MindTouch Enables Safe Crowd Sourcing Of Corporate Knowledge and Product Documentation

• Delivering quality, up to date documentation is one of the biggest challenges of every company. MindTouch decreases the challenge with safe crowd sourcing and the ability to break down support and documentation language barriers.
• Lower the cost and improve the quality of documentation and customer support while creating an engaged community of users, customers and partners.

SAN DIEGO, September 1, 2009 — MindTouch, developer of one of the top open source projects in the world, today announced the immediate availability of the MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base, the first packaged solution of its kind. Designed to enable safe crowd sourcing, the turnkey solution allows companies to safely open their product and company documentation to contributions from users, customers and partners while eliminating the risk of chaos or spam infesting their support operations. MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base includes editorial controls that allow no-friction end-user contributions while still making it easy for editors to accept and reject contributions. Sophisticated multilingual capabilities, word blacklist, collaborative video editing and user or IP blocking and banning are just a few of the innovative capabilities that make the MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base a must have for every company with customers and partners.

The solution is the second of several collaborative network solutions to be released by MindTouch [For more, see MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson’s groundbreaking post on collaborative networks here.]. The MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base follows the June launch of the MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, which tackled the failure of current corporate portals and enterprise social networks to deliver value to business users. MindTouch solutions are built on the company’s popular MindTouch 2009 open source collaboration platform.

The MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base empowers customers and partners to update and contribute information to a company’s knowledge base. The solution allows those outside the organization to collaborate on common support documents, including reference guides, tutorials, FAQs, files, images, or videos. The solution’s advanced authoring tool is designed for ease of use, giving non-technical users the ability to create content.

“High costs and the very real fear of giving up control keep companies in the dark ages of customer support,” said Fulkerson. “Until today, nobody’s given them the editorial oversight needed to let their most knowledgeable support staff — their customers — maintain and improve their product documentation.”

To address security and safety concerns, MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base includes a fine-grained permissioning system that allows full information hierarchies to be locked down to specific users or groups. The solution allows contributions to be moderated so that any changes made to any pages can be kept in a content queue until published live by a moderator. Additionally, all contributed content is revisioned to provide an audit trail of changes made to documentation. And, keeping to its open source roots, MindTouch has enabled all content inside the solution to easily be exported to common formats, ensuring customers that their data is not locked into a proprietary system for eternity.

The MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base also employs advanced polyglot features to localize the user interface and allow for translated pages to be linked together, a powerful capability in an increasingly international world where knowledge management system needs to cross language boundaries.

About MindTouch

MindTouch provides powerful, versatile software for creating, sharing and managing strategic content across the enterprise. Our open source product, MindTouch Core, has been embraced by over 20 million users and is supported by one of the open source industry's most active communities. Our flagship product, MindTouch TCS, is the “killer app” for documentation, transforming the way organizations author, discover and curate their strategic content to achieve measurable business ROI with customers, partners, and colleagues. To learn more, visit http://www.mindtouch.com