Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium wrote a thoughtful article about one of our recent announcements and titled it “Curation analytics take a step forward”. In case you missed this announcement it was about us supporting publishing from Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe FrameMaker, Madcap Flare and pretty much any other tool that can publish to Compiled HTML help (CHM) format.

O’Keefe shares her concern about the round-trip story, this is wise, but it isn’t as big an issue when you realize where MindTouch fits into the publishing pipeline. Furthermore, Sarah highlights our analytics as the primary value proposition for using MindTouch, but this is only a piece of why customers love MindTouch.

Where’s the Value?

This announcement is a big deal because pretty much every technology company over a $10M in revenue and over a certain age is using these tools. The problem with these tools is that they do not deliver any value to the company. It isn’t until the content is published that any value is created. I’m not criticizing these tools. I realize techwriters really like them and appreciate being able to push pixels in layout. However, the reality is these tools are interchangeable commodities. It’s like car tires. I don’t care what tires are on my vehicle. I just care about getting to my destination. It’s the destination from which we derive value.

Where’s MindTouch?

While MindTouch does offer an authoring environment capable of creating gorgeous content—all within your web browser—it is not our goal to replace desktop authoring tools. Far from it. Rather we extend these tools with an intelligent content framework, contextual help system, and analytics. Yes, we have many customers that have moved all authoring to MindTouch, but more are using MindTouch in conjunction with DITA authoring or other authoring tools.

Our mission is to make all software users kick ass with the software they use. This makes our goal to replace the publishing endpoints, like static HTML and PDFs.

From the title to the content, O’Keefe, who really is wonderful and very intelligent even if she went to the wrong college, hammers on analytics as the key value proposition for MindTouch. Yes, we offer exciting capabilities in our Behavioral and Curation Analytics that allow users to make informed decisions about: content, product—and even—sales and marketing strategy. However, there are, at least, three uniquely differentiated broad product categories that our customers love/value about MindTouch.

Intelligent Documentation

MindTouch has a concept of an Intelligent Documentation Framework (IDF). No, this is not competitive with DITA. It’s purpose is to accelerate learning and discovery. It does this by dynamically organizing the content so users can become experts with your products more quickly. It creates unbreakable links so you never have to worry about 404 errors even after you reorganize your docs. This framework is also great for SEO. It’s template driven and entirely customizable. Author your content however you like, you’ll still get the benefits of IDF.

Behavioral Analytics

O’Keefe probably focused on the analytics in MindTouch because they’re damn exciting. This is very different from web analytics. Our customers can analyze their content and users’ behavior to inform content quality and improve the overall help experience. Content strategists can determine which articles they need to write or improve. It’s easy to determine experts on topics. Also, these are very useful for search engine optimization. Many of our customers double their site traffic with the right audience. Finally, these tools commonly inform product, sales and marketing strategy.

Contextual Help System

In an afternoon some of our customers have imported help content and launched contextual help systems for their web applications. We call this feature F1. It is a competitive differentiator for our customers. It has allowed our customers to address product and support hot spots efficiently, in real-time. This accelerates user adoption and end user expertise.

Open + Social = Goodness

Open and social is goodness? Well, not necessarily. Socialization of your content is hot and trendy and there can be real value to opening up your content for contributions, but the value of commenting and collaborative authoring is really dependent upon the company and products.

There is no silver bullet to delivering exceptional help content. No one size fits all and there is no cookie cutter process. At MindTouch we know the most common publishing processes and how we fit into these, but we never advise ripping and replacing those with MindTouch. What investments have you made? Let’s make those a lot more valuable.