Deliver Your Content Quickly and Easily with MindTouch
February 09, 2016

Deliver Your Content Quickly and Easily with MindTouch

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

MindTouch 4

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

We use MindTouch as our technical documentation website platform. Content is largely created by information developers, but also by customer care (integrators and customer support specialists). Information developers review and publish content to the public-facing areas of our MindTouch site, while customer care members write and publish internal-only articles. MindTouch helps us make our latest technical content available to employees, partners and clients around the globe 24/7 and only requires a web browser. We can easily edit and publish updated information without a lengthy publication cycle. Users can easily search or navigate to the content they need.
  • MindTouch has excellent customer support! Representatives are very responsive and professional. I like having the option to either email support or to call a real person on the phone. Reps will often initiate a screen share to see exactly what the problem is and to help troubleshoot it. Even when the answer is not what I want to hear, support staff will always offer alternative ideas and try to be as helpful as they can.
  • MindTouch has an editing interface that is easy for authors to write and edit their content. It works similarly to Microsoft Word and other document editors, which encourages even casual authors to capture important content without being intimidated by an unfamiliar interface or strange markup language. It also allows advanced authors to see the HTML code when needed. The editor can also be customized if you'd like to add your own custom styles and other functionality.
  • MindTouch allows a great deal of customization in its home page, site headers and footers, CSS, and other site elements. Anyone can do their own basic custom site branding without needing to be a web design expert. But if you have access to a designer (or if you contract with one of MindTouch's partners for site design), you can really personalize the look and feel of your site.
  • MindTouch may not be robust enough to support large or complex documentation sets with lots of versioning and linking. There is no built-in functionality for version management or distinguishing different versions of a guide. Links sometimes are broken when pages are moved, copied, or deleted. There is no reporting available for broken links or identifying all the links that reference a certain page.
  • MindTouch may not fit well in a company with formal content reviews by multiple reviewers. Older versions of MindTouch have no built-in review workflow or features. The newest version does include useful review features, but may fall short if you need to track and respond to comments from reviewers.
  • I find the MindTouch documentation inconsistent in places and have noticed typos and grammatical errors. Perhaps this is because I am a particularly detail-oriented tech writer. :-) I would also like to see more documentation on customizing and writing scripts to add advanced functionality to sites.
  • Employees, partners, and customers are more informed about our products and can find the information they need more easily.
Previously, our company published our documentation as PDFs on a download site. The web-based documentation we now deliver using MindTouch is far more usable and searchable than our old PDF-based content. We also looked at other tools which would require a combination of web hosting, designers and developers to implement and maintain. MindTouch is a lot easier to implement and administer for a small team of non-developers.
I think MindTouch is an excellent tool for a knowledge base type collection of "flat" topics or for technical documentation with simple requirements. If you have a large body of content with complex versioning, linking, or reuse, or if you need a robust review and publishing process, you may need to make some compromises or look at other tools.