Using MindTouch
September 29, 2017

Using MindTouch

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

Software Version

MindTouch Responsive

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

Mostly it's the image management issues that I noted earlier. Our doc has so many images that we end up spending a lot of time trying to work within the 100-images-on-a-page limit.
We recently were assigned a new customer contact, and I think that the service has fallen off slightly since then. But generally, we are pretty impressed with MindTouch's responsiveness to our questions and requests. (We do have the Premium support level.)
We have set up a knowledge base for our organization. In our knowledge base, approximately 90 percent of the content is available to our clients, and all of it is available to internal users. Our company's support team is probably the biggest user of the content.
  • Handles renaming and moving topics very well. We are constantly updating and revising our content outline, both in its structure and in the terminology used. When we make those changes to the topic titles, MindTouch handles all the behind-the-scenes linking so that we don't inadvertently break things when we move and rename them.
  • Provides good options for presenting different content to different users. Besides the page permissions, we have set up different conditions so that even for a topic that is client-facing, we can provide extra, internal-only notes so we can embed extra information for employees.
  • Provides several ways for us to display different types of information. For example, most of our topics are general topics (reference and how-to) and a general outline type structure works best. But there are other parts of our contents (such as user permissions) where we can use tags to organize and group the information in ways that are more helpful for both internal and external users.
  • The limit on the number of images that can be attached to a page is just 100 images! We have thousands of images in our knowledge base, and have just embarked on another project to be sure that they are organized appropriately and that we aren't breaking that 100-image rule.
  • More on image management: it would be great to have a "where-used" type report that we could run on some image files. For example, suppose the image base contains ABC.png. It would be nice to see if any of the pages in the knowledge base use that file, so we can know if it is safe to delete the file.
  • API documentation. My MindTouch person has directed me to an API that would fix an issue I have (reordering topics within a guide) but I haven't gotten it implemented yet because I don't have dev-type resources to help me with this. (PS I realize your doc has greatly improved in the last few months and I appreciate that--I just want more!)
  • Our company releases its main product four times a year. On those days, we change the permission settings for the release notes so they're available to our clients, and then we "publish"--which means that we each revisit all the new drafts we have written for the new release and publish those. (We also have to upload all the new images, which is another issue. Why can't an image have a draft?) Anyway, it would be nice when you create a draft if you could specify a date when the draft was automatically published.
  • We don't track numbers for our knowledge base, but we use several different mechanisms (Google Analytics, the built-in MindTouch reports, etc.) to learn more about what our customers are actually looking for, and then build content to fill in those gaps. That has been a big help to us.
  • Our content is findable now! In the past we were embedded in an LMS and only a short paragraph describing each PDF was searchable. I spent hours every week trying to find which PDF had which topic. This is much better!
Yes - In the past we had an LMS. (I do not know which one.) It worked well for the content of the training team, but very poorly for the content from the doc team. This change has helped us immensely (though our training team still mourns its loss).
This has more to do with our company's implementation of MindTouch than the product itself. Our customers must sign into SalesForce to access our knowledge base. The knowledge base is on the first page that customers see, but it is buried way under a "feed." This is bad--users should be able to wander around in the knowledge base to see its structure, because that helps them learn the structure of the software, too. Our implementation also took the search bar in MindTouch away from external users, opting instead to go with a "federated" search bar that covers the knowledge base AND SalesForce topics. Don't do that either. Ugh.