You can't win them all
February 12, 2016
You can't win them all
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch
My client used MindTouch to publish information for and by its community of network administrator users.
Many people within the company created the content, as well as some trusted partners. As the community manager, I reviewed the contributions, worked with the authors, and organized the content.
The content was used by users of the client's technologies, mostly network administrators.
The client used the information in MindTouch to speed up the publishing process and increase product understanding in their most technical users so they could engage more deeply with the product.
- MindTouch develops its functionality through its API first and then builds its UI on its own API. It's an approach that makes automation and integration much smoother, plus it's just an admirable development practice.
- MindTouch has very good availability. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw an outage.
- MindTouch supports UNICODE in its editor, so you can include content in just about any language.
- The support organization is sometimes slow to acknowledge bugs, or even admit that the product behavior you're experiencing is a problem at all.
- The documentation site is out of date and incomplete. It does not use MindTouch's own search, despite the fact that MindTouch touts its search feature.
- The sales team can be too aggressive. You feel like you have to be on your guard to make sure they're not selling you things you don't need.
- My client had an onerous review process for formal documentation, so content could get in to MindTouch faster than into the corporate documentation, which reduced costs.
- Content in MindTouch was easier to search for than the content published in PDFs, which increased user satisfaction.
- At the time, MindTouch provided commenting tools for a back-and-forth dialog between content authors and content consumers, which increased user engagement.
I have researched the field of products extensively, and there simply isn't another product that does everything that MindTouch does. You can get distributed authoring capability or you can get a polished published document, but you can't get both elsewhere without spending an awful lot of time and money customizing the tool, and then supporting and enhancing that tool.