core 12 pipelines of Harness Solutions Factory
-
-#### *HSF Core + Harness IDP*
-
-This operating model is the traditional model and the only one that has been supported till now. It leverages Harness IDP features to execute workflows, run pipeline stages and control RBAC.
-
-#### *HSF Core + HSF Hub*
-
-This operating model is new with HSF 2.4. Removing the dependency on Harness IDP, HSF Hub is a new project that gets created to house all of the best practice templates from Custom Template Library. It runs a chained pipeline from this project and is controlled by ABAC.
-
-#### *HSF Core + Backstage (or BYO API Connector)*
-
-This operating model is new with HSF 2.4. It allows you to bring your own form of Backstage or API to trigger a HSF Core pipeline.
-
 ### Changing Operating Modes to use HSF Hub
 
 Since HSF Hub was created starting version 2.4 you will need to make sure that you are on 2.4 or later. If you need help updating please refer back to this document.
 
-1. Navigate to the Harness Solutions Factory workspace in the Solutions Factory project.
-2. Go into the Connectors and Variables tab and scroll down to find the `should_use_harness_idp` and `should_use_hsf_hub` variable.
-    <DocImage path={require('../static/hsfhub.png')} title="Click to view full size image" />
-3. Change the variable value to use/not use IDP and use/not use HSF Hub
-4. Navigate to pipelines and run Deploy Solutions Factory
+1. Navigate to the Harness Pilot Light workspace in the Solutions Factory project. 
+2. Go into the Connectors and Variables tab and scroll down to find the `should_use_harness_idp` and set it to false.
+3. Click provision and wait till it's completed. Verify that the HSF Core Manager is created.
+4. Navigate to the Solutions Factory Workspace and add in the variables `should_use_hsf_hub` set to true and `should_use_harness_idp` set to true.
+5. Click provision. This will remove the IDP pipelines and change the Create and Manage IaCM pipeline to use IaCM steps. 
+6. Navigate to pipelines and run Deploy Solutions Factory.
 
 If you are upgrading from a version prior to 2.4 you will also need to update your templates because HSF Hub now points to Custom Template Library instead of Harness Template Library
 
-1. Pull in example files for the specific templates that you are using
-2. Add in customized inputs and additional variables
-3. Run Deploy HSF Hub
+1. Pull in example files for the specific templates that you are using.
+2. Add in customized inputs and additional variables.
+3. Run Deploy HSF Hub.
 
 Deploy HSF Hub is a pipeline that will be created when the `should_use_hsf_hub` variable is set to true. This pipeline will clone the Custom Harness Template Library repository and use the hub registration file to parse through the resources to create the pipelines that live inside the HSF Hub project. These pipelines can be customized with pre and post steps, role bindings and resource groups.

docs/harness-solutions-factory/use-hsf/hsf-hub.md

@@ -5,8 +5,14 @@ sidebar_position: 2
 redirect_from: 
     - /kb/reference-architectures/hsf/hsf-workflows
 ---
+When workflows are triggered, it creates an IaCM workspace to create and manage the resources. A workspace maps to a single Terraform state file. If you don't want to maintain ongoing state, there is an option to create ephemeral workspaces. Workspaces for platform-level resources (creating orgs, projects, connectors) live inside the Solutions Factory project.
+
+By default, approval notifications are sent by email to members of the HSF Admins group. If your team uses Microsoft Teams or Slack, this can be reconfigured in the notification settings on the user group. There are two distinct approvals — one before entity creation and one before the Terraform plan is applied. The IaCM plan approval shows the resource diff so the approver can see exactly what will change before confirming.
+
+After a workflow completes, the outputs are pushed directly into the IDP catalog entry for that workspace. 
+
 ## Default Workflows
-These are the workflows that are automatically created when HSF is deployed into your account. These workflows are created by `harness-template-library` repository and registered into IDP via the `Register Official IDP Templates` pipeline:
+Below are the workflows that are automatically created when HSF is deployed into your account. These workflows are created by `harness-template-library` repository and registered into IDP via the `Register Custom IDP Templates` pipeline.
 
 ### Harness Organization Setup
 Harness Organization Setup is a workflow that creates and manages organizations within your Harness account. It standardizes the process for requesting new organizations and provides an easy way to manage them consistently. The workflow provisions an organization with a defined name.