NICE CXone Reviews

Technical writing. Developer documentation including Getting Started, Core Concept, Task descriptions, etc.

MindTouch provides an easy way to create HTML using an MS Word-like interface. The editor, however, contains advanced, professional features, such as single-sourcing text for multiple chapters that savvy technical writers can take advantage of.  

• A WYSIWGY editor that generates HTML
• CMS version control
• Automatic search for link targets
• User permissions
• Modals
• Easy table generation
• Editing
• Good customer support

• Workflow: There are status indicators that imply draft -> finished, but they don’t really work that way.
• Better support for the contextual hiding of content. Right now, the only filters are pro and non-pro. The user should be able to create filters to hide or not hide content.
• Can’t use a third-party link checker because MT creates dummy pages if they don’t exist for the link’s target. Instead of returning a 404, you get a bogus page and no broken link notifications. MT is coming out with a linkchecker for the MT Responsive product, which might resolve this issue.
• To be specific, the right hand rail of MT has a means of marking a doc called, “Stage,” as shown. Stages include draft, review, and final. The naïve understanding I had of them initially is that the stages related to publication, i.e., something marked “draft” would not be published until “reviewed” and then classified as “final.” This would be a wonderful workflow that mimicks, for example, Pull Requests in Git. However, Stage labels do nothing. They simply label the page with the Stage name. So, “draft” documents appear just as pages marked “final” and “obsolete.” So, I think this is a missed opportunity. I believe MT is trying to create this kind of functionality in the latest version of MT Responsive. Still, the Stage tag is a no-op.
• In addition, advanced authoring tools, such as XMetal and oXygen, enable the author to tag a sentence, paragraph, section, or chapter for the purpose of displaying/hiding that text. This is called conditional text. You can configure whether or not that conditional text appears in the document. For example, you might have an expert’s and beginner’s version of the same document. Rather than having two documents, you have one with conditional text. The beginner’s version does a lot more hand holding. For the beginner, you’d “turn on” the conditional text. For the expert, you’d “turn off” the conditional text. MT’s conditional text is limited to two tags. I believe they’re “pro” and “non-pro.” Something like that. These tags relate to the reader’s classification that’s in their MT user profile. Two tags don’t provide the granularity needed to use conditional text effectively. So, I doubt it’s used.  

MT outages are infrequent.

Scalability only comes into play if you try to load over 1000 MT books all at once, e.g., you might want to list all of the books available on your website.

Customer Service:

For immediate concerns, they're great about getting back to you quickly. The folks I've worked with are friendly.

Technical Support:

For simple matters, I would give technical support a rating of 10/10. They are very quick, and provide friendly responses to questions and bug reports. For larger asks, the score would be much lower, as sometimes larger issues were not addressed in a timely manner.

We used Wordpress. Wordpress is free but the burden is on you to maintain your site. MT's out-of-the-box functionality is great and they take care of the improving the product while keeping it backwardly compatible.

The setup was simple.

MT engineers created a custom implementation of MT for us... for a price, of course. The customization went well.

It’s not a standalone software product. You pay a licensing fee on a contract basis. Remember, your files are in their repository. They have a custom archiving process. So, should you ever want to move away from MT, getting your content out might be challenging.

We evaluated WordPress. It was cheap, but the maintenance was heavy.

It is a good product. I am not sure they support translation robustly.

Technical writing in the software industry. Writing includes developer guides and API guides.

MindTouch (MT) is the only real HTML authoring tool that has the sophistication technical writers need. MT is also a CMS to handle version control.

• Simple editing features
• Single sourcing
• Intelligent link searching
• The ability to edit the HTML, as well as the WYSIWYG.

The doc status is non-functional. MT would greatly benefit by providing a GitHub pull request functionality to foster draft mode and open contribution writing.

Sometimes, but MT communicates support issues if you subscribe.

Yes. If you have hundreds of books, the initial download is slow.

Customer support is terrific. The team is personable, informed, and responsive. Asking for new features is not quite that way, but every other kind of support question is handled beautifully.

Previously, we had to create all the functionality, which was already in MT.

We had a custom setup that cost us some money.

Initial setup with by MT. We have handled it in-house from there.

Tech writers will enjoy MT. Developers less so. For some reason, they prefer the Stone Age writing tools, like text editors and writing Markdown, or Confluence wiki.

MT has the network effect that comes from being a CMS. Your docs go on their servers and getting them out is difficult, especially if you want to switch to another authoring format, e.g., Markdown. There are no converters and an automated extraction of the docs from the CMS is not available.

Yes, but MT was the only HTML authoring tool of any value.

One of the biggest missing pieces is a link checker.

Being able to make quick edits so as to clarify points in the support articles based on the support feedback, and the powerful reorganization tools so as to move stuff around as needed, without breaking any existing links are the most valuable features.

We used to have a compiled help system where quick edits weren't possible without altering, compiling and deploying the changes. Since MindTouch is essentially a CMS which is tuned for technical support articles and to the likes of those, we can update and review documentation much faster.

Management of the screenshots is clearly an area that can be improved. We make DAM systems ourselves, so we're used to having a greater control of these assets. Considering the sheer volume of articles and screenshots that we have, a better tool for organizing, replacing and auditing screenshots in our documentation, if done right, would be a huge improvement.

Mindtouch recommends using a hidden category or article as the placeholder for uploaded screenshots. That way users won't see them in search results, but they can be linked to visible articles. Following their advice, I created media repos for each of our products to keep them separate.

Having run with mindtouch for several years, naturally the number of screenshots and explanatory graphics has piled up, and the task of removing old screenshots and/or replacing them with new ones could use some improvement. Right now this requires a series of tasks:

1) Edit the article with the old screenshot to find its filename

2) Access the media repo and search for that filename

3) Delete or replace the screenshot file with a new one

Alternatively I could just remove the screenshot from the article, upload a new screenshot and ignore the fact that my media repo over time would grow full of obsolete screenshots. However, this would make the task of finding screenshots harder when searching the media repo later...

With lots of screenshots to be replaced when we perform a service release, this is pretty tedious work.

At FotoWare we make Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, so we're no strangers to using metadata to quickly locate, publish, replace and/or revoke assets, such as screenshots. Although I would never expect mindtouch to build a fully fledged DAM system, some improvements to the way screenshots are added, replaced and/or revoked would be very welcome.

A second option we have considered is integrating the mindtouch editor with our own FotoWare DAM solution. That would allow us to host the screenshots on our own system and cdn and easily handle these operations ourselves without relying on mindtouch's media handling.

I can’t remember exactly, but it must be at least seven years, if not more.

We've had a couple of random service outages, but they've been few and far between; usually, the service is back up within one or two hours. So, we've not really had any major issues with the service.

There were no scalability issues.

We're in Norway and with MindTouch in San Diego, the time difference is obviously an issue. But, the response is swift and to the point. I've sometimes had to escalate cases to get the answer that I want, but their staff is always very polite and helpful.

Being a cloud service, everything ran from day 1. We styled the site according to the company profile, and even then, we swiftly received the assistance we needed, when we had issues with CSS or other related issues.

I don't know much about the pricing honestly, but MindTouch has several tiers to accommodate different types of customers.

We looked at one or two other options, but I can't remember their names. MindTouch seemed to deliver the complete package, and we've not looked back.

Get a trial! We got a pretty extensive trial period where we could try to migrate existing content and see how we could organize it in MindTouch.

Being able to test the system with our actual content and seeing how it really worked had us convinced.

The most valuable feature of this product would be the overall structuring of the content and guides. It is very easy to navigate through the different modules and to set content hierarchies. From an end user's perspective, it is very easy to find what you are looking for through the guide hierarchy or by simply using the search bar.

Before MindTouch, our users had to constantly look through our old PDFs to find answers; many times not finding what they needed in the maze of the individual docs and then, had to call customer support when they became frustrated. Converting our PDFs to MindTouch is like adding a huge new feature to our software product line and it has, so far, had a great approval rate amongst our clients.

Since we use this product as a resource for both the customers and employees, I would say it has also improved the ways our staff accesses information, which in turn improves overall efficiency. Instead of having to search through bottomless company-wide folders, SharePoint sites or past emails, any information regarding our solutions can be easily found and accessed.

I think that there could be improvements in the actual structuring and formatting of content, i.e., when creating topics and guides in MindTouch. Although they advertise that you can simply “copy and paste” content, I found this product to be tricky when doing this; it lacked clean formatting. There aren’t a lot of options to style the content as compared to programs like Microsoft Word (such as formatting tables, lists, etc.) and I found that often I had to settle in terms of styling the content as close to my ideals, that the product would allow.

I have been using this solution for approximately six months, i.e., since we purchased/implemented the product, at the end of December 2016.

We have not encountered any issues with the stability so far.

We have not encountered any issues with its scalability.

We did not have a solution before MindTouch.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. They provide online training and support for new users. They, also, provide a detailed walkthrough of setting up your product. It is easy to get technical support when needed, during this process.

My advice for others looking into this product would be to ask them for help at the initial implementation and then go-live. They have contract resources to assist with migration, as initially importing the guides with little experience in the solution, can be extremely time consuming and problematic.

The only thing I liked about this was the fact that you can create an online help system where information changes dynamically.

I was using a very old version (2010), and the user interface was bad making it difficult to perform simple tasks. However, I understand they have a cloud based system that is worth checking out and is much improved.