MindTouch

MindTouch offers a unique knowledge and information management tool that was different enough from traditional knowledge bases and advanced enough to not be a Wiki while allowing CRM integration and APIs for customization. MindTouch as a company is focused on making their product great where as other vendors treat this space as a bundle or checkbox feature without being robust enough to replace a knowledge base and PDF manuals.

I did not select MindTouch at my current company, but I was looking into it at my previous position. It has many of the useful features of the more traditional publications tools (RoboHelp, Frame) with the ease of web deployment of other tools (HelpIQ). It has some limitations (rigid structure, lack of PDF support come to mind), but all of these tools have their strengths and weaknesses.

I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support.

In my view, MindTouch is hands down the industry leader when it comes to documentation and publishing products. None of the other products I have used provide such an intuitive interface for single-source content creation. MadCap Flare has a steep learning curve and requires builds to generate content in the format you need prior to publishing. RoboHelp also requires builds to create content, which again leaves you with the task of publishing the generated content. MindTouch is the only product that allows me to instantly publish content and maintain that content in real time. MindTouch also provides the most intuitive method for controlling access to sensitive data by allowing me to limit content access by user group. As an evergreen SaaS company, we need a product that evolves as quickly as we do. MindTouch is that product.

We wanted a SaaS solution that was always online. In the past we used RoboHelp, but the whole idea of having to compile the help project before publishing seemed rather backwards at a point. Mind, we have not reviewed later installments of RoboHelp.

With MindTouch we can edit stuff live - we use this a lot to fix smaller inaccuracies in our docs based on support feedback, and it's all fast and accurate.

Zendesk has a nice documentation feature for smaller projects, but we found that with the sheer volume of documentation that we produce, nothing could measure up to MindTouch.