All posts by Corey Ganser

Adding and formatting tables with ease in MindTouch TCS

July 26th, 2011 | | TCS Features

This week for the MindTouch TCS feature review I’m going to look at how easy it is to add and format tables.

To get started, adding tables is a one click function now where you click the Table drop down and then highlight the number of columns and rows you want.  Once you click it will add it to the page.

Once the table is added to the page, we’ve streamlined the ability to format the width of columns.  This can be done by hovering over the column edge and then right clicking and dragging it to the desired width.  The column will maintain this width on save as well.  This is functionality that users are used to in a desktop application like Excel.

These new additions will make it easier to add and manipulate tables, which are an integral component of any documentation.

Making the feedback loop easier with MindTouch TCS

July 18th, 2011 | | TCS Features

MindTouch TCS comes out with a host of new features on a weekly basis and a lot of times the value of the features aren’t fully covered in the product notes.  I’ll be working on a series of blog posts that will cover some of the new features and why it matters to you.

The feature I’m going to focus on this week is our user feedback feature.  The user feedback feature is exposed in two areas on your mindtouch.us site.  The first location is when you rank an article thumbs down.

This then prompts the user to provide additional feedback as to why the article wasn’t helpful. The user can fill out the information and then click  Send.  In the background this message is by default emailed to the admin of the site, but there is also the ability to configure the email address that the message is sent to.  This means that you can add your support email or an email that points at your task management system, thus making it easier to manage and execute on the user feedback.

The other location where we actively solicit user feedback is in the search results.  If the user doesn’t find what they are looking for they can click the “Tell us how we can improve our search results” and that loads a dialog box where the user can submit their feedback.

The feedback is then either sent to the admin user or a custom email address which is used for the thumbs down feedback.  This is just one of the many features included with MindTouch TCS that make it easier to engage your community with your documentation and to manage their feedback.

Licensing MindTouch Core installs

January 25th, 2011 | | Community News

MindTouch is constantly looking to provide a exceptional experience to its commercial customers and Core community members. With this in mind, MindTouch recently consolidated our various installer packages that were being maintained separately so that, regardless of how a user installed MindTouch, they would be able to select MindTouch Core, MindTouch Platform or MindTouch TCS to install.

This change to the installer allowed MindTouch to make the following improvements:

  • Users would no longer accidentally install Commercial offerings when they meant to install Core.
  • MindTouch now has only 1 package to maintain when getting ready for a release which increases the speed in which MindTouch can release new versions.
  • MindTouch is still available via Linux Packages, VMware, and MindTouch MSI deployments for Commercial and Core offering. Previously MindTouch Core wasn’t available through the Windows MSI.

These changes introduced an unintentional chance for confusion. The MindTouch Community has provided feedback questioning why a “license” needs to be applied to the Core install. Since we have a consolidated deployment for all products, an activation key needs to be applied in order to load the correct version of MindTouch.

The need for applying this activation key wasn’t intended to signal any departure from Open Source nature of MindTouch Core. You can still compile from source and is still licensed the same.

For an overview of how to apply the license review our License documentation.

Easy one-click Windows installer for MindTouch

November 4th, 2010 | | Community News

Here at MindTouch, we’re always striving to simplify the installation and maintenance experience of our product – in fact, Mike recently highlighted the joy from one of many customers who appreciates the low maintenance nature of MindTouch.

As a company that has a track record of building an incredibly robust product across Windows and Linux platforms, our users have always had a wealth of deployment package options: source, .rpm, .deb, Windows MSI, virtual images, and even Amazon EC2 AMI images! When we look at deployment options, we’ve tried to stay ahead of the curve: we were one of the first in our product class to offer a virtual image – when Amazon EC2 launched, we also offered an AMI to cloud-enable MindTouch.

While tech-savvy IT administrators have loved the flexibility and ease of our deployment options, the non-IT users have suffered. We know that the experience for installing and evaluating MindTouch locally on Windows has been unnecessarily complex.

Well, this changes today.

Read more…

Tag This

September 28th, 2010 | | Uncategorized

What kind of content tagger are you? Are your tags useful, accurately classifying content and helping others to find it? Are your tags way out in left field? Is this blog post really tagged with “awesome”?

Tags are only meaningful if they are truly applicable to the content on the page and on the site. Not only do tags assist users in finding content specific to that page, they help to tie related content together. So how do you, as a content administrator or moderator, encourage and steer users towards using standardized tags (just like “awesome”)?

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2010 R.E.C.S.S. Nominations open

August 24th, 2010 | | Uncategorized

The 2nd Annual R.E.C.S.S. (Recognition for Excellence in Customer Support and Service) nominations are open. The R.E.C.S.S. awards were created by MindTouch Customer Support Manager, Corey Ganser to recognize outstanding customer support and service provided by companies and agents.

You can easily nominate a company/agent by going to http://www.supportawards.org/Nominate and filling out the form. You can nominate multiple times, but you can only nominate a company in the same category once. The top 10 companies/agents with the most nominations move onto the voting round where the company/agent with the highest votes wins.

The company will win an award along with being able to put a badge on their site noting that they have award-winning customer support/service. The top agent will win a Nintendo Wii.

The R.E.C.S.S. awards wouldn’t be possible without our sponsors: MindTouch, ZenDesk and Jolokia Networks.

Please take time today to nominate a company or agent for a R.E.C.S.S.

New Pages and Comments Moderator Dashboards

July 22nd, 2010 | | Uncategorized

The MindTouch professional services team has been hard at work, building an exciting new documentation and moderation system for one of our engagements. The amount of content that has to be moderated for this site is somewhat extraordinary (on the order of hundreds of thousands of pages!), with new content being generated both internally and by the community every day. Entire teams of moderators will be working to monitor new content and publish approved content that meets their standards. In addition, comments left by the community will be monitored for context and appropriate language.

To make this daunting task possible, we’ve developed two new dashboards: a Comments Dashboard and a New Pages Dashboard.

Read more…

E Pluribus Unum

June 28th, 2010 | | Uncategorized

“Out of many, one”

In my last blog post, I wrote about the user profile system that the MindTouch Professional Services team developed for one of our customers. The multi-page user profiles pull together information from several different sources, including Great Plains, in-house systems, and file repositories, to provide a complete “Who’s Who” of their employees. Static information such as office location, phone number, and department is gathered securely from behind their firewall and displayed. In addition, the user profile pages gave employees a place to showcase their work and skillsets, talk a little about themselves (including, yes, a “What Am I Up To?” feature a la Twitter), and provide links to external sources such as their Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, and personal website. The result is a vibrant and business-focused system that helps employees to get to know each other both as coworkers and individuals.

While that in and of itself is useful though, one of the primary goals of this engagement was to develop a system that allows users to be found not just by their username or phone number but by the skills they possess. This particular client is a creative and media-centric company, but it’s a challenge that every organization faces… how do you find someone by what they know?

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Flexibility is Key

June 28th, 2010 | | Enterprise 2.0

So many times we are surprised at the creative ways that customers are building value with MindTouch.  As a robust flexible application platform, MindTouch lends itself to extensive customization easily, allowing users to quickly and easy create powerful applications.

As you may have seen in previous posts, a survey of our users revealed that the majority of MindTouch customers are using MindTouch to create the next generation of collaborative tech support documentation.  This phenomenon arose organically, with users naturally gravitating towards the flexibility of MindTouch in creating and editing technical communications.

The key in all of these use cases is the flexibility of the MindTouch platform.

Today’s solutions require flexible platforms that enable structure to emerge, rather than forcing structure on your customers and employees. It is an important distinction that can make or break a successful deployment.

Our latest release, MindTouch Technical Communications Suite focuses on delivering the features most requested by technical communicators.  When we looked at how technical communicators are using MindTouch, we saw some great developments in the areas of Authoring, Discovering, and Curating information. It is in these areas that we have focused many of our new features in MindTouch TCS.  From our new search engine to powerful curation tools, we’ve added in the features that technical communicators need to quickly create and manage quality documentation sourced from internal and external sources.

The Evolution of Technical Communication

June 23rd, 2010 | | Enterprise 2.0

As engineers, we are often reluctant communicators.  I remember my first job out of college, working in the electrical engineering R&D dept at a now-defunct Fortune 500 company. It is safe to say that “writing the manuals” was usually the last item on the list of tasks for almost every project;  nobody wanted to do it, but being the newest person there, it was a task that usually fell to me.  A decade ago, technical communication was done with very rudimentary tools, using Word or Robohelp, and distributing documentation updates via CD-ROM.

The growth of technical communication industry is testament to the fact that technical writing is an art all to itself.  An outgrowth of what was once only thought of as “manual writing”, technical communication has evolved over the past few years into a much more social, collaborative process.  The advent, and staggering growth, of social collaborative technology has changed the world of technical communication forever.  Whereas before technical writing was thought of as more of an afterthought, it now sits front and center in the interface between a company and their customers; talk about a crucial positioning!

Read more…

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