Bloomfire provides knowledge engagement, aiming to deliver an experience that connects teams and individuals with the information they need to excel at their jobs. Their cloud-based knowledge engagement platform aims to give people one centralized, searchable place to engage with shared knowledge and grow their organization's collective intelligence.
$25
per month
MindTouch
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.
I think Bloomfire is most appropriate in a medium to large business entity since onboarding can be difficult without an organized tool to prioritize job functions. It would be most well suited for positions that incorporate data analytics/reporting and consist of regular deliverables. So for example: if an accountant wants to learn how to compile a cash flow statement but also has to turn it into a client-facing presentation, there are resources specific to internal accounting and then separate resources (also in the accounting vertical) for data visualizations and client reporting.
I would recommend MindTouch to anyone who is looking to create and host their documentation for a product that has multiple types of users. Our business modal represents customers on the buy-side as well as the sell-side and we are able to easily organize documentation to service both types of users.
Quickly reach out to whatever employee segment you want to reach by posting a topic and it will send a notification to everyone in that group with a link to the posting.
Bloomfire saves all of the previous posts so in your free time you can go to the site, and explore the various range of topics others have posted. The information on there will only be as good as the person posting it, but it will be people within your company and industry posting it. So it will always be helpful.
Bloomfire is a place to be noticed by your peers. Have a great topic you want to express, my company allows all to post there as long as we keep it professional. So you can share your ideas or experiences in a safe and productive manner. But we do have some fun on there too!
Good privacy settings for each page. I can set a new article to semi-private until it's approved to go live. And I can send a link to that page out for review.
Good tracking on each page history.
Ability to view and restore previous page versions.
I like the category search bars that only search the current category.
User experience. The product's UX is fragmented and it's hard to figure out how to do some certain very simple, important things.
Many aspects of the product don't really meet industry standards for technical communication. They seem to have been cobbled together by people who don't fully understand what technical writers do. Product updates really don't address these issues. Folks in sales and support sometimes imply that the authoring platform MindTouch has created is the only way to do create documentation, which is counter to the experience of those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time.
I am with a different employer now days where training is not part of my job description. If I ever found myself doing E-Learning again, Bloomfire would be the first interface I would recommend.
We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
Bloomfire is an easy-to-use platform for posting information and asking questions of my peers. It also has a user-friendly search capability. Yet like any other CMS, the secret to success rests in such items as the ability to use metadata to tag content or posts, and Bloomfire provides a wide range of options to make posting content and subsequently searching for it.
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.
MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
I have not needed to pose questions to the support team yet, as it is a very simple piece of software to use, however, its help documents and the bot ready to answer questions let me know I am in good hands. The help center could load a little quicker, but that's my only complaint.
Mindtouch support is awesome. Support agents are friendly and helpful. Some can benefit from ongoing training. Overall the support experience is very good. One area they can possibly improve is visibility into product feedback. Seeing or getting insight into requests or votes for features would be an added customer experience.
Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
- Easier to use - Easier to upload new information - Easier to search - Easier to share Bloomfire search-ability means much less work trying to organize and categorize documents. That means easier upload, which means more information gets stored there and used.
I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
Time to publication can be very quick, provided there are not multiple changes in flight at the same time for the same page.
We have seen a tremendous increase in customer traffic and SEO.
MindTouch allows us to custom-brand the look and feel of our site to match our company's marketing and branding. This instills trust in our content.
The relative simplicity of the platform enabled us to hire the best people and best writers we could find, without worrying so much about specific past expertise in a complicated publishing platform.
