![\"MadCap](\"https:\/\/www.cherryleaf.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/26169857760_505b29d2ab_z.jpg\")
<\/a>\nCentral is an application for managing Help projects. It is a Cloud-based project and team management application that contains a Trello<\/a>-like kanban board and calendar for scheduling tasks\u00a0and managing deadlines. It also provides build (aka publishing) management\u00a0and translation management in the Cloud. There is\u00a0also an administration area for managing users and user licences. Central looks to have functionality similar to GatherContent<\/a>, a project management tool used by content strategists, although without an\u00a0explicit workflow. Please note, you would still use MadCap Flare and Contributor for authoring and editing content.<\/p>\n Its main audience will be organisations that have a team of writers using Flare at different geographical locations, and who want to reduce the internal IT burden by using a Cloud-based management solution.<\/p>\n I didn’t see this presentation, but Matthew Ellison’s introduction to this\u00a0W3C Working Draft standard was mentioned by a number of delegates. Flexbox<\/a>\u00a0aims to provide a more efficient way to lay out, align, and distribute space among items in a container. It creates intelligent boxes that are stretchable, squeezable and capable of changing visual order.<\/p>\n Andrei Essaoulov of kCura presented a case study on\u00a0integrating Sandcastle-generated .NET API reference HTML pages into a developers\u2019 documentation site authored in MadCap Flare. Integrating automatically-generated reference content with other information needed by users is a challenge for many organisations. In kCura’s case, they have to document several .NET APIs; this means they have to integrate thousands of pages of API reference\u00a0and\u00a0create a common documentation experience.<\/p>\n Most of the heavy lifting was automated, using\u00a0Jenkins builds and PowerShell scripts. Andrei outlined what he called “a few kludges” to import the Sandcastle-generated content; these included importing a .CHM file generated automatically from Sandcastle into Flare, and using an empty topic to\u00a0reference Sandcastle content via an\u00a0iframe. The reasons for using Flare were the ability to single source content, publish content as\u00a0PDFs, provide faceted and filtered search options, and include local Table of Contents on the right hand side of the topics. Flare also offered hyperlink management, and a better search engine.<\/p>\n Mio Kataoka’s presented a case study on how she had used Flare to\u00a0replace AppDynamics’s\u00a0outdated system\u00a0for creating training courseware, and implement\u00a0HTML5 classroom presentations, student eBooks and PDF lab guides. Previously, it was costing\u00a0AppDynamics $12 per student to produce their course materials. Also, four courses\u00a0contained 90% identical content. Moving to Flare meant this content could be written and managed in one place, and then used in the four courses and the two platform variations. It also meant they could ensure the courses were being presented consistently, eliminating the situations where rogue instructors might be changing\u00a0the content.<\/p>\n It was interesting to learn about how they had moved away from printed materials for students, and to an online format instead. This meant video\u00a0content could be integrated into the course notes and they could update the notes in the future. The ability for students to make notes was raised by the audience; a future enhancement might be to add the ability to annotate the online course notes. The instructor\u00a0presentations contained a link to a Google Docs document that contained notes for the instructors.<\/p>\n One of the attractions of Keynote and PowerPoint is they\u00a0encourage you to use a lot of visual information. By moving to Flare, you would need to check you were still using enough\u00a0visual content\u00a0in your slides.<\/p>\n The last presentation I saw on Monday was eBay Enterprises’ Robert Hays, who recommended some ways of\u00a0working within an Agile environment. Robert treats documentation as code, and documentation activities as Agile tasks. His and the authoring team’s role is that of a developer (of content). Reviews and edits are called “calibrations” and “defects”, and the technical publishing team use the same tools as the developers, wherever possible.<\/p>\n He said content needs a definition of “Done”, like the other activities in an Agile project, and work should be structured in eight hour work plans similar to the developers’ work plans. The\u00a0User Stories should\u00a0used to generate one or more\u00a0topics: conceptual topics, task-based topics or reference topics. Robert includes the feature number and the User Story reference number in the topic titles, so there is close tracking of topics to code development.<\/p>\n The attraction of this approach is that it integrates the documentation development with the code development. Content is scheduled, reviewed, corrected and approved in the same way as the code.<\/p>\n This was the first of my two presentations at the conference. In both presentations, I was delighted to see the room was packed. I talked about\u00a0what technical communicators can learn from content strategists when it comes to promoting their services. It was interesting putting together the presentation, as I realised we often forget to do some of the things that seem to come naturally to content strategists. One simple example being to declare victory at the end of the project!<\/p>\n The case studies on Day One showed that Flare is a tool with\u00a0a lot of capabilities. I\u2019ll review the second day in another post.<\/p>\nCSS Flexbox Layout<\/h2>\n
<\/a>\nIntegrating API Reference Documentation with MadCap Flare<\/h2>\n
<\/a>\nManaging Training Courses in MadCap Flare<\/h2>\n
Using MadCap Flare in an Agile SDLC<\/h2>\n
What Content Strategists Can Teach Us About Promoting the Value of Content<\/h2>\n
Summary<\/h2>\n