I have discussed MindTouch several times on this blog (see for example: MindTouch 2009 Provides Enhanced Development Platform for Rich Collaborative Applications). Recently, I spoke again with Aaron Fulkerson, their Co-Founder and CEO, on MindTouch 2010. First, we set some context for this latest release.

MindTouch was first released in 2006 as an Open Source wiki-based platform. The initial goal was to attract users and this has been achieved with over a l million users in hundreds of thousands of installations. In 2008 MindTouch began to sell support subscriptions. Then in 2009 they released a commercial version that sits on top of the free Open Source core. They discovered that many users were building product and service documentation with the MindTouch platform.  These strategic efforts were used to engage potential customers, retain them, and increase cost savings through greater self-service.  The decision was made to create MindTouch 2010 to provide greater capability through an intelligent platform for this growing use case.  I think it was a wise decision.

As Aaron describes in a recent Forbes article, The Evolution Of User Manuals, product and service documentation has evolved from a tactical cost center to a revenue generating strategic tool. The advent of online documentation has learned with this transformation.  Now you can apply SEO to the documentation to proactively attract potential customers and MindTouch has done this. You can also track their pathway through the documentation to determine their areas of interest and offer appropriate solutions, another area that MindTouch supports.

Aaron writes that some companies that he has spoken to report that their documentation brings in over 50% of qualified leads. He also notes that in his own company receives 70% plus of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more than half of our overall site traffic. In addition, over half of their lead generation is driven by our documentation.

I can certainly believe this as I have seen similar results. This applies to both self-service documentation and that which supports call center reps. For example, is one company I worked with, the reps who made full use of the supporting product and service documentation were three times more likely to cross sell, moving from a below industry average achieved by the non-users to an above industry average for the documentation users.

MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content:

To support authoring MindTouch 2010 offers a multi-user, XML-driven editing platform that supports all rich media types. Users are able to publish in-a-click from commonly used desktop tools. The Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) ensures data portability. They also offer templates and Aaron walked me through some of these. A tutorial template not only provided short cuts but also offered good instructional format suggestions.  Here is a sample opening page offering templates.

To support discovery MindTouch 2010 publishes content in a web-based format, dynamically generating navigation from content semantics and including effective search engine optimization tools. The enterprise-ready Adaptive Search engine delivers increasingly high quality results by learning from your users’ behavior.

Content curation is great new capability. To support this MindTouch 2010 introduces some targeted curation analytics. Customers can analyze their documentation by quality, aging and customer behavior in aggregate or by specific topics.  You can use out-of the-box reports can create custom versions. Here are two sample reports covering aging and rating.

Aaron showed me a few client examples. Autodesk provides CAD software. They had a large user base. So they provided a MindTouch powered set of educational services. Based on participants’ interest, they now can cross sell through the educational materials.  The pilot was very successful and now they are rolling the offering across all products. This is a clever approach.

I like what they are doing. It is a great example of a company listening to its users to identify an expanding market opportunity.  They not only listened well but also provided some useful new capabilities to serve this use case.