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MindTouch

MindTouch

Overview

What is MindTouch?

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

MindTouch is a versatile software that is used by various organizations for different purposes. One key use case is creating and updating …
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Our Little Corner

7 out of 10
October 18, 2017
Incentivized
It's being used as the backbone of our Intranet across the company. This allows us to have general as well as technical information from / …
Continue reading
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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What is MindTouch?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://mindtouch.com/info

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is MindTouch?

MindTouch is a leader in customer self-service software. According to the vendor, MindTouch brings the customer record (CRM) and customers’ self-service behavior together to better understand their experience with the brand. Additionally the vendor says companies like Accenture, ADP, McKinsey, Sprinklr, Whirlpool, and Zuora rely on MindTouch for effective self-service and because it helps them create actionable customer insights. MindTouch has been named one of 2017’s “Hot 100” best privately held software companies by JMP Securities. MindTouch aims to make an organization’s customers smarter, happier, and more successful.

MindTouch Features

  • Supported: Customer self-service
  • Supported: Agent enablement
  • Supported: Field service
  • Supported: Contextual help
  • Supported: Documentation authoring and publishing
  • Supported: CRM integration
  • Supported: Help desk integration
  • Supported: Ticket deflection
  • Supported: Analytics and reporting
  • Supported: User behavior insights
  • Supported: Versioning
  • Supported: KCS methodology
  • Supported: Structured atomic content
  • Supported: Customizable Interface
  • Supported: Mobile responsive layout
  • Supported: BI Integration
  • Supported: 20 supported languages

MindTouch Screenshots

Screenshot of Content from MindTouch site visualized with Wave Analytics.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Whirlpool.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Conga.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Cisco Meraki.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Hitachi Data Systems.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Zuora.

MindTouch Video

Customer Self-Service Optimizes Growth

MindTouch Integrations

  • Salesforce Service Cloud
  • Google Analytics
  • Zendesk Suite
  • SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly SAP Hybris)
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM)
  • Single Sign-On (SAML 2.0)
  • Salesforce Sales Cloud
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • Contextual Help
  • SAP Cloud for Customer
  • eCommerce

MindTouch Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesAll
Supported LanguagesAll

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Vendor post-sale highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of MindTouch are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(180)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

MindTouch is a versatile software that is used by various organizations for different purposes. One key use case is creating and updating knowledgebases for customers, allowing them to access the latest documentation via the web. This feature has been particularly beneficial for Cisco Infinite Video customers, who can easily find relevant information and troubleshoot issues without needing to contact customer support.

Another major use case of MindTouch is increasing the number of contributors within an organization and ensuring governance and oversight as the number of contributors grows. By using MindTouch, companies can involve both internal teams and customers in content creation, leading to a collaborative approach that enhances the accuracy and breadth of knowledgebase articles.

MindTouch is also widely employed as a solution for dynamically changing content as products mature and to stay ahead of industry changes. Its flexibility allows companies to adapt their documentation quickly, ensuring that customers have access to up-to-date information.

Additionally, MindTouch serves as an online help center where users can find dedicated and searchable documentation for software products. It is utilized by multiple departments in an organization to publish customer-facing and internal documentation, helping to update and maintain content efficiently.

Overall, MindTouch provides solutions for creating comprehensive knowledge bases, improving collaboration among teams, facilitating content updates, and enhancing customer self-service capabilities. Its versatility makes it valuable across industries, from technology companies seeking to support their products effectively to educational institutions aiming to provide a collaborative learning environment.

Users have provided valuable recommendations for using MindTouch. These recommendations include:

  • Comparing MindTouch to other content/documentation provider software to understand its benefits.
  • Prioritizing the creation of a clear content hierarchy before implementing MindTouch.
  • Seeking help from MindTouch for migration and utilizing the available documentation.

Additionally, businesses should consider having a well-organized knowledge base, being prepared for customization requirements, and having a small team focused on regularly adding content. Flexibility in requirements and CSS/HTML knowledge can enhance the implementation process. Finally, having the Premium Support package can be helpful for the initial setup and launch of the site.

Following these recommendations can help businesses effectively reduce redundancy and optimize their use of MindTouch for content management and documentation purposes.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 110)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch at Procore Technologies Inc. as the core CMS platform to host and manage our public support site (https://support.procore.com). I picked MindTouch over other CMS tools because of its intuitive interface and customization options. We've built a fully customized support site that matches our corporate branding style and integrates with our customer support ticketing system (Zendesk). (Prior to Zendesk, we also successfully integrated MindTouch with UserVoice.) We're able to build SEO-friendly support content that has proven to be the main driver of web traffic to our marketing site, as well as an effective lead generation tool that consistently yields product demo requests. Our internal Technical Documentation team creates and manages a majority of the content but we've also given select customers the ability to create their own customer support content in a private section of our site that can be securely accessed by their end users via our SSO integration between MindTouch and our web application. MindTouch has helped us effectively scale our SaaS company by giving users a centralized location where they can effectively support themselves in a self-service manner.
  • Intuitive WYSIWYG editor makes content creation quick and agile.
  • Created content is SEO-friendly.
  • Granular page, user, and group permission options make it easy to control how content is shared.
  • Link validation tracker. I want to be notified when a link is broken or be able to run a site-wide report on-demand.
  • Content Reuse tracker. I need to know where content or images are being used/re-used.
  • Global search and replace
  • Drag and drop, file/folder hierarchy
  • Poor quality of image resizing. Results in blurry screenshots.
  • Ability to change date range of popular page analytics. Right now, the oldest pages are the most popular pages.
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.
Seth Faber | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using MindTouch as a central repository for support knowledge, product documentation, processes & procedures. We started within the support department and quickly expanded to include delivering product documentation as native web content (not PDF) and now we targeting field service and deliver content. Centralizing information into a single highly accessible solution allows anyone to find relevant information quickly.
  • Authoring content is simple and not overly burdensome
  • APIs and connectors allow integration into CRM systems and anything else we can imagine
  • Flexibility which allows us to replace a knowledge base, wiki, PDF manuals and various team sites, Creating a single tool that delivers the right content to the right audience, all in one place.
  • Reporting for large amount of contributors is difficult as each has to be search separately
  • Advanced enterprise type of features like synonyms, full page content reuse (not just sections), use case to article linking data in search result prioritization as content reuse is not accounted for but page views are
  • MindTouch only searches content within MindTouch so our support website has 2 search boxes that act differently. One performs federated search across the entire website including MindTouch and the other only searches MindTouch. It is difficult to present both options on MindTouch pages but users need to also find content that is not in MindTouch.
MindTouch does a great job of handling content as varied as product manuals to a knowledge base replacement. Content is easy to make within MindTouch but it is also flexible enough that content can be pushed into it from other authoring tools via APis. It does not replace our entire support website but is easily integrated into the support site for a seamless experience.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is the primary authoring and publishing tool for our Tech Writing department. It powers our customer-facing support site. The business problem it solves is allowing us to easily reach our customers via the web. We have 1000s of articles and a team of people writing, editing, and updating content every day.
  • Automatic redirects when we change a page title/URL
  • Good WYSISWYG editor
  • SEO is awesome
  • Allows customized branding/look-and-feel
  • Full SaaS solution -- we have no hardware or files or anything stored locally
  • 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.
MindTouch makes it really easy for writers to write. The learning curve for the tool is low. The SEO is excellent -- we always trust our content will be in the top 3 Google search results (we're usually #1). We've found some aspects of it to be challenging though when trying to manage support documentation for multiple versions of a product.
Kevin Landry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Mindtouch is being used corporate-wide. [It] Started out in the US and is being migrated to other offices around the globe. [It's] Currently used for in-house technical support calls only. We are transitioning to customer-facing content within the next few months.
  • Article search and the ability to drill down by category makes getting to the content area easy
  • Article creation is very easy and can be based on templates that help drive consistency
  • Predefined dashboards for article usage and other metrics is a big plus
  • Extracting content in large amounts is not possible. We are extracting, translating and importing into other language specific sites and this has become an issue. Need better exporting capabilities.
  • Need more API capabilities to manipulate data.
  • Should have better out of the box translation of content.
  • Should have better article usage rating. Only one like/dislike per article per person. Article rating doesn't work for internal call centers.
Mindtouch is a great tool if you want simplification, customizable UI and easy to use. If your looking for advanced features like data extraction, data manipulation and translation be sure you understand the product limitations.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Mindtouch to satisfy our content management needs organization-wide. We deploy our self-service strategies on this platform as well as our internal knowledge base documentation for our customer care department.
  • Template creation and usage - It's so easy to create Mindtouch templates for content creation, management, and workflow processes.
  • Conditional Branding - Our favorite part of this platform is its ability to provide multiple branding and landing pages specific to our branding needs.
  • Content Management features - We also love how it is easy to manage content via custom classifications, content reuse, global variables, and content IDs.
  • Lack of Workflows and forms - No ability to create workflows or forms to support our content management processes.
  • Error Messages - Generic and vague error messages happen too often, leaving lack of support or best practices.
  • Customer Support - Depending on who you get, the service could be good or frustrating.
  • Lack of KCS Proccess Support - Even though Mindtouch is striving towards process improvements to align with the Knowledge-Centered Service model, it is not yet in compliance.
If you are looking for a content management system, this is an excellent one to start with. Its template creation, multi-branding capabilities, permissioning structure, and API access gives you a very good start for digitizing and managing content. If you are looking for a content management system that is KCS approved or geared more towards ticketing/customer service, you might want to consider whether the positive features outweigh the lack of workflows and forms often needed for the KCS approval process.
Vlad Todor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is used only by our department to provide documentation for customers and support staff. It is not used directly by support staff or SMEs, but this is because MT4 does not provide draft functionality as Responsive does. Given the rudimentary nature of drafts in Responsive, and no real way to control workflow, it's unclear how much our process would change with the upgrade in platform.
  • Ready to go out of the box, no maintenance after setup.
  • Easy to learn: it's a simple product, WYSIWYG.
  • Responsive limits how you can organize content. You can't have a guide within a guide, because according to MindTouch, you should't do that. MindTouch believes all problems are solved by the magic of their search capabilities, not in manually curating content. MT4 allows a little more flexibility, but just about everything we want to do involves an ad hoc work-around.
  • Single-sourcing documentation is rudimentary and untraceable, for both MT4 and Responsive. We have to leave hidden notes on the pages themselves to try to track how content is shared.
  • Single-sourcing images suffers from the same limitations. There's no tool for managing and tracking images, it's just another webpage on your site.
  • The only output is your MindTouch site. Forget about printing to PDF or anything else. We have eliminated manuals because MindTouch simply can't do them.
  • There's no universal replace tool. When our language changes, we have to search and then manually edit every page. MindTouch offers another work-around, for a fee.
MindTouch (MT) is well-suited for companies that have simple documentation. It works out-of-the-box, with little training. No technical knowledge is needed after initial setup and CSS customization. The hosted site is fast, and requires no maintenance.

It is not well-suited for professional technical writers. I don't think MT even has technical writers on their staff, given their own documentation and their lack of features a writer would need. Judging by the changes from MT4 to Responsive, there is little interest in producing a more robust authoring tool.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is now the 'one stop shop' for all knowledge we want to share with our customers, and also among staff. We use it mainly for technical documentation and support articles, but also release notes, product updates, training and more so that all the content about our products is there.
  • Initial creating of content and content structure. If you use the out of the box look&feel, it is fairly easy to start to populate your instance with content
  • Site structure management is good: opening another branch, moving/copying content from branch to branch. This kind of tasks is easy to do
  • managing users is simple and easy
  • Integration with Salesforce: the search from the SC cases view doesn't work well, and we took that component out of our Salesforce instance. We encourage our support analysts to search on MindTouch native, and that post a link to the relevant page.
  • The internal search engine doesn't always meet our customer's expectations. We do have thousands of pages, and we understand it is difficult to return to the "right" page when there are so many, especially as they are all so alike. Yet Google does that, and we encourage or customers to use Google as the first step to finding knowledge.
  • Reports, report and reports... we rely on Google Analytics, but we are missing am easy way to measure "effort" invested in the Knowledge Base, like: user activity, actions over time (# pages written last week, # pages deleted last month, number of editions by the user X, and such) There are some features for that, but they good only for a small number of users and content. As we have many cooks in our content kitchen, and a lot of content, it isn't sufficient.
Good for small knowledge bases, where most of the authoring is done by small teams of professional technical writers.
Not so good for large knowledge bases, where most of the contribution is done by non-pro technical writers.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We just launched MindTouch and we are very excited to have this new resource! MindTouch will allow us to eventually move all of our product documentation online, allowing us to keep content fresh and improve the customer experience. We started with a new product initially and will soon be moving all of our product documentation to MindTouch. We are also looking into ways to further utilize this resource across all departments company wide.
  • Ease of Use, both from a user perspective as well as an editor
  • Ability re-skin the UI to reflect your own branding
  • Very responsive support team
  • We've only been using MindTouch for a month and haven't noted any major issues yet
I honestly have only had interaction with MindTouch from a product documentation perspective. As Creative Director, I was responsible for rebranding the UI to match our company branding. We are in the antivirus and endpoint security sector, and so far this resource has proven to be an excellent resource. Currently we are using MindTouch for product documentation, but we intend to take full advantage and see where else it might prove useful.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently utilizing MindTouch as a documentation center to teach our new and existing customers how to utilize our software. Documents currently include FAQ's as well as step by step walk-throughs of our platform. These walk-throughs include screenshots of our software to give our customers a better idea of how our software works. We have found that MindTouch is easily customizable and allows us to separate out documentation for our multiple user types. We have also enjoyed the contextual help tool which allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform.
  • 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.
  • The Media Repository has proven to be difficult to use as the images typically become distorted.
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used to answer common customer questions globally. It reduces the amount of resources we need for support. We are moving from a high-touch customer support model to a low-touch model.
  • Easy to create articles
  • Easy to search for them from google
  • Easy to organize content in a way customers can find the topics they are interested in
  • Once in an information area it can be difficult to zero in on the article of interest. Additional filter options could be useful.
  • More templates
  • Better batch operations to simplify reorganization and restructuring of content
Well suited if customers already know about it. Can be difficult to 'train' customers to use it as a first resource (instead of calling or chatting). Can be difficult to manage if there are thousands of articles. Easy to manage if there are hundreds. If content creation can be automated (even partially) this can be a good scenario.
Nina Wishbow | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch for our help website and context-sensitive help in our product user interface.
  • The MindTouch service has been more reliable than other, similar products I've used.
  • It also is easy to customize the appearance and layout of pages once you're familiar with how the product is structured.
  • It allows embedding of videos, which we don't do very much of at present but would like to do more of.
  • Surprisingly for a content delivery company, I found the documentation to be very sparse, so at first it was learning by trial and error.
  • The product is also not very flexible at the highest level. You have to fit your topic structure into their framework, which can be somewhat limiting.
MindTouch is particularly good if you have some HTML/CSS skill, so that you can customize their defaults. It also is well suited to a smaller documentation set and for a "mobile-first" strategy. Their display framework, which appears a set of boxes set in a grid on the page, can introduce usability issues for large or complex documentation sets because it forces the user to drill down into topics instead of being able to scan long lists of topics in a tree.
October 18, 2017

Our Little Corner

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's being used as the backbone of our Intranet across the company. This allows us to have general as well as technical information from / for all departments in a quickly accessible (and secure) site. As our use of other software tools grow and our company expands, we are looking to leverage additional information and useful resource links for all employees.
  • Notifications of updates / changes that may impact service or performance
  • Easy to access support and receive assistance or answers
  • Knowledgeable staff
  • We find the whitelisting process to be unnecessarily slow.
We haven't used it outside of an informational intranet. In a review of modifying the site to be more of a social intranet, we found that the product seemed to be lacking. We believe a 7/10 represents a solid and reliable score and as the product continues to expand, we look forward to enjoying it even more.
October 17, 2017

Success with MindTouch?

Kristen Kiley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our training team set up MindTouch to house all our training videos and articles. The site is used by our customers as well as our internal departments such as support and sales. The articles contain detailed documentation on our product's features. We also use it for release notes and to link to Gotomeeting registration pages for our live training classes.

We recently starting using a separate LMS system so we can assign and track our customers' training during onboarding scenarios. We use an LMS for this because MindTouch can't do this.
  • 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.
  • When they release product updates each Thursday, sometimes those break areas of our site. Either it interacts with and breaks our custom branding or it breaks the layout and responsiveness of existing pages. So far MindTouch has not been able to find a solution to any of my tickets on these issues. So that puts the problem back on us to go through all of our 3,000+ pages and apply a fix, or to rebrand certain areas like our customized search page which broke and was reverted back to default.
  • The reports could be more helpful. I'd like to filter these reports further before I export.
  • the search feature isn't strong enough. Doesn't always pull up the best results, and it's difficult to sort through the results and know what is what. Is it a video? An article?

It's good at easily creating and housing all our documentation/articles.

It has a simple and effective way for customers to contact support. With the 3 contact methods appearing on certain pages of the site. And a good support contact form that integrates with our Salesforce.

The user community features look to be a good fit for us, but we've not implemented it yet because our engineering department still needs to prepare the single-sign-on for us.

It's not as appropriate for housing all our video tutorials. Right now we can put each video on its own page and list them similar to articles. It would be better if we could easily move and navigate between videos without having to click into individual pages. It'd also be nice to have more linking/association between videos and articles of the same subject matter.

It's not as appropriate for offering our live class schedule or registration. I'd like to see a GoToMeeting integration. Or even a good way to display classes on a calendar, with the ability to filter which classes display on the calendar.

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using MindTouch on our team only. Other groups publish content on our corporate website. It meets the documentation needs of our customers and our content is also available to the public, so it can help with marketing and SEO.
  • The authoring environment is easy enough to use.
  • Customer Service reps are responsive and resourceful.
  • 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.
MindTouch can get a help site up and running quickly, and it's honestly better than a lot of other products out there.

It's more appropriately used by dedicated tech writers than those in other roles, because there's a bit of a learning curve due to some of the oddities with the product. Those include strange, proprietary templates and complicated customizations.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Mindtouch to maintain help centers for several customer facing products. It is used by multiple teams and authors. External users access our knowledge base, and are added/authenticated as users using SAML interface.
  • SAML interface is great for updating user table based on passed parameters.
  • Good flexibility in tagging and categorizing content.
  • Good support for custom JavaScript and CSS (inline or site-wide).
  • Inflexible structure. The arbitrary enforcement of 'categories,' 'guides' and 'topics' are arbitrary and force awkward structuring of content.
  • Support for external editors (e.g., emacs or similar) and other tools. The WYSIWYG editor is basic, and the source view is missing tools (e.g., multi-file search and replace).
  • Total lack of feedback on feature requests. Over the course of our experience, our team has made multiple requests which seem to drop into a black hole. There is no feedback loop to customers on status of requests (which for users = gaps).
Well suited:
Help centers with simple structure, few products, that follows the structure dictated by MT.

Not well suited:
Sites with complex structure requiring alternate navigation structures.
Sites where content requires integration/feedback from SMEs. The lack of a robust draft/markup workflow (see Google docs) means users are forced to generate PDFs or cut/paste into Google docs for review, which is a major drawback.
October 11, 2017

MindTouch Review

Deborah Fuhrmann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently MindTouch is mainly used by support to record our answers and solutions as well as our documentation team who publish our product documentation.
  • Easy to use editor.
  • Simple to build out structure and change as needed.
  • Resolution time.
  • Update on ticket status.
  • Better reporting for KCS metrics.
MindTouch is really great with content that is public and requires no restrictions for audiences.
Lila Krutel Meyer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At Gainsight, our documentation team members are the primary authors in MindTouch, but the published docs are utilized by other internal teams as well as our customers. We use MindTouch to share product release notes, user guides and admin configuration guides, tutorials, troubleshooting tips, FAQs, as well as some short feature overview videos. Our internal teams can submit feedback on individual articles directly in MT, and the docs team receives email notifications. Our Biz Ops team is working on documentation to support new customer on-boarding, and we're planning to host that in its own category on MT. Additionally, our support team is starting to use a private category on MT to host their internal technical documentation.
  • Authoring and editing articles is quick and easy.
  • Mindtouch has a really responsive and helpful support team.
  • You can customize the structure of your documentation on MT.
  • You can easily re-use content from one article in another, as well as pull in multiple articles to a path or sequence of documentation.
  • You can't easily manage the sequence of articles in a sub-category or guide.
  • If you are migrating documentation from another platform to MT, you may encounter a rocky road and lots of manual QA.
  • There's no real draft management functionality available. If you want to offer article feedback to someone, all you can do is enter text in a single comment box at the end of the article. As a result, we still use Google Docs for drafting and sharing articles for review, and then when they're finalized, we publish them on MT.
  • Some of their backend tools for reviewing broken hyperlinks, or locating unpublished articles, as well as their OOTB reporting options need improvement. They feel somewhat buried in the backend and inflexible; for example, you can't export a long list of records for easier review.
If you don't already have a documentation portal in place, MT is a great option. If you need to have private and public categories, and different people need to be able to edit/view articles in different categories, MT has the permissions structure in place to handle that. If you want to re-use content, including media, MT can support those use cases. If you want to present some articles in a path, to help users tackle a larger task or process, MT can do it with their paths feature.

If you're migrating docs from another platform, be sure to figure out how your existing article URLs will be handled. All of our old article URLs were broken in the migration, which created a bad end user experience that we were dealing with for several months.

If you need to have detailed reporting capabilities on user activity, you'll probably have to connect MT to Google Analytics or another tool.

October 10, 2017

Title Here

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Across the whole organization. Everyone contributes to our public-facing documentation. We are trying to disseminate knowledge so users are more educated, can solve problems on their own, and learn about our company as a solution for their analytics needs.
  • Flexibility of formatting in documents
  • Works in a browser
  • Usability -- things from save buttons (not where I expect them to be) to buttons for enabling formatting options in a document (looks clunky, like Word from the 90s).
  • Heard from our development team that changing layout wasn't easy, and so we're stuck with a layout on our documentation landing page that is subpar.
  • Integration with our SSO was clunky and has resulted in many bugs and my constantly getting logged out of MindTouch
It seems to work, but I wouldn't say it worked well. Would look into other options next time that give us more control over layout and better usability when publishing.
Travis Sousa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is being used by DealerTeam to the fullest measure.

Internally - Structured content allows for new hires to read self-help articles and learn about tribal knowledge without taking valuable time away from top producers. MT has saved time and improved the efficiency behind new and existing employee training. Team building has also improved as we can now share articles around the office by copying and pasting a link. Whether it's to answer an employee question or provide an answer to a client, sharing content is fast and easy.

Externally - A web centric knowledge base with public facing URL's for each piece of content!! Are you kidding me? Nope, that's what you get with MindTouch. Don't worry, you can keep sensitive content private with Roles and Permissions. Creating public facing content structured like a website has made a huge impact for our customer support channels. Self-help content available 24/7 has successfully catered to our niche in the automotive retail industry. With high turnover and constant re-training, our clients can now direct their employees to our Customer Success site and not our phone lines. I have personally reduced my time on the phone and webinars by over 50%.

Help Tickets - When ticket deflection doesn't serve up the answer automatically, our Agents are responding faster to help tickets through the MindTouch Service Cloud integration. The Genius Link displays top rated articles and provides matches based off key words for fast content sharing. But seeing the User search history is the real hero for customer support. Our Agents can track where the customer has already view content on our MT site making each response relevant and progressive when solving the case. Even when the answer is to draft new content, our customers' questions are perpetually dictating a better success site.

The DealerTeam Community - We wanted to build a community for our customers to get real value. The idea was to use SSO and provide a single place for customers to provide Ideas, access Knowledge, Release Notes, Cases Management, and The DealerTeam Academy for LMS. MindTouch is so progressive it already had an integration for our Customer Community. Using custom code to leverage the integration, we can provide our customers a seamless experience to content in MindTouch we used to create our Learning Management System. I cannot express the time saving advantage enough. Because MindTouch is structured in a way that promotes content sharing, we were able to leverage the platform to build our LMS and control the message delivered to every customer, no matter where they choose to access the content.

Organic Search and SEO - MindTouch puts Google to work in your advantage. I had no SEO experience prior to building the success site, so don't expect me to get technical here. By following SEO best practices and using the MT content structure, our published articles started to land on page one search results. The simple fact anyone can use their browser from any device and search for DealerTeam help content is amazing.
  • MindTouch has build a relevant platform to create and host public facing help content. It is easy to use yet robust enough to get highly technical with API's and seamless integrations.
  • MindTouch continues to revolutionize customer success. In the two years I have subscribed to their services, they continue to release new and useful features, educate and inspire the industry, drive innovation, and build strategic partnerships for long-term success.
  • MindTouch provides amazing customer and technical support. On top of a stellar product, they go out of there way to offer the best customer experience.
  • The Company Culture at MindTouch is impressive. Upon several visits to headquarters in downtown San Diego I have had the pleasure to become aquatinted with many of the employees. The company is comprised of stand-out talent and exceptional people working for the common goal of customer success
  • A dominate social media presence. If you want to know about MindTouch, you don't have to go very far. These guys are experts at what they sell and practice everything they preach.
  • Every emerging technology strives to improve. Not all problems are foreseeable and bugs exist. If I could dream up where MindTouch can improve, I can assure you they have already begun.
  • The standard pay structure of buying a full year in advance might be tuff for smaller startups
  • I would love MindTouch to provide video hosting as part of their service.
Because of the many ways MindTouch can be structured any business providing customer support and documentation can benefit.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is being used across the entire organization. We used MindTouch to create a knowledge base to deliver information to our customers, including user guides, release notes, use cases, and other content enabling customers to learn about our products. MindTouch enables us to consolidate and organize customer-facing content in a single, searchable location.
  • The WYSYWIG editor enables content creators and editors to preview how published content will look.
  • The conditional text style enables us to tag proprietary information in customer-facing content, so that only readers with the appropriate permissions can view that content.
  • The automatically-generated table of contents in certain templates makes it easy to let readers search documents by header.
  • Editor has no option for including a bulleted list within a numbered list (something possible with traditional word processing software), a feature often needed in creating technical documents.
  • Would be nice to support more than one language per license, for content that must be localized to many languages.
  • Can't preview end-user content before the document is published.
MindTouch is probably well-suited to most general documentation and content-creation needs. For highly technical documentation, it would be good to include some more formatting options. And, previewing end-user content before publishing would be very useful. Some formatting or content errors can be detected only during WYSIWYG preview, but having to publish a document in progress risks making unedited content public (even if only briefly).
October 09, 2017

Easily the best

Paul Schwartz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is being used as an internal knowledge repository for our customer facing technology support teams. The content is created by the support team and the support leadership relies on the associates to consume the information. MIndTouch allows the support teams immediate access to development manuals, implementation team whitepapers and keeps a running record of all the information accessed by associates.
  • Allows for end user customization with standard HTML actions. This is beneficial because every organization is different in not just the data needed but also the intended look and feel.
  • MindTouch has a powerful search function and ranking abilities inside of the knowledge base. With out this support associates would have to spend more time than is necessary researching answers.
  • Overall ease of administration is a strength of MindTouch. The real effort is behind the layout and accumulation of data, MindTouch makes it "easy" to access the pertinent data once the configuration is complete.
  • While there is power in the back end configuration aspects of the tool set there are also limitations on the layout options. What ends up happening is that every company has a very similar look and feel to the knowledge base screen.
If there is a need for a consolidated view of the corporate data related to data MindTouch is the only solution I would consider. The power behind the views and history is not to be overlooked for any leader trying to gain an understanding of the consumption of information for an organization.
Marshall Yam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch as the platform for our Knowledge Center, which provides our customers and employees with access to our product documentation and training materials. The Documentation Group is responsible for managing the Knowledge Center, with support from the IT department. The MindTouch based Knowledge Center allows users to search for content via PC or mobile devices, read it online, or save or print it for offline access.
  • Good search engine
  • Easy-to-use editor
  • Mobile access
  • Customization is complicated and limited
  • Should offer ability to save selected topics to a favorites list and then generate PDFs that include any number of the favorite topics and in any order
  • Content lists are arranged arbitrarily in alphabetical order
  • Searching for content across range of documents, not just within individual documents
  • Accessing content via mobile devices
  • Streaming video
  • Setting content access permissions for individual users or user groups
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch across our organization to store documents pertaining to training, forms, and miscellaneous guides and tutorials.
  • Stores high numbers of documents.
  • Simple, easy to use interface.
  • Has support available when needed.
  • Allows for a high level of customization.
  • The tiered setup of different article types can be confusing at times.
  • Links with different names cannot be dropped over an existing document and updated. In those cases, links must be redone.
Communicating information to employees and customers is a strong point, but the article type setup can sometimes be a bit of a challenge at first. However, that usually gets more self-explanatory once the user has utilized it for awhile.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using the MindTouch platform to house our technical help content. We have a few people in our organization that contribute articles to the help website and we have minimal time from developers to make the site look different or function differently from the base MindTouch template. MindTouch addresses the business problem of our software users having questions while they are working in our software; having a self-serve site instead of needing to reach out to us right away is useful.
  • Responsive images and content to different devices (mobile, web, etc)
  • History tracking, knowing who made what changes within articles
  • Ability to keep drafts or parts of the website unpublished or only viewable by a few people
  • It takes a long time to fix bugs
  • Our software users do not like the MindTouch base template, they find it hard to navigate. And since we do not have developer time to adjust the template it is what we have been using. it would be nice if there were a few design templates to start from so you don't have to have a full time developer on the team
  • Image repository is confusing - sees like a good idea but execution and UI/UX is not smooth
MindTouch seems well suited for an organization that has a dedicated team to work on this platform (and must include a developer). It can be harder for a smaller company or a smaller department that does not have these resources available full-time because of training required and understanding the workflows needed to create an efficient site.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Initially, we chose Mindtouch as a solution for authoring and publishing technical product documentation and support FAQs/knowledge base. Operationally, we were looking for an out-of-the-box, cloud-based documentation solution where writers can easily create content, collaborate, and publish. For customers, we wanted to move from PDFs to self-service support. Mindtouch checked all these boxes for us. Feedback from the field has been positive.

Since our launch, other departments expressed interest in using Mindtouch for their content or are now using Mindtouch to publish best practices, videos, and other customer-facing content.
  • The initial launch - prepping the site for go-live. We were able to brand our site with minimal customizations and minimal technical support. Mindtouch provides a semi-structured architecture for organizing content - once you are familiar with this model - it was easy for us to organize our content.
  • The editor is awesome. Seasoned tech writers and occasional writers can easily write, and publish their content with minimal training and support. Tech writers appreciate abilities for advanced techniques, such as content reuse, linking, or embedding JavaScript. Occasional writers appreciate the ease-of-use and a familiar editor ui (such MS Word).
  • Publishing workflow and revision tracking. Tech writers working on content for feature releases appreciate the edit live or edit as a draft features. We use edit as a draft when collaborating with SMEs - enabling SMEs to co-write as a Draft Contributor. Revision history is great for either reverting content OR reviewing change history -- especially when multiple authors are involved.
  • Mindtouch is a great alternative to traditional technical documentation authoring solutions (HATs). We appreciate that content can be viewed as a knowledgebase and as contextual help from the application. My team is more productive and able to deliver more quality documentation - on time.
  • Localization/translation solution and workflow is cumbersome. At the moment we translate to one language, but can foresee complexities in change management if we needed to manage many locales.
  • Improved documentation on advanced topics, such as working with underlying css classes and understanding dependencies. Overall though, Mindtouch documentation has improved significantly over the years.
Mindtouch is great for organizations whose focus is producing content. You want to get ramped up quickly and maintain your site with minimum resources. It may not be a good solution if your organization has a complex content architecture, want to implement strictly structured content, such as DITA, or want to have complete control over maintaining the technology.
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