Likelihood to Recommend For a new site: 1. Are there any hosting requirements? eZ Publish works best on a traditional LAMP stack. 2. What is the expertise of the development and systems administrations individuals? There should be some PHP development experience and a solid level of Apache and MySQL hosting. 3. Who will be managing the content of the site? What is their bandwidth for training? For ongoing content changes?
Read full review If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.
Read full review Pros Content Taxonomy: Content is managed in a tree. Though taxonomy vs folksonomy is a near-religious debate among professionals, clients seeing the system for the first time just seem to "get it" more often. Content Flexibility: Common content types such as blog posts and articles are available out of the box. However, customizing these and creating new content types is very easy. Developer Friendly: Developers need only a little PHP experience to get started. Of course being an expert doesn't hurt and opens the door for the development of custom modules. Read full review MindTouch helps to easily organize our help articles to ensure that our end user is receiving the proper information. The MindTouch platform is extremely easy to navigate which reduces the turnaround time for our team to publish new material. The editor tools supplied through MindTouch make styling our documentation a breeze. The contextual help tool allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform. Read full review Cons The template language: Outputting content or doing something special with it requires use of the templating language. Myself along with other developers I have trained, found this to be one of the biggest hurdles. Layout of physical files: The system decides what settings files and templates to use based on a hierarchy of modules. The same file can exist in multiple modules and you can find yourself deep within very similar looking folder structures, causing confusion during debugging. Community: eZ has a solid set of community contributors but the gap between it and Drupal or Wordpress is pretty large. Read full review When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case. The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else. Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content. Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history. In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
Read full review Usability The site is responsive across multiple devices and screens. It has a clear path to contact support. The articles are searchable. Site users do have trouble navigating the site and finding what they need. That may be due to the architecture of the site, but it'd be nice if MindTouch offered more solutions are this. Our content is organized by product line. And many of those product lines have overlapping training content, so we have extensive duplicate content.
Read full review Performance MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
Read full review Support Rating It's good. Pretty solid. We got a lot of input to get up and running, but did a lot of the setup and customization work ourselves, because of our high standards. We've gotten good response and results on specific projects related to customization and our CSM is also pretty responsive. Overall, I think that the jobs of CSMs and support folks would be easier if the product weren't wonky in some ways. They seem to have to do more "workarounds" for basic functionality that should just work out of the box
Read full review Online Training Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
Read full review Implementation Rating Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
Read full review Alternatives Considered eZ Publish isn't as large in community size and number of installations as other content management systems. However, it's just as capable and met our needs:
Developers, system administrators, and project manager can all speak the same language during the development and maintenance cycles of a site. End-user training is very straight-forward. Vendor support is available. Client IT departments can access if need (developers/designers/sysadmins). The community is there (forums) and there are solid contributions (extensions) from both the vendor and the community. Read full review I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon
Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used
Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
Read full review Scalability We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with
Zendesk Read full review Return on Investment Common knowledge: By making eZ a core offering, developers, system administrators, and project managers were able to communicate with each other effectively. Training: Due to its content taxonomy, end-user training often went well. Support: In our case, we had Gold support from eZ Publish which saved time and helped with customizations. Read full review Our operational efficiently has improved significantly. Prior to Mindtouch, we managing duplicate content in two separate authoring solutions. Delivering content predictably and consistently was difficult and stressful for writers. In Mindtouch, we were able to optimize our content (remove redundancies) giving us more time to test, review, and improve content quality. Traffic to our knowledge center is increasing monthly. Internally, SMEs and customer-facing teams are recognizing the value Mindtouch brings through self-service knowledge. These SMEs want to contribute more to content, either as contributing writers or collaborators with tech writers. Read full review ScreenShots