Good for documents, not for user-to-user interaction.
February 04, 2016

Good for documents, not for user-to-user interaction.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

TCS

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

We use Mindtouch for or community website. It houses the product documentation for use by customers. We have a technical writer responsible for majority of the content creation, and other employees in support and training contribute. Mindtouch was originally purchased to work towards a vision of a support community (users helping other users) with current help information (our previous methods went stale and weren't easy to update).
  • DekiScript and the ability to create reusable components (they call them templates) that can query and render information in the system the way you decide is VERY valuable.
  • It keeps track of pages, so when you rename things the links don't break. Aliases are super helpful - you can use a word/code and map that to a page. You can switch out the page without having to address every place the link with that word/code is used.
  • Word variables, suggested search results, and pages with different permissions are things we utilize.
  • The WYSIWYG editor is a little unreliable to load and has some quirks (add its own characters). There isn't a global find and replace mechanism (say you have to change a product term). There isn't a way to identify orphaned pages or links or broken images.
  • There isn't a forum feature, so there isn't much value for us having customers sign up and login.
  • There isn't a typical publishing flow or scheduled publishing. Things have to be managed with tags and manually set public.
  • There is no real template functionality - setting the layout of a page type that gets applied to multiple pages and can be changed in one location that updates the others. When you make a new page off a Mindtouch template you are making a copy of a page layout. If you later choose to change the way the items on the page are ordered, you have to redo each page.
  • We've had internal and external customers comment that the search doesn't work well.
  • Image management is not ideal. You have to use a separate page structure and attach images to those pages. The pages serve like folders and the images are attachments to those pages.
  • We were able to consolidate many repositories of help documents into one location. Since it's web based we were able to monitor to see if we need to provide separate documentation for ALL releases, or just the current one. Turns out we could do current, so we were able to cut down on a lot of maintenance on older sets of documentation.
  • We were able to associate specific pages with pages of our app to better direct users to information that might be relevant.
  • Publishing content is a lot faster because it's instant. We used to have to wait for a product release (and then, only customers that updated would get the new information). Now all the newest corrections are available to everyone and is indexed really well by Google.
  • We were unable to advance the customer community vision. While we made a good attempt, we also couldn't get other people in the business to contribute like we had hoped. They need specialized training to learn to use the system (though, I don't think it's that hard), and the lack of publishing workflow meant there wasn't a smooth way for content to flow through for revision and be vetted for posting.
I joined right after Mindtouch was selected here. So my experience with other products is from another job. I think I heard mention of them looking at Zendesk here, but it was before the Help Center product was available. But, from what I can compare, the document management part of Mindtouch is much more powerful than the others (being able to reuse content, etc). The others do a much better job with the user-to-user features.
If pure document management is needed and it's a single person or close communicating team, Mindtouch works well. If you have a developer, or some who knows javascript (DekiScript is close to it), you can take full advantage of templating. If the team is larger, content comes from less trusted sources, or slightly less technical users it can fall down. And if you are looking for a more community driven product, it's not really good for that either.