Knova vs. MindTouch

We expereienced an upgrade by Aptean in March 2014 and it actually created issues with our interfaces to Word and well as performance issues. As of November, we have most of the performance issues resolved, however our interface with Word is still not working. It takes alot of upfront work to convert with Word and with the upgrade that was affected. Authors are still frustrated with many issues in the formatting and editing of existing data. A vital tool to update the product home pages has not been available except for sporadic late night periods since the upgrade in March. Overall, many authors are not happy with this knowledge management tool

I would recommend MindTouch to anyone who is looking to create and host their documentation for a product that has multiple types of users. Our business modal represents customers on the buy-side as well as the sell-side and we are able to easily organize documentation to service both types of users.

Incentivized

• Aptean offers simple access to Knowledge Management for our Clients, Customer Support teams as well as internal support teams. Allows our knowledge management team the ability to provide consistent and up-to-date processes and troubleshooting tips for our associates as well as ADP Clients.
• Aptean provides an easy to use user interface with tools for authors that mimic Microsoft Word (Cut, Paste, Spell Check, Bullets, Indentation etc). It also provides an easy to user user interface for our associates in accessing the Knowledge Management solutions. The Search tool is very powerful and allows the users quick access to the information they need!
• In the more than 3 years that we have been using Consona/Aptean, we have had very little down time. This is important to our authors as well as end users in being able to access the information. Allowing the authors the ability to update the information in near real time is another key feature of keeping our information current.

• Good privacy settings for each page. I can set a new article to semi-private until it's approved to go live. And I can send a link to that page out for review.
• Good tracking on each page history.
• Ability to view and restore previous page versions.
• I like the category search bars that only search the current category.

Incentivized

• We have experienced some slowness with importing pictures into our Aptean application. While they do eventually complete, it is very timeconsuming when several images are needed. Definitely tries our patience, or consider not including them at all!
• Some of the formatting issues transfering our information from Word to Aptean are still challenging and require too much manual intervention than necessary.

• User experience. The product's UX is fragmented and it's hard to figure out how to do some certain very simple, important things.
• Many aspects of the product don't really meet industry standards for technical communication. They seem to have been cobbled together by people who don't fully understand what technical writers do. Product updates really don't address these issues. Folks in sales and support sometimes imply that the authoring platform MindTouch has created is the only way to do create documentation, which is counter to the experience of those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time.

Incentivized

Many business units are using the Aptean product for knowledge management and a change now would be too crucial to the processes that the associates are becoming familiar with using. We have spent a lot of time promoting our Aptean Knowledge Management tool and interfaced it with our call tracking system.

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.

Incentivized

MindTouch has many formatting options but some procedures (like editing a template) are not easy to figure out. We needed to create several custom templates for our content and found the MindTouch user documentation on this process somewhat contradictory and incomplete.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Mindtouch support is awesome. Support agents are friendly and helpful. Some can benefit from ongoing training. Overall the support experience is very good. One area they can possibly improve is visibility into product feedback. Seeing or getting insight into requests or votes for features would be an added customer experience.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with Zendesk

Incentivized

• Increased Employee Effciency adding ability to look up processes and troubleshooting tips is invaluable.
• Ability to share information with our Client Facing interface, which results in better customer service. Encouraging ADP associates and clients to become more self sufficient is what we're all about!
• Ability to keep the information current with the effciency of the product.

• Time to publication can be very quick, provided there are not multiple changes in flight at the same time for the same page.
• We have seen a tremendous increase in customer traffic and SEO.
• MindTouch allows us to custom-brand the look and feel of our site to match our company's marketing and branding. This instills trust in our content.
• The relative simplicity of the platform enabled us to hire the best people and best writers we could find, without worrying so much about specific past expertise in a complicated publishing platform.

Incentivized