At MindTouch, most of our customers have teams in place to write their content. Occasionally, however, we do get requests from companies who want to hire writers to help develop their content. Given the fact that they’re our customers, naturally we thought it would be a good idea for the MindTouch writer following to get in on the game. If you’re a writer and have cycles to spare and would be willing to do freelance or for-hire work for our customers, tell us. We created a form below where you can submit your contact info and bio. Fill it out, click submit, and you’ll be included in the list we send to customers who want some creative talent.
We’re in the freedom business. We like users to be free to use the software and not shackled by confusion. We like software makers to be free to design and develop and not worry about how their users learn. We want support people to share their internal troubleshooting steps with users, thus freeing themselves to bite into meatier issues. And, of course, we want Tech Pubs folks to set their desktop files free and get them to the cloud. With the latest MindTouch TCS release we’ve made it possible for authors of great content using products like Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe FrameMaker and Madcap Flare to easily set their static content free on the Web. Here are the three easy steps to converting your CHM file-based help into a MindTouch TCS site.
As pioneers on the Help Center frontier, what I’m going to say may strike you a bit less like Manifest Destiny and a bit more like overstaying one’s welcome. PDF’s are the way of the future.
There, I said it. I truly believe it. This post explains why.
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Last week, we announced the launch of our Social Publishing and Behavior Analytics for Desktop Authoring Tools – a new capability of MindTouch TCS that supports popular desktop authoring tools including Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe RoboHelp, XMetal, Microsoft Word and MadCap Flare as well as several other popular editing tools that produce compiled HTML help (CHM) files.
In just a few clicks, content authors can publish to MindTouch from their existing tools. Hierarchies, cross-link references, image and page formats are maintained. Content is automatically and dynamically organized by tags and the site hierarchy. All content is indexed by a powerful search tool. Moreover, end user behavior can be analyzed to inform content, support and product strategy.
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This week for the MindTouch TCS feature review, we’re going to look at how MindTouch TCS automatically relates content.
MindTouch TCS ships with a series of page templates, known as IDF (Intelligent Documentation Framework), that help users organize and structure their content in a way that makes it easier to create, manage and surface documentation. A component of IDF includes the ability for documentation to be automatically related.
Relating content is done automatically but can also be customized to add keywords to help narrow down emphasis on related articles. You can do this by adding a tag like “keyword:tools” as an example to a page where “tools” can be replaced by a keyword that you want to target for the article’s related content.
This week I’m going to focus on a new feature that was released a couple of weeks ago called Search Recommendation. Before we look at Search Recommendations, take a look at my last blog post about reporting around user’s search behavior. The reporting provides great insight into what your users are searching for and what they are and aren’t finding. There are a couple of things that can be done with this information, specifically identifying articles that don’t exist within your documentation that users are searching for. But what if there is documentation but the users just aren’t finding it correctly because of a different search term than what would trigger a result or maybe the correct result is on the 2nd page of search results. This is where Search Recommendation comes in.
This week I’m going to focus on our Search Analytics report which is one of the Curation Analytics reports included with MindTouch TCS.
The Search Analytics report provides insight into what your users are searching for and what they are and aren’t finding. To get started you can login to your MindTouch TCS install and then click on Reports at the top. Note that reports are only accessible to Admins currently. Once you click on reports then click on the Search tab. You will then be presented with Popular search terms along with a table of Popular search queries. Within the Popular search queries you can see what keyword(s) users have searched for and what the top clicked results are. You can also click on the keyword(s) themselves and see all of the clicked results within the time frame specified.
This week for the MindTouch TCS feature review, I’m going to look at the User types. Within MindTouch we offer many levels of segmentation for users to restrict what functionality the user has accessibility to.
The default role that a user receives when they sign up is Community Member. A Community Member can rank content on a page, provide feedback on articles along with navigate the site. MindTouch TCS allows you to have unlimited number of these type of users at no additional cost.
The other role is Pro Member. A Pro Member is broken down into additional segmentations, but the base rights include the ability to add and modify content on your MindTouch TCS site. The Pro Member role’s rights can be increased up to Admin where the Pro Member is able to manage and administer the site. The pricing for MindTouch TCS is based off of the number of Pro Members that you have.
This means that if you have 3 users that create your documentation but 10,000 customers that use the documentation, you are only paying for the 3 authors.
For more information about pricing and user type access for MindTouch TCS, contact your account rep today.
