TrustRadius Insights for MindTouch are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
MindTouch is a versatile software that is used by various organizations for different purposes. One key use case is creating and updating knowledgebases for customers, allowing them to access the latest documentation via the web. This feature has been particularly beneficial for Cisco Infinite Video customers, who can easily find relevant information and troubleshoot issues without needing to contact customer support.
Another major use case of MindTouch is increasing the number of contributors within an organization and ensuring governance and oversight as the number of contributors grows. By using MindTouch, companies can involve both internal teams and customers in content creation, leading to a collaborative approach that enhances the accuracy and breadth of knowledgebase articles.
MindTouch is also widely employed as a solution for dynamically changing content as products mature and to stay ahead of industry changes. Its flexibility allows companies to adapt their documentation quickly, ensuring that customers have access to up-to-date information.
Additionally, MindTouch serves as an online help center where users can find dedicated and searchable documentation for software products. It is utilized by multiple departments in an organization to publish customer-facing and internal documentation, helping to update and maintain content efficiently.
Overall, MindTouch provides solutions for creating comprehensive knowledge bases, improving collaboration among teams, facilitating content updates, and enhancing customer self-service capabilities. Its versatility makes it valuable across industries, from technology companies seeking to support their products effectively to educational institutions aiming to provide a collaborative learning environment.
Used to answer common customer questions globally. It reduces the amount of resources we need for support. We are moving from a high-touch customer support model to a low-touch model.
Pros
Easy to create articles
Easy to search for them from google
Easy to organize content in a way customers can find the topics they are interested in
Cons
Once in an information area it can be difficult to zero in on the article of interest. Additional filter options could be useful.
More templates
Better batch operations to simplify reorganization and restructuring of content
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited if customers already know about it. Can be difficult to 'train' customers to use it as a first resource (instead of calling or chatting). Can be difficult to manage if there are thousands of articles. Easy to manage if there are hundreds. If content creation can be automated (even partially) this can be a good scenario.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Engineering (Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing company, 5001-10,000 employees)
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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).
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Engineering (Internet company, 51-200 employees)
We use MindTouch to house all of our internal and external support content. It is a standalone site and we also surface it in-app for a contextual help experience. Last year we transitioned to support a self-service model of support alongside our dedicated support structure. MindTouch enabled us to enable our users to help themselves, before they filed a ticket.
Pros
Its editing functionality is very robust and allows us to create multiple kinds and formats of content.
Its API was flexible enough for us to create the solution we wanted, even though it wasn't supported out of the box.
Administratively, our account contacts have been fantastic, helpful, and very response.
We've always received great support when we needed it.
Cons
I would've said the WYSIWYG experience needed work, but that was recently addressed. There is, however, some visual cruft from the previous UI that could be ironed out.
Better API documentation and more support for contextual applications of the software. We had a pretty long road to implementation because updates on MindTouch's side that we weren't aware of broke our implementation. We addressed these shortcomings on our end since MindTouch couldn't commit to a solution that worked for us.
Some of the hierarchical choices that users can make don't feel like they're consistently applied throughout the experience.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think for lean software companies like mine, MindTouch makes a lot of sense, especially if your content is very technical and robust. You want something more powerful and customizable than Zendesk but you don't want to pay for a solution as robust as Desk.com. MindTouch was a very good middle ground for us.
We use Mindtouch to host our external/public facing documentation for our payment/financing product.
The audience for this documentation is a wide range of users: web developers, marketers, project managers, accountants, customer service managers, etc. We've set up an information architecture within Mindtouch to distinguish the content for these distinct audiences.
There are several departments at our company that contribute to our Mindtouch content: Integrations, Sales, Client Success, Operations, and Marketing. I manage the contributors from those groups, and have trained them on the best practices and usage of the Mindtouch product.
With Mindtouch's versioning/draft management, and ability to arbitrarily include entire page contents in other pages, we can have multiple contributors to content without worrying about content being lost or going stale. We can also gate/hide content, and make it available to only user groups, allowing us to deploy public documentation to beta-product users without allowing others to discover it or search for it.
Pros
Simple GUI editing (WYSIWYG) while still providing full customization (HTML/JS/CSS).
Easy to use permissions and user roles schemes to control access to published content.
Extensibility via customizable templates, API integrations, and other dekiscript widgets.
Built-in versioning and draft system which allows for worry-free editing.
Cons
Built-in site templates, scripts, and stylesheets cannot be overridden or removed. Our extensively customized instance of MindTouch could be significantly simplified, more performant, and easier to develop on without those hard coded includes. Having the ability to start with a 'clean-slate' or to individually exclude resources would facilitate further optimization.
Permission/restriction settings can only be applied after the page has been saved. This makes it impossible to publish semi-private or private content without risking discovery.
Help widget integrations are limited by default to ONE for our instance. We'd love to adopt this feature but are not clear on why it's deployment is so restricted.
Need the ability to define arbitrary 'slugs' for pages, so they can be referenced via short names/URLs/paths. Currently content IDs are the only way to support this, and those have to be setup separately from the actual page authoring/editing screen. Not having this functionality also makes it extremely difficult to retire old content and redirect those page requests to some new content.
Likelihood to Recommend
Suited for medium and enterprise level businesses where a user-friendly content management system is needed. It can be customized to suite a wide variety of use-cases and business requirements.
It is less suited for leaner or more developer focused organizations, that are more capable of hosting a code-driven solution for API documentation.
MindTouch is currently used by XRS Corporation/Omnitracs as a knowledge base platform for our web-hosted product. Internal users, primarily the support group, also use MindTouch to view all support related documentation. The technical documentation group is responsible for content creation for the majority of our MindTouch implementation. The same group is responsible for distribution as well. The support and IT groups are responsible for updating their areas of MindTouch.
MindTouch allows a secure method to distribute product documentation to approved users. Also, documents, such as release notes or other guides, can easily be hosted in MindTouch as PDF files our customers can download.
Pros
The MindTouch interface is very easy to use. Any user who has used a basic word-processing application can immediately jump in and begin making updates to topics using MindTouch.
The support group at MindTouch is top-notch and has been an extremely valuable resource over the past several years. They have helped me with all aspects of our MindTouch sites, from basic usability questions to more complex configuration requirements for our products.
Cons
I would like a report on attachments status. I would like the report to list each attachment and what other topics link to the file. I would also like to generate a list of attachments that aren't used, so we can remove them.
Likelihood to Recommend
MindTouch has been a great asset to our company. A single MindTouch site allows us to distribute extensive product documentation to customers, documentation for internal support and IT groups, and provide F1 "pop-up" context sensitive help for our SaaS product. MindTouch is not tied to a product release, so updates can be made at any time to the documentation with no impact on the product itself. Also, we can set the security for individual sections of the MindTouch site to control who has access to specific sections.
I have not run into a situation where MindTouch would not work with our products or company structure.
We use MindTouch as knowledge base for our products. In our current product, it's a pretty simple integration, using a portal with special branding. In our next generation product, the integration is deeper, with mindtouch queries and results showing up inside our application, along with ticket deflection in our ticketing system.
The integration process went very smoothly and we got a lot of support from MindTouch regarding how to integrate. Part of what made the integration go so well is MindTouch was able to suggest best practices, which helped us design our knowledge base. We are happy with MindTouch. Our biggest problem is not having enough bandwidth to update the knowledge base more regularly.
Pros
MindTouch creates a virtuous feedback loop by tracking how user's queries match the contents of the knowledge base, so we can develop new articles that better answer customer questions.
MindTouch has an API that let us embed its functionality directly into the application.
MindTouch is very flexible in how it lets us organize and brand our knowledge base.
Cons
We did an SSO (single signon) integration, and we had some problems with it. The support response turn around time was kind of slow. They eventually came through.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it's great for a straight up knowledge base application. If you have a team that can constantly feed it content, you will get the full power out of it, using the reporting tools provided. I also think it's great if you want to use your knowledge base content to expand your SEO footprint. This has already been working for us.
We work with a variety of customers across multiple industries who use MindTouch for different use cases. One of our clients, with offices all over the globe, uses MindTouch to help their HR department stay in compliance across all of the countries they operate in. They keep all relevant HR laws and regulations for each country - a huge amount of data. We extended MindTouch for them to provide a customized advanced search feature that allows their users (their internal HR department) to look up the data they need in seconds.
Another of our large clients is a global appliance maker (refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves, etc...). We've helped them implement a self-help/troubleshooting portal using MindTouch that allows their customers to look up relevant documentation about the appliance they've purchased. Additionally, customers who are experiencing problems with their appliance can navigate through a series of troubleshooting questions and answers in order to drill down to a solution to their problem.
And yet another one of our customers, a global maker of high-end business equipment, uses MindTouch to expose a knowledge base and product documentation to their users. Product documentation is created with a internal tool and an automated process automatically uploads the new documentation to MindTouch via the MindTouch API.
Pros
MindTouch is excellent for organizing large amounts of data, like articles, product information, and other types of hierarchical data. Its out of the box search and navigation capabilities allow users to find the content they need quickly. Additionally, MindTouch has the capability of doing very complex searches across content extremely quickly via its advanced search syntax.
MindTouch is extremely easy to use, even for people with little to no technical knowledge. It allows users to search and contribute to articles very quickly and easily. It's a great tool for collaborative publishing of information.
MindTouch Exposes a robust API allowing customers to integrate both internal and external systems with MindTouch. In addition, the API can be used to extend MindTouch to create a myriad of customized features.
Cons
Some of the more technical documentation for developers is lacking, for instance the dekiscript documentation is severely lacking.
Likelihood to Recommend
MindTouch is excellent for collaborative publishing of content such as: product documentation, help pages, knowledge articles, etc. It's also great at supporting scenarios that involve multiple types of users or different user groups.
We use Mindtouch for or community website. It houses the product documentation for use by customers. We have a technical writer responsible for majority of the content creation, and other employees in support and training contribute. Mindtouch was originally purchased to work towards a vision of a support community (users helping other users) with current help information (our previous methods went stale and weren't easy to update).
Pros
DekiScript and the ability to create reusable components (they call them templates) that can query and render information in the system the way you decide is VERY valuable.
It keeps track of pages, so when you rename things the links don't break. Aliases are super helpful - you can use a word/code and map that to a page. You can switch out the page without having to address every place the link with that word/code is used.
Word variables, suggested search results, and pages with different permissions are things we utilize.
Cons
The WYSIWYG editor is a little unreliable to load and has some quirks (add its own characters). There isn't a global find and replace mechanism (say you have to change a product term). There isn't a way to identify orphaned pages or links or broken images.
There isn't a forum feature, so there isn't much value for us having customers sign up and login.
There isn't a typical publishing flow or scheduled publishing. Things have to be managed with tags and manually set public.
There is no real template functionality - setting the layout of a page type that gets applied to multiple pages and can be changed in one location that updates the others. When you make a new page off a Mindtouch template you are making a copy of a page layout. If you later choose to change the way the items on the page are ordered, you have to redo each page.
We've had internal and external customers comment that the search doesn't work well.
Image management is not ideal. You have to use a separate page structure and attach images to those pages. The pages serve like folders and the images are attachments to those pages.
Likelihood to Recommend
If pure document management is needed and it's a single person or close communicating team, Mindtouch works well. If you have a developer, or some who knows javascript (DekiScript is close to it), you can take full advantage of templating. If the team is larger, content comes from less trusted sources, or slightly less technical users it can fall down. And if you are looking for a more community driven product, it's not really good for that either.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Engineering (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)
We use MindTouch for customer-facing product documentation, as well as some documentation meant for an internal audience. I am responsible for structuring, writing, and distributing our documentation. I also manage MindTouch users and control access to various parts of the documentation site. We use MindTouch as a single-source of content for our online web-based documentation and for context-sensitive help in Cloud Cruiser, our SaaS solution for monitoring cloud billing and usage.
Pros
The support team at MindTouch is simply outstanding. They have provided the best support I've ever had from a software company. They respond quickly, and have provided above-and-beyond levels of support. They talk about having a vested interest in making me successful, and I've certainly felt that in my interactions with their support team. This is always the first thing I mention to colleagues when discussing my experience with MindTouch.
Because MindTouch is a SaaS product, I don't have to worry about managing product updates myself. I know this doesn't make MindTouch unique in the software industry, but it is a piece of how they contribute to the success of my efforts by making my life as a documentation manager simpler.
The integrated F1 help system was very easy to implement in our product.
Cons
The authoring interface feels a bit clunky at times, and I've had to make a few compromises and implement a few workarounds to accomplish what I want to accomplish. For example, while I can define variables in my doc site, those variables are not handled well in expanders. Multiple paragraphs in a table cell cause the first paragraph to add unnecessary padding above the first line of text. I've removed the paragraph tags in the source markup to remove the padding.
While full inaccessibility has been rare, the hosted site can be slow to respond at times. For example, pages can be slow to open for editing. Dialog boxes for images might not open with all options available.
MindTouch has a doc structure that is not strictly enforced, but one must work around the limitations if that structure is not wanted. For example, PDF exports cannot include pages in the first two levels of the doc structure.
Likelihood to Recommend
MindTouch is best suited for a hierarchical documentation structure that follows a book-model organization of information. I would not recommend MindTouch for a 1-level wiki experience.
VU
Verified User
Contributor in Engineering (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)
Our company uses MindTouch for all of our customer-facing product documentation. It's also used for collaboration with customer-facing internal teams. Product managers, sales, client services, and technical writers are all responsible for content creation. The senior technical writer (me) is responsible for final approval and distribution of content. MindTouch solves the business use case of providing a way for our external customers to locate information quickly. It also allows our internal teams to create and modify documents themselves directly in MindTouch through a drafting and approval queue (a true documentation workflow) rather than submitting requests through email or a separate ticketing system.
Pros
Customer Support
Account Management
Training Resources
Cons
Editor is not easy to use unless you are an advanced user that uses the editor daily
Import/export of common file types, such as Word, is difficult or only done by manual copy-and-paste.
Setting up the right user experience (branding, interface layout, and content structure) is a manual process, and not out-of-the-box ready
Likelihood to Recommend
It's well suited for customer-facing documentation. The interface from a client perspective is easier to use than other software. It less appropriate for internal collaboration, such as engineering tasks in an agile development and software release environment. We use different software for those cases. It would be helpful to have one centralized solution instead of juggling between separate systems.
