Using MindTouch To Revolutionize A Cottage Industry In A Time Warp
Updated April 14, 2017

Using MindTouch To Revolutionize A Cottage Industry In A Time Warp

Tim Bergman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

MindTouch Responsive

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

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.
  • 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 has allowed us to improve the accuracy and distribution of our technical documentation. This means that we are able to provide better service to our customers in a more timely manner.
  • Having up-to-date information available for our customers and service technicians means has helped lower our support call volume.
  • MindTouch has enabled us to provide information to our dealerships, which helps them be well-informed during the sales and delivery processes.
MS SharePoint was knocked out of the running almost immediately because we don't want to have to hire a dedicated resource just to maintain the technical side of things. We would rather invest in resources to help create and update our content. A wiki is just too general without enough structure. Moxie was a very viable alternative, but they didn't have any online support documentation for their product, which was ironic, really.

MindTouch impressed us right out of the gate with their success site. They have all of the documentation about how to set up, configure, and use their product on that site, and it's available to anyone.
MindTouch is very well suited for handling large quantities of information grouped into guides. It is even a great product if you want to create a comprehensive owner's manual for a product. It can also be configured to handle multiple owner's manuals, but you will likely need to make use of the API if you need to update/maintain content, properties, or attributes in bulk.

Using MindTouch

Our internal users represent every department within our organization. Our user base includes executives, sales, engineering, production, support, warranty, service, and more. Every department has users that access and reference different resources within our site. Some are looking up various components used in our coaches, some are referencing technical information for repairs and maintenance, and other are looking at information about our products in general.
5 - Our support group consists of one person with technical/programming skills, an editor, researchers and subject matter experts. This group is involved in adding and updating site content within MindTouch, as well as with external tools that are integrated with MindTouch via the API.

MindTouch Reliability