Easy to use, limited features.
October 26, 2017

Easy to use, limited features.

Vlad Todor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

MindTouch 4

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

The product is easy to learn and easy to use. Anyone in the organization could easy contribute to the site, writing and editing on day one. There are no advanced users--there just aren't many tools to leverage.
The support team is excellent. They have been wonderful in emergencies and overall care.
MindTouch is used only by our department to provide documentation for customers and support staff. It is not used directly by support staff or SMEs, but this is because MT4 does not provide draft functionality as Responsive does. Given the rudimentary nature of drafts in Responsive, and no real way to control workflow, it's unclear how much our process would change with the upgrade in platform.

Pros

  • Ready to go out of the box, no maintenance after setup.
  • Easy to learn: it's a simple product, WYSIWYG.

Cons

  • Responsive limits how you can organize content. You can't have a guide within a guide, because according to MindTouch, you should't do that. MindTouch believes all problems are solved by the magic of their search capabilities, not in manually curating content. MT4 allows a little more flexibility, but just about everything we want to do involves an ad hoc work-around.
  • Single-sourcing documentation is rudimentary and untraceable, for both MT4 and Responsive. We have to leave hidden notes on the pages themselves to try to track how content is shared.
  • Single-sourcing images suffers from the same limitations. There's no tool for managing and tracking images, it's just another webpage on your site.
  • The only output is your MindTouch site. Forget about printing to PDF or anything else. We have eliminated manuals because MindTouch simply can't do them.
  • There's no universal replace tool. When our language changes, we have to search and then manually edit every page. MindTouch offers another work-around, for a fee.
  • Our documentation is more easily searchable than before, and analytics indicates greater reach to our content.
  • All users have up-to-date documentation instantly. This has been very helpful given the speed of our software development.
Yes - Framemaker, MS Word were replaced because we wanted all of our materials under one roof.
MindTouch (MT) is well-suited for companies that have simple documentation. It works out-of-the-box, with little training. No technical knowledge is needed after initial setup and CSS customization. The hosted site is fast, and requires no maintenance.

It is not well-suited for professional technical writers. I don't think MT even has technical writers on their staff, given their own documentation and their lack of features a writer would need. Judging by the changes from MT4 to Responsive, there is little interest in producing a more robust authoring tool.

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