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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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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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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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For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://mindtouch.com/info
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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
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
- Google+
- Contextual Help
- SAP Cloud for Customer
- eCommerce
MindTouch Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | All |
| Supported Languages | All |
MindTouch Downloadables
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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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.
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(1-25 of 37)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 22, 2018
SEO-friendly CMS for creating robust Support/KB websites
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.
November 02, 2017
Impressions of a long-time MindToucher
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.
October 23, 2017
MindTouch - An exiting new addition to our team!
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
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.
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).
October 11, 2017
MindTouch Review
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.
October 10, 2017
Easy & fast content authoring platform
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.
October 10, 2017
Title Here
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
October 09, 2017
Useful Product, with Some Limitations
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.
October 08, 2017
MindTouch based Knowledge Center
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
October 02, 2017
Catch a Ride to Self-Service Knowledge
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.
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.
September 28, 2017
MindTouch is great for companies with huge amounts of content
We use MindTouch to house all of our customer-facing user guides for our software products. We also use it for internal information, training, HR resources, and departmental processes. We additionally have a section for hosting links to sign up for training webinars. Authoring is primarily done by myself in Product, but trainers also update some articles, and a variety of people use the internal-only section.
- The WYSIWYG editor is easy to use and very robust. There is also a great deal of customization available for styles and headings.
- MindTouch provides the option for custom site CSS to brand and style your site as desired.
- Information organization for users. It is easy to display information and articles in the desired hierarchy.
- The Search feature leaves something to be desired. I continually get complaints from our users that Search does not return useful results.
September 05, 2017
Worth the cost for a growing company
We have a number of products and processes that we've for a long time held as "tribal knowledge". Mindtouch allows our most experienced employees to record their knowledge and executives to record expectations so that on boarding and referencing are easy.
- Searchable content for immediate answers
- Nesting of articles for exploration on topics
- The text editor is extremely difficult to use. Keeping consistent styling throughout the document is pretty hard.
- It's gotta be easier to copy and paste into MindTouch without losing all formatting/styling.
September 05, 2017
Ideal for large volumes of documentation
At FotoWare we use MindTouch to document the entire suite of Digital Asset Management software we develop and sell. We document user guides, technical configuration, and our API in MindTouch, and the documentation is made freely available for our customers and resellers at https://learn.fotoware.com. We believe a knowledgeable customer is a happy one, so anyone who's interested in our software can find ALL the information they need on the MindTouch site, without restrictions.
- Weekly development cycles that mean changes and fixes are pushed to content creators quickly. We truly feel the MindTouch team is actively working to improve the service.
- Content editing is fast and intuitive; linking articles, adding rich media, it works just as expected. Anyone who's learned the basics can add content that's meaningful and adds value to the documentation.
- The search engine was a big thing for us - once articles are tagged right (we have a lot of content), related articles are REALLY related, and when searching users find the content we most want them to find. We all know Google is great at finding things, but the MindTouch search engine is fast and accurate. And it can be implemented in the browser's omnibox so you can trigger a search directly from the address bar in your browser. That's a big deal for me when I manage the content on the site.
- The only think I can think to wish for is an improved video player. But we've got around that by embedding the Vimeo player directly through a dekiscript when we need it.
We use MindTouch internally and externally, to provide access to our base product documentation, learning aides, best practices, and more. Previously, we operated on a system of internal and client PDFs as well as an internal, un-curated, wiki product. Upon request our customers were provided documentation through email or via a file sharing service. With the previous hodgepodge system, we had little to no control over who could publish documentation, where or how it was transmitted, how it was organized, and a non-efficient method of tracking documentation age and validity. We were ineffectively educating our clients and our staff.
- MindTouch makes it is ridiculously easy to create and publish media rich content. We enhance our information to accommodate all user learning styles with a mixture of information mediums, e.g., videos, images. The editor is intuitive, the system is stable, and permits a responsive delivery of content across multiple media platforms.
- By using a cloud-based system to host our documentation, we are able to provide our clients access to information for new features timed with the initial release of the feature or when the client upgrades versions.
- MindTouch allows us to write all content in a single product library and then re-use that content via multiple methods in our other libraries. We maintain a consistent message by utilizing their content re-use and workpaths functionality to use original content across multiple articles, that may differ in focus or audience, on the same subject.
- MindTouch's permission system allows us to seamlessly display or hide information from users based on their access level or product version.
- The lack of drag-and-drop for images was very frustrating when importing our documentation. We had documents with hundreds of images that had to be saved prior to uploading them into the articles; a silver lining was that after they were saved locally we could then copy / paste, skipping the multiple clicks to attach from file.
- The Dashboard could use some improvements. The Draft Manager is not user workflow intuitive, doesn't allow starting work from the and then one-click back to view and updated the to-do list. Currently the reports are rudimentary and not intuitively named. But in the past few months they have moved more functionality into the Dashboard and they are working on the reports.
- Working with drafts is awkward. Prior to publishing an article for the first time, the user is unable to view drafts along side live pages to visualize the addition of content in the existing structure. Users are unable to create anchors and links in / between draft pages, the pages must be published prior to linking to / from the page; requiring the user to publish and then un-publish or edit the page multiple times to establish links. Additionally, copying pages creates them live and permissions cannot be applied to draft pages.
August 14, 2017
One of a Kind HTML Editor
MindTouch is used for internal-only as well as external documentation for corporate services. Documents are user guides, getting started guides, etc. Internally, service developers create the MindTouch documentation or a technical writer does. The external documentation is created by a technical writer. Users are internal devs for the internal products or third parties developing on top of our services for the external docs. MindTouhc provides an easy to use the editor to document complex software products.
- Versioning-- so you can roll back or compare to previous doc versions.
- Customer support-- friendly and timely, I get emails and/or calls usually within hours of submitting a support request.
- Linking, permissions, image handling, table creation -- all of the basic tools needed to create documentation.
- Oddly, MT disallows h1 heading tags that you enter, MindTouch downgrades to an h2 heading tag.
- Link checking is missing because when third party tools try to check links, MindTouch will create a bogus page so the link doesn't break. But we'd like it to break so we know the link is broken. Linking to bogus pages is unhelpful.
- The editor tool bar remains on the top of the UI. So, many times, you have to scroll to the top of the screen to do things that would be very simple if the toolbar floated on the top of the screen.
We use Mindtouch for client-facing platform documentation and release notes. While the whole organization has access, this means primarily that client-facing functions (Support, Success, Services) are the internal users of our Mindtouch instances.
- Content reuse across articles and dynamically updating articles based on linked content.
- Maintaining linked structures despite article name and structure changes.
- Anchor implementation.
- Solid WYSIWYG editor.
- Multilingual content without cross-instance SSO and a special config would be great (I know it EXISTS, it's just, a big undertaking for a couple reasons on our setup).
- Better visualization for instance architecture/article hierarchy would also be super.
- More robust user...usage? statistics and tracking, without having custom reports run.
August 02, 2017
Very good CMS with good collaboration tools.
We have been using MindTouch Responsive for about two years now, as a full replacement of an in-house help system for an e-commerce platform. MindTouch brought a highly improved experience for both users and authors of our knowledge center, simplifying the authoring and review processes, and giving us the option of managing multiple users, both internal and external.
Additionally, we received great support from our account manager and the MindTouch customer support team, solving the few issues that we encountered quickly and painlessly.
Additionally, we received great support from our account manager and the MindTouch customer support team, solving the few issues that we encountered quickly and painlessly.
- Easy to use editor
- User management
- The editor interface could be streamlined, hiding some unused features.
- Copy-pasting text from Word or other docs generates formatting issues, even with the editor's 'no formatting' option.
One of the challenges Newmar deals with is documentation. Our products are comprised of so many components from different manufacturers that keeping up with their literature and documentation can be overwhelming -- not to mention our own documentation that we need to keep up with. Because of MindTouch, Newmar is able to cater to our customers' information needs like never before. We are now able to provide coach owners and service technicians with instant access to the information they need when they need it.
My department, Technical Publications, is responsible for adding and maintaining our MindTouch content. We make use of the aging, traffic, and content rating reports to keep up with what's most important to our users and help prioritize our focus for research, technical, and editorial reviews. The MindTouch framework makes it very easy to add to and update our functional and technical guides and articles as new/relevant information becomes available. Aside from the great web UI and framework of the product, MindTouch offers a very well-documented API that we use for programmatically adding users, adding and updating content, and maintaining permissions.
MindTouch has made such a profound impact on our ability to get relevant, up-to-date information in the hands of our users that we will soon be creating our coach owner's guides exclusively from our MindTouch site.
My department, Technical Publications, is responsible for adding and maintaining our MindTouch content. We make use of the aging, traffic, and content rating reports to keep up with what's most important to our users and help prioritize our focus for research, technical, and editorial reviews. The MindTouch framework makes it very easy to add to and update our functional and technical guides and articles as new/relevant information becomes available. Aside from the great web UI and framework of the product, MindTouch offers a very well-documented API that we use for programmatically adding users, adding and updating content, and maintaining permissions.
MindTouch has made such a profound impact on our ability to get relevant, up-to-date information in the hands of our users that we will soon be creating our coach owner's guides exclusively from our MindTouch site.
- What really sets MindTouch apart from other providers I’ve worked with is that the people who know so much about the product also understand how their customers actually use the product. That had a profound impact on our setup, configuration, implementation, and rollout. One of the most refreshing things that MindTouch demonstrates is that they don't expect everyone to use their product exactly the same way!
- Once we signed our contract we moved into the on-boarding process, which was practically the easiest part of the whole thing. It was unbelievable to see that all of their checklists and documentation for setting up our site was openly available on the MindTouch customer success website. Having access to that information during the sales process allowed us to see what was coming and what to expect along the way. Beyond the documentation, though, our Implementation manager guided us by making sure that we understood what we needed to do and how to use the product to accomplish the task at hand. Whether we were following the process for standard functionality or delving into a question/feature/use-case for our specific implementation needs, she would walk us through a hands-on demo or facilitate a meeting with a subject matter expert to be sure we were well-trained. By the time we were finished with the training we were well “on board” with MindTouch.
- I can’t talk about a successful sales and on-boarding process without also mentioning the pleasant, timely, and very helpful assistance I’ve received from customer support. They have answered several questions and helped troubleshoot some things with me. I have also quickly come to count on my rep as a valuable resource for some of the deeper functionality/programming concepts of the product! There have been occasions where my questions/incidents have been escalated to him and he’s known the answer right off the top of his head, and there have also been a couple times that he has gone further up stream to find an answer for me. All in all, the customer support team has been very timely, responsive, and helpful.
- As if all of that isn’t enough, though, I’ve even received some personal follow-up messages from one of the VPs. Of course, anyone would expect an executive in that area to be polite and courteous when dealing with a customer, but aside from that what I have seen is that he rolls up his sleeves and gets directly involved. I’m sure that some of the things he’s communicated with me about could have been left for others in his team to take care of, but the fact that he handled them personally is a characteristic I admire. That's something I look for in the leadership of the companies I choose to do business with because it speaks volumes about the culture of the organization.
- I was told up front about the ways that MindTouch interacts with its customers to be sure they are happy and getting the most out of the product, but I never expected the experience to be this good! Everyone I’ve had the privilege of coming into contact with at MindTouch has consistently proven this and reinforced the fact that I made the right choice with MindTouch. I’ve never had such a pleasant overall experience with a product, and I’m looking forward to our future success with this partnership.
- One of the challenges we have with using the MindTouch framework is the inability to list an article in more than one location throughout the site. The MindTouch workaround for this is to create a new page and link the content from one article to another. This is acceptable, but far from ideal because it creates several challenges for my department as they try to configure the site to work for printing owner's guides for multiple products.
- MindTouch has developed "DekiScript", which is both a positive and a negative. While it provides convenience within the product, there are a few "shortcuts" that seem to be missing. One example is in creating a PDF of a guide or page in responsive. Since Responsive doesn't yet have any obvious means of creating a PDF, it would be most helpful if there was a "page.pdf" shortcut that would produce the url for doing so. Instead, you have to jump through a few hoops to get what you need to piece together a relatively simple thing. This forces unnecessary complication back onto us to manage with the rest of our content.
MindTouch is broken into three parts: Product Documentation, Support Knowledge Articles, and Internal BluB0X Process Documentation. I am responsible for the direction and high level architecture of MT. I have a direct report that is responsible for the technical details (CSS, Java Script, Deki script) and for developing templates to ease creation of new content. The two of us are responsible for new content and ensuring the reviewing of existing content is done. The readability and SME content review is assigned to other people, but we are responsible to make sure the reviews get done and for ensuring the content adheres to our content standards and style guide.
Except for internal process documents, all our content is all public, we are targeting two groups of people 1) Our direct customers AKA Integrators, 2) Their end-customers that will use our product as part of the Integrators solution.
The two key problems we want solved by MindTouch is to train our customers via on-line documentation and to deflect support calls via KCS Just in time solutions.
Except for internal process documents, all our content is all public, we are targeting two groups of people 1) Our direct customers AKA Integrators, 2) Their end-customers that will use our product as part of the Integrators solution.
The two key problems we want solved by MindTouch is to train our customers via on-line documentation and to deflect support calls via KCS Just in time solutions.
- Very responsive design. Very simple, but powerful tools to make the documentation interesting to the eye.
- Intuitive WYSIWYG editing. For our reviewers, who are programmers, they are not interested in being power editors or spending any time learning a new tool, so the WYSIWYG is crucial to get them engaged in getting our documentation to be A+ quality.
- Content re-use is great. Simple tweaks to include all or part of other articles, another tweak to include the header or not. This means that when I find a better way of stating something I can change it in one place and get the improved documentation.
- Using drafts and the draft tool is simple and easy to use. Helps us keep track of what is being worked on currently.
- WYSIWYG editing around or in tables can re-write the customer css that we have in place. The edit does not even know that it has been re-written.
- When a reviewer is reviewing a document it would be good to be able to highlight and area of the document and add a comment. Right now you can add a comment into the document but it is inline and does not highlight the section being commented on. MS word does this very well. The comment should also include the name of the person leaving the comment.
- It would be nice to have a few real world examples of how other people setup MindTouch that we can blatantly rip off. I am sure that many of the things we are doing are not unique, so would be nice to share code or best practices. Being pointed to other sites is nice, but unless you can look at their code it only touches the surface.
MindTouch allows our clients to seek information on, and updates of, our school-related software.
- MindTouch makes it easy to have templates and self-help instructions so that a variety of teammates can contribute without a ton of learning curve.
- The MindTouch search engine makes it easy for our clients to find what they need.
- MindTouch created an easy ability to add and control users. And we found the page-level security meets our needs.
- MindTouch's flexibility means you can get the organization and look you want, without needing a degree in html.
- MindTouch support people genuinely care about my success, are easy to get to, respond in a reasonable time period and are both knowledgeable and down-to-earth.
- MindTouch (MT) bought the text editor from someone else. It lacks precision, flexibility and features. Word can do many things the MT editor cannot. Photos can be hard to place and run text around them without awkward spacing. The tool to place text near photos needs improvement from its present level of zero. Photos cannot be cropped. Placing a photo in the middle of a numbered list will require a big time investment. The text frequently loses "normal" and needs to be re-defined. Pasting text into an article never is formatted correctly the first time. It would be nice to be able to do text boxes, like Publisher allows. Presently, all copy runs the full width of the only text box you get.
- MindTouch's support people often like the enhancements I suggest but getting them into the product -- if it happens at all -- takes too long. MindTouch does many admirable big-picture things but needs to pay more attention to enhancement suggestions and improving its text editor.
- When you are in any of the control panels or behind-the-scenes control areas, why do you have to close that page -- actually close out of MindTouch and then go back in, to get back into the text editor?
- The "views" counter on each page is very difficult to reset. You have to export the page, delete it and then import it back in. This would be less necessary if we, as clients, could control when the counter starts. Currently, it starts when the page starts, so every time you access the page as you construct it counts as a view -- actually, in our install, it seems to count as TWO views. That's like having your traffic counter on your highway count all of the construction traffic before the road was opened to the public.
October 31, 2016
MindTouch works the place!
We are using MindTouch to create a knowledgebase for customers of the Cisco Infinite Video line of products. Currently, we have 2 technical writers and one SME adding content. As content becomes available (the product is in its infancy), more writers and SMEs will begin to use MindTouch. Distribution will be through our website administered by MindTouch. Our users are cable operators in several different countries. MindTouch allows us to create and update our documentation on the fly, giving our customers access to the latest documentation via the web.
- MindTouch allows people with multiple levels of expertise to contribute to the product documentation.
- MindTouch allows us to present the user with the most up-to-date documentation possible.
- MindTouch makes content creation fairly easy, with templates and use guidelines.
- We struggle with customizing our site, because so much of MindTouch is 'behind the scenes' and difficult to discern. We can't see how they are using certain things (for example, one variable that we used as a glossary popup was 'JSON' - we had to change it because it blew our site up).
- MindTouch does not allow two people to edit a page simultaneously. It does, however, warn you that someone else is editing the page.
- The location of content in MindTouch is not always apparent. We struggle sometimes finding the pages that we've created. A more streamlined approach (like a file system) to content management would be nice.
August 30, 2016
MindTouch TCS
MindTouch is being used in my organization to provide an internal and external knowledge base for some of our products. We host customer-facing articles that provide customers additional help with some of the more complex features. Internally, we host training documents and guides to help our employees navigate the complex processes of our business.
My team is responsible for creating and maintaining the content. MindTouch allows us to consolidate our knowledge into one location for centralized access.
My team is responsible for creating and maintaining the content. MindTouch allows us to consolidate our knowledge into one location for centralized access.
- User role management - user roles can be explicitly set and permissions to specific pages or sets of pages can be easily set, helping determine visibility of specific content.
- The WYSIWYG editor is intuitive and provides preset formats for frequently used text styles
- DekiScript extends the interface, allowing content creators to pull in other resources or provide dynamic content without having to update pages as more content is created.
- Tagging allows dynamic content to be made visible and updating tags can help shape list results to drive customers to the content you want them to see.
- Search can be challenging. Most customers don't use boolean search strings, so vague search terms can return lots of results, confusing customers.
- Creating content from scratch is great, but editing can cause some text blocks to have extra formatting added, affecting the final text formatting. I've seen nested header tags in the source that should not be there along with other nested font tags that can render the text in interesting ways.
- Formatting with CSS is not easy. In some cases, we have to submit a ticket to have our root CSS updated. The CSS should be completely user-managed.
- Header and footer templates are not user-accessible. We have to submit a ticket to update information in our page headers.
MindTouch is used to create a knowledge center for our employees and for our customers (the users of our software). Content is mostly authored by technical writers in the technical publications team, but we also have SMEs in the organization who contribute. The technical publications group is responsible for reviewing content, gaining content approval, and publishing the content. The content is used by employees who sell, support, and implement our software, as well as our customers who use the software daily in their jobs. MindTouch has helped us provide more accurate and on-the-spot user assistance, which cuts down on calls to technical support. Because the content is online and provided in smaller information chunks, it is easy to keep the content current and relevant, which promotes customer satisfaction.
- Provides the ability for anyone to create custom PDFs from topics they select. This is a strength for us because we have customers who do not allow their users to get out to the Internet, so they can designate one person who can access MindTouch, and that person can create custom PDFs for the rest of the users.
- It provides the tools that allow us to customize the look and feel of the knowledge center. Because our knowledge center is just one part of our overall customer portal, we needed to be able to customize its look so that it would match the other components of the portal.
- It has flexible functionality for structuring the hierarchy of the knowledge center. This was essential for us because we wanted to be able to provide information to our users in different ways and provide more than one path to finding the information they need.
- Their technical support team is very responsive and helpful. This was important for us because this was our first time putting content online for our customers, and because we customized the look and feel ourselves, and that did require some help with HTML and CSS.
- I'd like to see MindTouch provide the ability to create your own paragraph styles more easily. Right now it's done via CSS code on the back-end, but they need a more intuitive interface like Word and RoboHelp have.
- When I delete text (especially text that has had particular styles applied to it), it should delete all the HTML/CSS code associated with that text as well. Instead, I have to go into the source and delete it manually, or it can have adverse effects on the text that follows in the topic.
- Inserting images and links in the topics/pages is cumbersome. The search/browse window that comes up has too many tabs and doesn't find the images you want to insert or the topics you want to link to very easily. It doesn't seem intuitive.
MindTouch is being used as a public portal, a customer knowledge and learning accelerator, and central repository of internal knowledge. Content creation is done by a team of customer experience designers, instructional designers, and subject matter experts. It is used by over 70,000 customers worldwide in multiple languages. It has quickly become the go-to resource for customers for maximizing the ROI of our software and for accelerating their path to becoming product experts. In addition, it makes it easy for our content creators to ensure up-to-date, consistent content that's easy to find for our customers.
- Particularly, Mindtouch excels in its search capabilities, including the ability to filter content and quickly see related content.
- The category and guide structure enables easy implementation of disparate sources of content in an organized, easy-to-navigate way. This is vital from a user interface perspective, and makes browsing content easy.
- Mindtouch makes it easy to load a variety of media types, tag and organize them, and cross link them, which gives our customers a robust omni-channel learning experience.
- As the product grows, there are a few opportunities for improvement . One is to expand the ability to host streaming video content. While it can easily connect to YouTube and other hosts, the video hosting ability could be improved.
- Another area where the product could expand is with regard to discussion forums and increasing the social aspect of learning, allowing users to interact with one another and share comments.
- Lastly, while the Mindtouch success center is full of valuable information and their onboarding process for new customers is detailed and thorough, configuring the product is not for the faint of heart, especially if anything nonstandard is needed. Thus, despite the quick and effective customer support, the handful of 1-hour training sessions would be best augmented by more hands-on assistance. Having a list of examples of site setups with detailed instructions how it's achieved might also be beneficial. As it is, they do have excellent partner vendors that can help with customization.