MindTouch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

Easy to use editor.

Simple to build out structure and change as needed.

Resolution time.

Update on ticket status.

Better reporting for KCS metrics.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.