Introducing MindTouch 2010

MindTouch has long been recognized as leading the way of innovation with our general purpose collaboration platform.  We’ve  continued that technology leadership with our newest releases last week of MindTouch Platform v.10 and MindTouch Core.

The newest member of the MindTouch product portfolio - MindTouch Technical Communications Suite is however, anything but general purpose. This is the most focused product we have ever released. It’s built on the same great platform, but it has been sharpened with a wealth of research about a particular use case, serving a new and emerging market: strategic documentation. An emerging market, one that MindTouch users have been defining for a few years now.

Fifteen months ago we set out to better understand how we serve the millions of MindTouch users on our platform. The goal was to identify the top use cases, map those to market opportunity and mission criticality then design and launch solutions for the top few. What better way to inform product development and deliver more value to our users than by speaking directly with many thousands of them?

With our findings we quickly launched a few solution frameworks and productized some apps. These all were wildly popular. It’s hard to miss when you listen to your users. However, one use-case emerged as a surprisingly clear winner that was simply in a category of it’s own: product and services documentation. Or as we now think of it, strategic documentation.

Strategic documentation is content that drives top line revenue by increasing lead generation (sometimes by 2x) and improving customer retention. It drives down customer support costs (customers report as much as 50%). This also often informs product development teams.

Product and services documentation, really?
As companies, from all industries, shift selling online (or a hybrid thereof) their documentation is increasingly valuable for search engine optimization (SEO), establishing company expertise and credibility, and as a check list item in the customer due diligence process. This is why it is no longer the sole domain of technical writers and is increasingly shared across multiple departments: marketing, product, customer service, … and informed by all other departments such as sales and engineering.

Your documentation is a storefront. Are you open for business? The Internet has changed how all companies sell their products and services. Now product and service documentation is strategic. Indeed this strategic content can drive over half your new customer acquisition, increase customer retention and dramatically lower your cost of customer support.

Why write alone? The tools used for authoring strategic content haven’t changed since the early 1990s. These pre-Internet desktop applications are designed for the individual and output static content. Now that content is strategic there are many stakeholders, departments and specialized application and data silos to connect with. Companies demand an agile, easy to use multi-user content authoring tool that is web-based, standards compliant and able to connect external applications and content repositories.

Content can’t be strategic if no one can find it. PDF, CHM and static HTML aren’t helpful to your customers. These are dead files. Your customers and prospective customers demand a new way to navigate, discover and engage with your documentation. Are you providing the discovery tools they expect?

Are you supplying what your customers demand? Probably not. What are they searching for? Where are the holes in your documentation? What’s stale? What lacks quality? Your customers have a lot to teach you about your content. Are you learning so you can curate effectively.

MindTouch Technical Communications Suite (TCS) is the killer app for authoring, publishing (discovering) and curating documentation. Yes, this is great for technical writers and it’s also great for customers and prospective customers as well. Most importantly this is great for companies that want to grow their business because MindTouch 2010 helps increase lead generation, contracts sales cycles, improves customer satisfaction and retention and decreases customer support costs.

These are some bold claims about the benefits of MindTouch TCS, yet we just released it. How can I make these statements? I feel confident in drawing on the success of the thousands of companies already benefiting from MindTouch in these ways. With MindTouch TCS and our game-changing Curation Analytics, we just made it a lot faster and easier for everyone to achieve these goals.

Check out some of the early coverage of MindTouch TCS, courtesy of Barb Mosher at CMSWire:
“MindTouch 2010 Includes Curation Analytics for Content and Documentation

I’m very excited to offer these new tools for customer acquisition… I mean for strategic documentation.

• More MindTouch TCS videos
• MindTouch TCS Announcement
• Download MindTouch TCS, Platform v.10 and Core
• MindTouch Platform v.10 in the Cloud (hosting available for all MindTouch products)