Technically Speaking

Not too long ago, I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place. I work for a large organization (30k+ world wide workforce), and I’m just one tiny fish in a very large lake.

I was asked to provide help content in the form of a getting started guide for a piece of software that was going to be released world-wide.

I started working on the project using my tool of choice, a help authoring tool called MadCap Flare. This is a tool I really like, and have been using for several years. I’m something of an expert on Flare, so it is my first choice for pretty much any authoring project.

I started working within my group, however, and found that Flare wasn’t going to be the right solution for this project because of project constraints outside of my control. We have an in-house translation group that does all our content translation. They have their tools in place and are not interested in obtaining and learning to use a new tool (MadCap’s Lingo tool). There are certain strings in the project (specifically surrounding variables and master pages) that wouldn’t get sent to translation if they didn’t use Lingo. This project is going to go out in 24 languages, so simplifying the process is essential.

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If you are a technical communicator who pays attention to the latest releases of help authoring tools, you probably heard that MadCap Software released a new version of its flagship product, MadCap Flare.

I’ve been using Flare V6 for a couple of months now, and this review is to give you an end user’s review of the features and enhancements Flare V6 has to offer. You may be asking yourself if it’s worth it to upgrade your existing Flare installation to the latest version. Let me give you eight reasons to upgrade, if your budget allows.

Reason 1: WebHelp Mobile Output

Flare V6 includes a new target: WebHelp Mobile. This target creates a web-help output designed for mobile browsers, particularly the iPhone.

If you are trying to produce help content in a way that is accessible in the increasingly-important mobile browser market, this output format is exactly what you need.

To leverage your existing content in this new output format, it is as easy as adding any other target. You add a target to the project, and select WebHelp Mobile as the target type. The first time you add a WebHelp mobile target, you will also need to create a mobile skin. If you leave the default values, Flare creates a skin that matches the native iPhone skin very nicely. (There are actually thee different mobile skins to choose from including gray (default), slate, and green.)

Now, set your skin in your mobile target file, and build your project. In about 30 seconds, you’ve created a mobile-friendly target. The results look great:

Reason 2: Batch Generate and Publish

This is a feature that I needed about two years ago, and I’m thrilled to see it built directly into the Flare interface.

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MadCap Software today released Flare V6, and it is pretty cool.

I’m still working on a post to give you the details to help you decide if you should upgrade your existing Flare project to V6 (which I’ve been previewing for about a month), but alas, with work deadlines that post will have to wait until tonight.

So check back tomorrow for my Flare V6 review and upgrade guide!

Users of MadCap Flare were greeted in their e-mail inboxes today with the announcement of an update to Flare V4.2. If you missed it, it might be because it was buried in a message about the new Feedback Server 2 that is now available. To get all the benefits from Feedback Server 2, you have to upgrade to Flare 4.2. That said, I’m not a Feedback user, so I don’t have a lot to comment about on that front. Instead, I’ll focus on some major improvements in Flare 4.2 that make this upgrade a “must.” The major enhancements that I’ve found so far include:

• Dramatically faster build time for PDF targets
• Smaller file sizes for PDF targets
• Auto Save

Dramatically faster build time for PDF targets

The first thing I noticed when I built a PDF target using Flare 4.2 was how fast it was.  I’ve commented in the past about how important hardware is in getting the best build time from a Flare project, but I’ve become accustomed to the build time for my hardware set. Last week in Flare 4.1 I build three PDF targets, then I re-built them in 4.2.  Here is a break down:

So, a group of targets that were taking me a total time of more than 20 minutes to build now build in less than 5 minutes. That is a significant improvement.

Smaller file sizes for PDF targets

The next thing I noticed when I built a PDF target was how the file sizes are dramatically smaller now. This is another place that 4.2 shows huge strides. Check out these file size comparisons between 4.1 outputs and 4.2 outputs from my current project:

There are going to be a lot of happy customers when they see this! My three PDFs used to exceed 50 MB in size (added to our project’s already large download file). Now these same files only take up less than 10 MB in size. Wow.

Auto Save

MadCap has finally introduced a feature that is sure to please long time Flare users: Auto Save. You can set Auto Save in the Tools | Options setting. When enabled, by default, Flare will auto save your topics every 10 minutes. I set mine to five. Back when I was using Flare 3, this would have been huge, huge, huge, because I had serious stability problems with Flare (due to some problems with my computer, it crashed at least once per day). I now have a different system, and combined with my Flare 4 upgrade, I’ve had a serious improvement in application stability. I don’t think Flare crashed even once on me during all of January.

Auto Save is a fantastic improvement, but I’m even more thrilled with the overall stability of Flare, which seems to be much better in the V4 line than it was in the V3 line. But if you’re stuck with some kind of problem like I had on my old machine where some conflict causes Flare to be unstable for you, then you’ll really get bang for your buck for this feature. (Especially since it is a free upgrade for all Flare V4 users.)

Conclusion

I am thrilled with this release of Flare. The improvements for my projects are significant, and I’m not even a Feedback customer. If you are a Flare 4 user, upgrade today. If you aren’t a Flare 4 user, what are you waiting for? Join us in the 21st century. You’ll be glad you did!

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Disclaimer: If you aren’t aware, I’m a Flare Certified Trainer, and have been certified MAD (MadCap Advanced Developer). I’m also a MadCap MVP  (volunteer administrator) in the MadCap forums. I’m an avid Flare user and advocate, but not a MadCap employee.

You’ve heard me say it before, and you’ll hear me say it again: I really like MadCap Software. In case you just joined us, MadCap produces my main authoring tool, MadCap Flare. I use Flare to create single-sourced online and printed help for a variety of products.

Several times every week, I will be working on documentation, and I’ll use a feature in Flare (for example, conditional snippets), and I stop and literally say, “Wow. I love Flare.”

Now, you might expect a MadCap MVP (i.e. volunteer forum moderator) and a MadSkills Certified Trainer (which isn’t my day job) to like the company that produces the software. I’ll admit I have a bias. But I became a MVP because I loved the software enough to contribute to the MadCap forums regularly. Then I was invited to join the MVP group. And I didn’t set out to be a Trainer. MadCap actually contacted me, because they know how much I know about and like Flare, to see if I could pick up a training session that the other trainers were unavailable to take.

In any case, when I see a blog entry like this, I have to be even more grateful for the fantastic people in MadCap’s support department. In the post, MK Anderson talks about an unresolved customer service incident with Adobe that has been going on since August (4+ months!). And we’re not talking a complex custom feature request. We’re talking about getting a valid product key, even for a newly upgraded product.

I compare that to the customer service I’ve personally received from MadCap software, and the comparison is stunning. I have bronze-level support from MadCap. Yet, several times, MadCap has CALLED ME on the phone to better understand a technical problem I’ve reported. All my support requests have been resolved within a few days (though some of the resolutions were “we’ve filed a bug” — which is all you an say for some issues). MadCap Support doesn’t give up on difficult to find issues; once there was a bug being reported by a couple of customers, but MadCap couldn’t track it down. They worked with the few customers reporting the issue until we discovered repeatable steps to encounter the issue, then they fixed it that same day. Try getting that kind of support from Adobe.

So here is a shout out to all the fabulous people at MadCap Support. Thanks guys for a job well done! You are a big, big part of what makes using MadCap software a great experience.