Useful Product, with Some Limitations
October 09, 2017

Useful Product, with Some Limitations

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

MindTouch 4

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

MindTouch has many formatting options but some procedures (like editing a template) are not easy to figure out. We needed to create several custom templates for our content and found the MindTouch user documentation on this process somewhat contradictory and incomplete.
During our trial period MindTouch representatives were responsive but in many cases did not have any additional information besides what was in the public MindTouch documentation. The online documentation sometimes included contradictory information. It was hard to tell if we were finding the most current documentation.
MindTouch is being used across the entire organization. We used MindTouch to create a knowledge base to deliver information to our customers, including user guides, release notes, use cases, and other content enabling customers to learn about our products. MindTouch enables us to consolidate and organize customer-facing content in a single, searchable location.

Pros

  • The WYSYWIG editor enables content creators and editors to preview how published content will look.
  • The conditional text style enables us to tag proprietary information in customer-facing content, so that only readers with the appropriate permissions can view that content.
  • The automatically-generated table of contents in certain templates makes it easy to let readers search documents by header.

Cons

  • Editor has no option for including a bulleted list within a numbered list (something possible with traditional word processing software), a feature often needed in creating technical documents.
  • Would be nice to support more than one language per license, for content that must be localized to many languages.
  • Can't preview end-user content before the document is published.
  • Increased ease of collaboration by enabling multiple authors and editors to access a document.
  • Decreased time to publication by integrating document creation, editing, and publication workflow.
  • Provided more options for organizing diverse content in a knowledge base.
Yes - Replaced PHPKB, which provided only limited options for document formatting and knowledge base structuring. PHPKB was selected before I joined the organization, so I'm not sure why it was chosen, but the team decided it was no longer a viable option. We selected MindTouch after reviewing and testing several CMS products.
MindTouch is probably well-suited to most general documentation and content-creation needs. For highly technical documentation, it would be good to include some more formatting options. And, previewing end-user content before publishing would be very useful. Some formatting or content errors can be detected only during WYSIWYG preview, but having to publish a document in progress risks making unedited content public (even if only briefly).

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