Technical documentation platform provider MindTouch tonight announced an interesting new feature in its flagship product: MindTouch Contextual Help. The feature offers the ability to integrate collaboratively written documentation inline into web and desktop application interfaces, instead of only publishing it as a standalone document elsewhere. In contrast, forums, PDFs and other standalone Help systems are “antiquated” and see low user engagement, the company says.
This would be quite a development for any Content Management System but it’s even more intriguing when considered in light of MindTouch’s initial product years ago: an open source Wiki that could display dynamic, programmatically piped-in data from 3rd party services. In a way, Mindtouch is still that – but nine months ago the company launched a platform specifically intended to serve customers building technical support documents. From the ultimate in wide open publishing technology, Mindtouch has now focused on infusing the same type of functionality into the interfaces of more traditionally created software. You might say it’s a story of Read/Write technology growing up. Will it work? If it doesn’t trade too much simplicity for this newfound sophistication, it very well could.
Article source: RRW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/Qqmhr9Undp8/inline_documentation_cms_mindtouch.php