MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.
MindTouch offers a unique knowledge and information management tool that was different enough from traditional knowledge bases and advanced enough to not be a Wiki while allowing CRM integration and APIs for customization. MindTouch as a company is focused on making their …
I did not select MindTouch at my current company, but I was looking into it at my previous position. It has many of the useful features of the more traditional publications tools (RoboHelp, Frame) with the ease of web deployment of other tools (HelpIQ). It has some limitations …
We selected MindTouch because: - it could support multiple products inside of one instance - it could support both external and internal users with conditionalized access to content
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 …
Each suite offered a variety of features; however, MindTouch had powerful SAP integration and as a hosted solution the value of ownership was nearly immediate. Put on top of the API and CSS options for customization MindTouch was the top solution for our documentation …
MindTouch has a high degree of user freedom regarding customization, offers a quick-responding support team, and keeps their site up-to-date and modern. The combination of these abilities made MindTouch a fine choice that could suit our needs.
In my view, MindTouch is hands down the industry leader when it comes to documentation and publishing products. None of the other products I have used provide such an intuitive interface for single-source content creation. MadCap Flare has a steep learning curve and requires …
MindTouch is by far better than Zendesk. Article management and editing are much better and richer (more than a basic font. MindTouch has a better interface and better design options out of the box. MindTouch has a dedicated customer success management [team] and support from …
Technical Writer / Help Author / Copywriter / Course instructor
Chose MindTouch
We wanted a SaaS solution that was always online. In the past we used RoboHelp, but the whole idea of having to compile the help project before publishing seemed rather backwards at a point. Mind, we have not reviewed later installments of RoboHelp.
N/A. It has been several years since I evaluated competitors. I'm vaguely aware of Zendesk and am in process of evaluating not - not with the intention to replace MindTouch, just to keep up with trends in the industry. I would consider a move if I ever felt that MindTouch was …
MindTouch wasn't the cheapest option we considered, but it was the best value. It gave us the most features, controls, flexibility, and growth opportunity for the money we paid for it. We did not need a ticketing solution, and a lot of the offerings we evaluated were stronger …
MindTouch is not as sophisticated as those editors but MindTouch is the only one that generates HTML. The other editors provide additional, advanced functionality, are more bulletproof, and require the services of an experienced technical writer. MindTouch, however, is simpler …
Actually, when we evaluated MinfTouch it was evident that we didn't really need to perform due diligence against other solution providers. It was apparent from the get-go they were the perfect fit for the problems we were trying to solve.
We selected MindTouch after being given assurances it met all of our needs. Whilst I am sure it can do this, it was not made apparent the technical ability required to be able to achieve this and given the choice again we would not have selected MindTouch.
We were on Salesforce.com's KB and did not like the interface and the difficulty with article creation. The advantage of SF was that we could assign articles to individuals for review. I feel that is missing with MindTouch. It makes article creation workflows very difficult.
We previously used MadCap Flare. Flare is amazing for its single sourcing capabilities, where MindTouch is lacking. But with Flare we had to do an entire build and publish each time (which took hours).
We looked at Happy Fox, Salesforce Communities, Fuze, MadCap Flare, etc. MindTouch won out because of its Salesforce integration and the fact that it was a hosted solution with everything included in one price.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.