t2 ExactTarget is the global leader in on-demand email marketing and one-to-one marketing solutions. Download this case study and learn how they've cut their strategic documentation costs by as much as 50% with MindTouch TCS.
I’ve started a number of documentation projects for a number of companies, and published countless manuals. The cost of that documentation was tremendous. What I’ve seen with MindTouch may be the equivalent of a 50% savings in development and publication costs."
Charles Cantrell, Automation Engineer
ExactTarget
Objective
An alert Documentation Manager at ExactTarget recognized the opportunity to collect and make use of their technical documentation. ExactTarget looked to MindTouch for an automation and content creation tool that would be easy to adopt. Over time, MindTouch evolved into the central technical repository for development, documentation and support.
Solution
MindTouch allows a very lean documentation department to maintain a large, and complex body of technical information, through collaboration, automated tracking and generation processes. “Having the control to tell if a page has been edited and by whom is really critical from a control/ management perspective.” said Charles Cantrell, Automation Engineer, ExactTarget.
Outcome
With its intuitive web-based authoring environment, MindTouch TCS allows everyone in the company to contribute to the documentation, not just the documentation writers. Ideas for improvements that someone would never bother to send in or that would get lost on a writer’s to-do list can be added directly to the document, kicking off an automated workflow process to review and edit the content before making it available to customers.
Real Success
With MindTouch, ExactTarget's documentation has evolved into a strategic revenue generating asset for their company.
Mozilla
The extensive API will let us pull in information from all over the project, making Mozilla Developer Center a much more valuable resource for web developers and Mozilla developers alike."
Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering,
Mozilla developer.mozilla.org
Objective
Seamlessly migrate one of the world’s largest developer communities to a new platform that is scalable and more extensible.
Solution
Mozilla approached MindTouch when they realized their current wiki solution didn’t meet the scalability and extensibility needs of their large and rapidly growing developer community. Consisting of nearly 100,000 editors collaborating in almost twenty languages across tens of thousands of pages of content, Mozilla worked with the MindTouch team to seamlessly transition and migrate their entire developer community to the MindTouch platform.
Outcome
Their MindTouch solution was migrated and deployed to production in weeks. Today the platform is used to build new community capabilities and the API is leveraged by Mozilla to maximize value from information scattered across many Mozilla properties, making the Mozilla Developer Center a much more valuable and engaging resource.
Real Success
Out of all the platforms Mozilla evaluated, MindTouch was the only platform that could be extended as a platform for web applications and deliver this level of power and sophistication to the Mozilla community.
Red Mountain acquires and rehabilitates commercial real-estate. Using MindTouch, they are able to make swift responses to opportunities yielded by the ever-changing conditions of the retail and mixed-use real estate market.
Enterprise mashups across legacy intranet, databases, and financial applications have resulted in a 25% productivity gain across all our departments, saving us millions of dollars."
Red Mountain Retail Group
www.redmountainretailgroup.com
Objective
Create a collaborative network that allows for business intelligence, application mashups, knowledge capture and ERP reporting transparency.
Solution
With only a single IT person and within a period of six weeks, Red Mountain deployed a closed-loop collaborative network built on MindTouch. The first phase involved MindTouch delivering basic wiki collaboration. The company saw a 5% improvement in productivity across all departments. Immediately thereafter, Red Mountain deployed MindTouch enterprise adapters to automate both weekly and monthly property and project reports. With this they were able to do more with 20% less resources. Finally, Red Mountain created department and executive dashboards. Existing systems that were integrated with MindTouch include Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Yardi Financial Software, Microsoft Small Business Server (file server) and the legacy intranet.
Outcome
They experienced a real business benefit through the use of business intelligence dashboards and dynamic reporting across all of the company’s properties. These provided a single, common view of the data across the company, eliminating information silos and the need for each department to develop separate and very time-consuming weekly reports.
Real Success
Enterprise reporting, dashboards and custom workflows across legacy intranet, databases, and financial applications have resulted in over 25% productivity gain across all Red Mountain Retail departments, saving them millions of dollars.
Learn how the Dearborn Public School district, one of the largest school districts in Michigan, was able to use MindTouch as as integral part of a district-wide technology infrastructure project.
Our users are people whose primary focus is teaching kids, not developing software."
Chris Kenniburg, Dearborn Public Schools
RightScale
Objective
To build an internally managed system to easily maintain the Dearborn Public School District’s technology footprint of 32 individual school websites and 800 teacher blogs.
Solution
MindTouch’s collaboration platform has been deployed across the Dearborn Public School District, meshing together a network of 32 unique school “nodes”. These collaborative nodes act as distinct web sites that allow the district to build a bridge between schools. Updates, news & events and teacher blogs aggregate into one easy-to-navigate search system.
Outcome
From an IT perspective, the time-savings Dearborn Public School District has seen has been dramatic. “Prior to MindTouch, if there was an issue on the school web site and a teacher called me, it might take me 4-6 hours to get it fixed with the old system,” said Kenniburg. “Now, I just log right in and it’s a 15-minute task. Also, with regard to training, you don’t have to make sure there’s special software loaded on every computer. All they need is a browser.”
Real Success
According to Kenniburg, the biggest benefit the district sees is in the division of labor that now goes into maintaining the family of sites in the system. The platform is set up so teachers can just log into the MindTouch powered site manager to update information. What’s more, the platform’s access control and permissioning features even allow parents to participate from home, creating a richer collaborative network.
Datacard Group
Datacard Group, a $400 million company based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, collaborates with their customers to create secure financial card programs and government ID initiatives.
Objective
Create a solution to create product documentation and manage their internal knowledge base.
Real Success
Customer loyalty is critical to any company’s growth, and something that MindTouch is lucky enough to enjoy, thanks to our innovative products and amazing customer service.
A globally distributed company, the Datacard Group has been a MindTouch customer for quite a while. In fact, the first MindTouch product they deployed was the MindTouch DekiBox, a hardware appliance sold very early on in our company’s history. Today, they use our virtual machine installation, a low-touch, high performance software virtual appliance.
The DataCard engineering department uses MindTouch to create and share their product documentation, as well as their internal knowledgebase. Over 300 engineers at Datacard use MindTouch day in and day out, authoring new product documentation, improving existing documentation and driving discussions around new product and service ideas. At Datacard, MindTouch is regarded as a business critical application. In addition to the benefits MindTouch provides in terms of information sharing and discoverability, a major contributor to the MindTouch “stickiness” within Datacard is how easy our product is to maintain and operate. The engineering team at Datacard was given the option to migrate to a SharePoint deployment, but chose to continue (and expand) their MindTouch deployment? Why? Typically, you'd assume it was due to our strong capabilities for product documentation. However, Datacard had additional reasons – product performance and stability.
According to Mark Wittwer, who is responsible for the MindTouch deployment at Datacard, he spends “less than a day a quarter maintaining MindTouch”, adding that he “has to give MindTouch credit, your product is rock solid”. Mark spends quite a bit more time managing other applications at Datacard and appreciates the low-maintenance nature of MindTouch.
Our MindTouch Collaboration Solution is allowing the Santa Ana Police Department to create, retain and share our intellectual property – the irreplaceable knowledge we all hold that helps keep our community safe – in such a way that officers across the department can benefit immediately."
Boris Duran, Technology Specialist Officer
Santa Ana Police Department
Objective
Deploy a scalable enterprise collaboration solution with the potential of evolving into a knowledge base.
Solution
After an exhaustive review of collaboration solutions, the SAPD chose MindTouch to serve as their strategic collaboration platform. Their decision was based upon the fact that MindTouch met all of their initial requirements, but also because of the extensible nature of the MindTouch platform, which guaranteed its ability to grow with the department’s needs in the future.
Outcome
Some of the immediate benefits the department has been able to realize include:
- Rapid adoption within the department
- Bringing disparate systems together
- Connecting the station with the field
Real Success
MindTouch was able to meet all of the initial requirements. The extensible nature of MindTouch guarantees the ability to grow with the department’s needs in the future.
Booz Allen Hamilton
Objective
To replace their current intranet provider with a robust, customizable, scalable solution. They needed to reduce their page load times as they were taking up to 5 minutes and also needed to migrate 100,000 pages. In addition, the new solution needed to integrate with SharePoint 2010 and offer a MS Word like interface for easy content creation, editing and projects to provide a seamless experience.
Solution
The MindTouch team worked directly with BAH Hello team to create a customized solution so they could have it “their way”. BAH adopted a program methodology, worked under an agreed program budget, laid out responsibilities and setup formal workshops around MindTouch processes.
Outcome
All 23,000 employees migrated to MindTouch in June of 2010. People and projects are now linked contextually as 8 years worth of data was migrated to a MindTouch environment.
Real Success
MindTouch and Sharepoint are linked seamlessly without awareness from users. Page load times decreased by 500%.
MindTouch TCS gives us greater management of our knowledge base, allowing us to open a traditionally close-to-the-vest part of the business to outside partners."
Dean Onishi, Communications Manager
RightScale
Objective
Quickly provide a consumer-facing support portal for product documentation and knowledge management.
Solution
RightScale selected MindTouch to launch their collaborative network for self service-support and product documentation in mid-2009. RightScale needed a structured knowledge base to aggregate content that consisted of tutorials, videos, references, and frequently asked questions for their customers.
Outcome
RightScale took only one month to build a customized collaborative network using MindTouch. Innovations in the property included dynamically updated navigation tools that exposed potentially overlooked portions of documentation, collaborative editing, and rapid application. An advanced search interface was also added on to the MindTouch enterprise search engine that enabled custom queries based on tagging, page and file contents.
Real Success
The user experience of the site delivers an easy and fluid way for visitors to navigate and find desired information, contact support and refine searches. The RightScale Support Portal was launched in one month. Today, more than half of RightScale's new site visitors come in via their support documentation portal, driving new business opportunities for the company each and every day.
Objective
Driven by their customers varied usage and experience with their products, communities are the long tail of the Autodesk ecosystem, where the Internet combines the insights from many small groups into a major web presence.
Autodesk embarked on an initiative to extend its conventional publishing practices, capture the insights from innovative users, incorporate video into online experiences, and produce compelling learning environments that drive future business. For that, they chose MindTouch.
Solution
Autodesk has added MindTouch to its content infrastructure to enhance content delivery and to support a continuous learning environment. This social web platform combines a wiki environment for web-based documentation with support for learning communities, social interactions, and content analytics. The wiki organizes content around the customer experience, and the ways in which practicing professionals typically look for answers to questions. For Autodesk customers, the social web takes over where conventional publishing leave off.
Outcome
- Launched wikihelp.autodesk.com
- Improved content delivery: Now, Autodesk can organize and deliver any type of content, including video segments, as part of an integrated and seamless experience.
- Improved content enrichment: Using metadata within this MindTouch-driven social web platform, Autodesk can now tailor content delivery around targeted business purposes.
- Exceptional experiences: Among the technical documentation team, content developers become content curators. In addition to describing the details of product features, they are also concerned about creating the compelling customer experiences, and maintaining them over time in light of what digitally savvy professionals do.
Telestream
Telestream specializes in products that make it possible to get video content to any audience, regardless of how it is created, distributed or viewed. Throughout the entire digital media lifecycle, from capture to viewing, for consumers through high-end professionals, Telestream products range from desktop components and cross-platform applications to fully-automated, enterprise-class digital media transcoding and workflow systems. Telestream enables users in a broad range of business environments to leverage the value of their video content.
Objective
Telestream's IT department was tasked with finding a solution that would connect Telestream employees, giving them a place to share information, keep up to date with new company initiatives, as well as act as the presentation layer for their disconnected system and applications. The solution also had to be extremely easy to use, as there was going to many different types of users - IT, Marketing, Engineering, HR, etc., using the system.
Solution
After reviewing solutions from a wide range of vendors, Telestream chose MindTouch for many reasons, among them:
- Ease of use: Users of MindTouch enjoy a wiki-like editing experience, as well as an integration with widely used MS Office apps. This mean no new tools had to be learned, making it easy to ramp up internal users.
- Extensibility: the solution was going to be deployed and maintained by an internal IT team. With just some basic development skills, the IT team was able to integrate systems with MindTouch and even build upon it.
- Open architecture: Telestream didn't want to get locked into the Microsoft stack, required for SharePoint deployments.
- They also appreciated the ability to work directly with the source code when developing new apps on top of the platform.
Outcome
"Telestream has standardized on MindTouch as our collaboration platform. It serves as the 'Information fabric' for our company - connecting engineering, sales, marketing, finance, etc. We've found it extremely easy to extend - connecting our enterprise systems in such a way as to surface the right information to the right people - and just as easy to maintain. Their product support is fantastic as well. I recommend MindTouch to any company looking for a SharePoint alternative." - Chris Carovich, IT Manager, Telestream
Bill Me Later
Bill Me Later, Inc., now part of PayPal/eBay, pioneered the next generation of payment with rapid check-out. The Web purchase experience is improved through a safe and speedy solution for shoppers and an attractive alternative payment solution for merchants.
Bill Me Later is currently available at over 1000 leading online stores, including Apple, Walmart.com, and Overstock with more stores being added regularly.
MindTouch is truly onto something by combining everything that's great about
a wiki and everything that's great about Microsoft SharePoint into one platform. [MindTouch] pulls it all together into a really amazing concept. That's the truth,
I use the product - it's amazing."
Troy Saxton-Getty
Vice President, Engineering, BillMeLater / PayPal / eBay
www.billmelater.com
Objective
Implement an intranet that improves efficiency, searchability and business intelligence.
Solution
Bill Me Later selected MindTouch for its collaboration platform. Integrating existing systems, extensibility and ease-of-use were all important considerations. MindTouch replaced email, shared folders, a legacy intranet and databases. With MindTouch, Bill Me Later created a new and more effective collaboration medium that included enterprise mashups for business intelligence across several enterprise applications and data sources.
Outcome
Bill Me Later realized dramatic savings in resources and time by bringing teams to a common collaboration and reporting platform with better search and discovery, better versioning and tracking, and improved security around unstructured content. The MindTouch solution was deployed over a period of weeks, not months, and has reduced the cost of doing business by 40%.
Real Success
MindTouch delivered a 1000-to-one return on investment in the first year through dramatic improvements in the way Bill Me Later employees capture, share and collaborate on all content and media.
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The Washington Post
This new phase in WhoRunsGov.com’s growth invites the Washington community, and the public at-large, to share their knowledge of how Washington works. We’ve created an easy and dynamic way for them to do just that."
WhoRunsGov
www.whorunsgov.com
Objective
Launch a consumer-facing community that engages consumers and thought leaders' political views without spending an exorbitant amount of time or money.
Solution
The Washington Post tasked MindTouch with launching a new kind of online resource and community site that would inform and engage users by providing a unique look at the world of Washington politics through its key players and personalities.
Outcome
In six weeks a new community was implemented and launched. Since inception, the site WhoRunsGov.com, has exceeded all expectations in traffic, community engagement and growth. The site features editable profiles of influential political officials who shape government policy, integrated blogging, and real-time information aggregated from external websites that is contextually relevant to the subject matter. Moreover, the property allows community contributions, which are moderated by site editors.
Real Success
From concept to launch, WhoRunsGov was up and running in six weeks. Traffic, community engagement and growth have met or exceeded client expectations.
3Ones
3ones is a product development company for hire. They develop products for communities, consumers, and corporations. Their products appear on Web sites, social networks, desktops, and mobile devices. They created CompleteGuides.net - a destination for technical books.
Developing on a MindTouch-powered publishing platform has enabled us to not only reduce production time by 350%, but to create a social experience. Volunteers have helped us make better books by proofing, recommending content, and sharing the site with their social networks."
Patricia Forest, Co-Founder, 3ones
Objective
3Ones endeavored to open a new chapter in book publishing for the technical market. They set out to challenge the traditional publishing model for technical writing. In rapidly growing industries, books for dummies and how-to guides are as many as 6 months out of date before they even hit the shelves.
Solution
3Ones chose MindTouch for its price and ease-of-use. Real-time collaboration between authors, editors and graphic designers became possible immediately, with no formal user training. Single-sourcing the content and publishing across many channels simultaneously adds value without adding effort.
Outcome
Using MindTouch Technical Communications Suite, authors, editors and graphic designers were able to collaborate in real-time, pushing their first book to print in a matter of weeks instead of months. In the first 6 months since it was published, they've averaged over a thousand orders a month. Capitalizing on the social, viral aspect of the platform, their order volume on a single promotion day was so great that it caused Google Checkout to crash.
Real Success
Prior to using MindTouch, 3Ones spent 200 hours of book production time (excluding writing time) using a combination of MediaWiki, Google Docs and MS Word. With MindTouch TCS, this effort was reduced to 60 hours (30% of the time). These decreased production costs allow 3Ones to sell their books (both eBooks and traditional print) at a third price of conventional publishers. Future editions of their books will take only 10-20 hours to produce, thus adding incremental value over the lifetime of each edition.
