Decision Maker’s Guide to Customer Support and Documentation Edition

Since I am in the business of Customer Support Communities and Social Documentation I am frequently asked to differentiate between Enterprise solution providers. While each of the companies below have superior offerings to how most companies do SocialCRM (customer support) today, there are differences that are important.

The Social Business Players

MindTouch is an enterprise social and collaboration platform with a focus on Social Documentation and Support Communities.
Atlassian Confluence is a popular wiki commonly used by software development teams that is also used for documentation by software developer workgroups.
Jive Software is a general purpose social business platform with many use cases. One of which is customer support communities.
RightNow has a customer support suite that they’ve added some social capabilities to.

Each of the solutions listed in the matrix below are high quality, enterprise ready product. But each serves a different purpose or is a general platform trying to solve multiple enterprise issues. For purposes of our matrix, our focus is on customer support documentation communities.


In 8 words or less	Customer support and documentation community platform	General purpose solution with some documentation specific capabilities	Social business amps up customer support	Next generation customer support communities
Key customers	Autodesk, Intuit, Washington Post, New York Times, Intel, Fujitsu	IBM, Zynga, Nike, Stanford University (internal collaboration customers)	SAP, Cisco, NetApp, Citrix	Motorola, Black and Decker, Iomega, MySpace, Overstock
Perfect for	Custom support & documentation communities that scale	Smaller deployments that need documentation quickly	General customer support communities	Customer support communities that require social monitoring
Search Buzz Meter*
Platform Extensibility	Unlimited, Flexible, quickly build new modules	Limited	Limited	Limited
Auto organization of content
Curation Analytics
Adaptive Search
Questions & Answers
Template driven content creation
Single Sourcing
Content Moderation
Web Content Management (WCMS)
Rich Media Content Creation & Publishing
Supported Languages	18 Languages + myriad community translations	10+ Languages plus many partials	Spanish, French, Simplified Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese	28 languages
Unique Monthly Web Traffic**	150k/month	180k/month	200k/month	140k/month
Cloud/SaaS enabled?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
The Videos	MindTouch	Confluence	Jive Software	RightNow
Target Market	Enterprise and MidMarket	MidMarket & SMB	Enterprise	Enterprise
Reputation/Social Currency System	Extensive	None	Broad	Some
Content rating system	Extensive & impacts search results	Limited	Some	Limited
Office Locations
Strengths	Cutting edge social business platform, highly scalable, only solution to support documentation & support communities	Easy to use, many technology partners, widely used, good community of users	Powerful out of the box general solution that easily converts to customer support community	Market leader with a breadth of knowledge and proven clientele
Weaknesses	Out of the box support community functionality needs to be enhanced by MindTouch before deploying	Support communities are not a focus for the organization.	Specific support community functionality is missing or weak.	Documentation tools are non-existent. Therefore can’t support technical needs of the market.
	* from Google insights & trends. Jive meter for innovation module only.	**Est. traffic from Google Adplanner.