Likelihood to Recommend 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 We have offices set around the world, and hiring new team members in certain countries makes it a bit difficult, especially now to fly out or fly in to help get them situated and fully trained. This really helps close the gaps in between the distance and training. Makes onboarding a heck of a lot easier.
Read full review Pros 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 Tracks progress for training. Easily determines a new hires competency in handling tasks on their own. Houses all of our documents and videos in one location versus several. Read full review Cons 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 The subject organization could use work! It's just jumbled and needs folders. It's very cumbersome to have to click back and forth to subjects when you are within a task. I wish there was a larger side bar that could show ALL subjects, topics, and tasks in one glance with drop-down menus. 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 During the entire sales process, the Trainual team was great to work with. After the sale, their onboard process was top notch as well and was very quick to answer any questions and actually were open to customizing the platform to meet our specific needs. They have been great this entire time.
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 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 This is our first time using anything like this! Previously we just wrote task items in shared Google documents. It was the best of what we could do at the time, but this is a whole different world, and we love it! Being able to integrate quizzes and photos and interactive video is excellent! Read full review Scalability We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with
Zendesk Read full review Return on Investment 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 Saves time for the team for training The fact that everything is in one location is really good! Allows us to edit and change and adjust as the business does Keeps us flexible and not cemented to a way of doing things Read full review ScreenShots