MadCap Software has released on details some new products it will be releasing shortly. These include MadCap X-Edit and MadCap Press.
What is striking is that MadCap really does seem to understand the problems technical communicators face in the real world.
One of the issues technical authors often face is dealing with reviews of drafts and dealing with any amendments. If the drafts are sent out as a Word document, your nicely styled document can come back with as a formatting mess. It’s partly due to the fact that most users just don’t understand Word’s Styles features.
Whitney Potsus has posted on her “Connected Content” Blog some handy suggestions on how to avoid this by using some of Word’s less well know features (“You turn into Style Gallery Cop and put your documents into lockdown.”), but these can create barriers between the reviewer and the documents you want them to review.
X-Edit promises “a document solution for the everyday content contributor that combines both editing and publishing into a single document solution…Send Blaze or Flare topics to reviewers with direct Outlook integration. The reviewer can make edits, changes, and annotations within the topics. When the reviewer is done, sending the topic back is as easy as one click.”
MadCap Press seems to park MadCap’s tanks firmly on Adobe’s lawn. MadCap Press promises the ability to create high-end print documents, such as product brochures. It also promises seamless integration with MadCap’s translation tool, Lingo.
I still have concerns that Adobe still really doesn’t understand the practicalities of technical communication, that features appear as solutions looking for problems to solve. However, Adobe is the market leader and, as we’ve seen in IT many times before, it’s often the company with the best marketing (rather than the best software) that wins. This means MadCap needs to be good at marketing (which they are), as well as good at development.
I think Author-It will still be a player. They seem to have a strategy of developing a community of advocates and influencers and of disrupting the market. In some ways, Author-It makes FrameMaker and RoboHelp look very old fashioned.
Interesting to watch this develop, and as you say I think it’s MadCap vs Adobe.
AuthorIT offer single source, so is in a different market but, again, they seem to be doing a good job of pushing into the more traditional ‘dtp’ space, I wonder if that is largely due to price? (AuthorIT vs a custom single source solution is no contest).
Ultimately I just hope they all deliver on their promises. We’ve been talking about ‘holy grails’ for years now… surely they are getting close?
Welcome comments as ever, Gordon. The Holy Grail may always be ephemeral, because the real problem is with “the crack cocaine of business software”, Microsoft Word. Its DTP-lite capabilities makes it easy to break pretty much any standards you try to impose, and its universality makes it hard to keep documents away from it.
Hmmm I’m not sure I buy that.
I’ve never had any problem convincing my bosses that Word isn’t a suitable solution for a multi-format publishing team.
Import/export Word yes, work within? No.
I meant getting people to do their writing or edits in a tool that isn’t Word.
I’m surprised that you didn’t mention the other product in this slew of releases from Madcap – namely, Blaze. This is supposedly their XML-based Frame killer, and has been in development for quite a while.
I think we can all agree that anything that loosens the cold dead hand of Word from our work is to be welcomed. The interesting battle here, I think, is between Frame and anything that seeks to replace it, as Blaze explicitly seeks to do (it imports from and exports to Frame).
I downloaded the trial beta yesterday, and I’m just starting to plough my way through it. Madcap are making all the right noises about single-sourcing (though no support as yet for stuff like DITA), and there are hooks into off-the-shelf content management systems.
MadCap is a loud mouth company. 3 years to build a version 1.0 with possibly 4000-5000 bugs and with 5% of FrameMaker features can’t be a FrameMaker killer. No XML support, no PDF support (no clones please!!, I want good quality PDF), Blaze is not worth wasting my time.
I was interested to see that you brought Author-It into the arena. Whilst researching for an effective online help program for a contract position, I contacted Author-It’s website to get a quote. Once it realised I was in the UK, the price jumped to just under £4,500. It was immediately consigned to the “bad ideas” bin!
Btw – we settled on Robohelp eventually, although Flare would have done.
I’m currenntly working in one of 5 UK authoring departments within a large UK company, all using different authoring tools. As the products become more & more integrated, we all need to sing from the same hymn sheet to produce integrated help systems. 75% of the company are moving to Flare and we’re trying to work out whether we should go with the flow or stick where we are. Any help/advice from those of you who have moved over? Of from those of you who’ve decided not to?
Probably the best advice is: be consistent in your use of styles and with your information design.