No one releases 4 products at once

Except us. That’s what we’ve spent the last month doing, getting all 4 products ready to release at the same time.

So what did we release? Here’s the list:

• Flare 4 (author and publish online and printed content)
• Blaze (author and publish printed content)
• Analyzer 2 (free if you have version 1)
• The X-Edit family (supports the multi-contributor workflow and eases the pain of reviews)

This is quite possibly our biggest release since the first release of Flare.

So what’s in the new versions, Sharon?

Really, too much to tell you about here. I’m going to send you to the brand-new website to find out more. It wasn’t enough that we released 4 products at the same time, we’ve also revamped and redone our website! (We’re all a little tired.)

Once at the new website, you can find out about all the new versions, sign up for demos and webinars, and download the trials. And send us feedback about what works and doesn’t work on the new website.

Did I mention the special pricing? We’re practically giving Blaze away.

If you’ve been waiting for…

A robust authoring and publishing tool that fits your workflow needs, it’s time look at Flare (online and print outputs) or Blaze (print outputs). If you’re still locked into chapter-based authoring, you need the power that topic-based authoring gives you.

If you looked at our products before and they weren’t quite what you wanted, take a look again. We’ve included feedback from our users, increased the power of the tools, and generally improved your workflow. It’s all there now.

Because good documentation shouldn’t be hard. (I thought up that tag line and I rather like it!)

My first podcast!

Last Friday, I did my first podcast. Tom Johnson and I spent about 45 minutes talking and I had a really good time. What you don’t know – and hopefully won’t hear – is that I was dying from food poisoning that morning. I’d been up since about 3:30a, pretty darn sick. I have no idea what I got into but it was in a hurry to leave.

Tom was great, as always, and I think it went well. I sure can talk. With luck, I made sense or at least entertained you. Maybe both! If I missed on both scores, remember how really sick I was and be nice.

Stop by and visit

OK – I’m expecting to see you all in demos soon. If you all want to show up, we’ll have to add a few more. But that would be happy news and not a problem. If you’re fast, I have a Blaze demo at 8am Monday morning, Pacific time. If you missed that, we’ve got lots of others.

I’m also going to be at DocTrain East at the end of October and then at Tekom in Germany in early November. I’ll be at several local STC functions and am available to come talk to your group about our tools.

Now go see what the excitement is about!

Happy Birthday, Son

A few years ago today, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, 2 weeks early, about 1:40 in the afternoon, I gave birth to my son.

Matthew Michael turns 30 today. He lives in Tulsa with his wife and 2 children and runs a photography business. If you are in the OK area and need photos, he’s your man. Click the Burton Studios link and see what he does.

If you like his site, he did it himself. He talked to my brother, the web god, and described what he wanted to do.

“Gee,” my brother said. “Most people use PHP for that.”

“OK, then I’ll learn PHP,” Matthew said.

So he did.

Did I mention that he has no formal training as a programmer? Yeah. He checked out a book from the library, looked up code samples on the web, thought about what he wanted the site to do, and started coding.

When he was 5, he started taking stuff apart to see how it works. Phones – *working* phones – were one of his favorite things to take apart for a while. Then it was off to VCRs and other stuff, just because he wanted to know what went on inside.

He rebuilt a car engine a few years ago because it needed to be rebuilt. “It was pretty easy, Mom. It’s obvious how it all goes together.” Apparently, my son “sees” how things must go together and then just does that.

This is the sort of brain this kid has. It was…interesting(!) to parent him. A strong visual, kinesthetic learner.

I’m a very proud mom. He’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Despite all the stupid stuff I did as a parent (and I’m sure he’s got a list), he turned out a good man. I’m delighted to know him.

Happy Birthday, Matthew! I doubt he remembers much of the day he arrived but I do!

In other news…

Another quarter of Fuzzy Ducklings has been set free. Bonni and I sent the Ducklings off last week and graded their finals over the weekend. No one cheated, at least that we could tell, and everyone passed. We had some great students this time and this was overall a good class. This group of Duckling engineers seemed to get the relationship between good documentation – spec, test cases, manuals, and so on – and the quality of the product.

We have 3 weeks between quarters before the next group of Ducklings come quacking in. Be nice to have the break.

By the way – our first group of Duckling engineers graduated last June. You may be working with them at some point. If they seem to value tech comm, you can send the thank you cards to me here at this blog and I’ll pass them along to Bonni.

Going with the X-Edit flow

We have exciting stuff going on at MadCap in the next few weeks. I thought I’d cover a little about the X-Edit family of products, to give you a little heads up about how we’re supporting your workflow.

The X-Edit family is 3 products in one, but it’s easier to think of X-Edit and X-Edit Contribute as 2 different modes.

X-Edit    Full featured word processor that also does everything the other 2 products do. Think of it as everything you could want. Saves to PDF, XPS, imports into Flare or Blaze, all that good stuff. Not a replacement for Blaze or Flare, because you don’t have the sort of topic-based authoring features you have in Flare or Blaze.

X-Edit Contribute    Lighter word processing features. You create a template in Flare or Blaze and then send that template to people who contribute to your projects. They open that template and start creating content with your styles, table formats, variables, if you allowed that, and so on. These files import seamlessly into your Flare or Blaze project. You can also do review topics, just like X-Edit Review.

X-Edit Review    When your Flare or Blaze topic is ready for review, you send it for review from inside Flare or Blaze. Flare or Blaze wraps all the stuff it needs for that topic and sends it to the reviewers you specify. The reviewer opens the topic in free X-Edit Review, makes edits or annotations, as you allowed, and then sends it back to you. You save it to your project, review the changes, and either make the changes to your source files or accept the changed topic into your project.

Common Tech Comm environments

As you know, the environment for Tech Comm people varies. I’ve worked with groups where the tech writers designed and wrote all the content. SMEs reviewed the materials for accuracy but never wrote a word.

But I’ve also been in the other extreme, where I didn’t write a single word – my role was to take the content from all the SMEs and wrap it into a tool to publish it. I was the tool expert, not the domain expert.

The X-Edit family lets you work at either end and in the middle somewhere. It fits your workflow, instead of making your change your workflow to fit our idea of what you should be doing.

OK, I hear you saying, so why can’t my content contributors write in Word and send me those files? I thought Flare and Blaze imported Word files?

Your content contributors can still do that, if that’s how you all want to work. We won’t make them stop if that’s what they’re comfortable with.

The advantage to the X-Edit family is that the content they’re creating is using your templates, your variables (if you want them to), your table styles, your everything, if you want them to have it. This means the content comes is very clean, significantly reducing any cleanup time and effort.

And the interface is pretty straightforward. And because you can specify what project features your SMEs can use, you can keep them from hurting themselves by misusing things like variables, conditions, and so on. They can be smart in their domain and you can be smart in yours. It’s a good match.

Beta, beta, everywhere

Last week was busy for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was 3 products being released into beta.

Blaze Early Experience Refresh

I want to thank the people who have beat up Blaze so far. We really appreciate the efforts. We’re releasing a refresh to the Early Experience. When you download the refresh, uninstall any previous version you may have and reboot before you install.

If you haven’t looked at Blaze, sign up to participate in the public Early Experience. Go to our website at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/blaze/ and sign up. We’re offering great prizes to those who find the most verified issues, such as gift certificates to Amazon. If this product is going to do what you want it to do, then we need you to help us know what that is. So go forth, download, and work with it.

X-Edit beta

X-Edit allows anyone to contribute content into your Flare or Blaze workflow. Now the everyday content contributor can open your Flare or Blaze topic templates and start creating content. This allows “casual contributors” to create short documents and add content using the correct styles and other project formatting options.

X-Edit Express beta

X-Edit Express is the free tool for reviewing content sent to you from a Flare or Blaze project. Using X-Edit Express, you can easily open topics created by the Flare or Blaze user. Depending on the options set by the Flare or Blaze user, you can annotate the topic or edit it. When you’re done, just email the topic back to the Flare or Blaze user to get your comments into the project. 

Go to http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/xedit/ to sign up and download one or more of these products.

Why do you care? Workflow. Better workflow = more time for content development, that’s why

These products support and improve your workflow. It goes like this:

X-Edit helps when you have a workflow where people are contributing content. I did a project once where I took the HR content that other people developed and put it into a help project. The people writing the content knew nothing about the tool I was using and I knew nothing about their HR policies. This is a common workflow.

X-Edit lets these people just write content that they send to you. You just add their content to your project, do what indexing, etc you need to, and you’re good to go. No converting from Word, no dealing with everything in Normal and hand formatted. Just easy to import content.

X-Edit Express is used in review time. Send a topic for review inside Blaze or Flare 4. The reviewer downloads the free X-Edit Express, opens the topic and makes the level of changes you allowed – either annotations or directly edit actual content. One click sends it back to you when they are done.

X-Edit: Creating templates for your X-Edit users

If you want, in Blaze or Flare 4, you can define a template for your X-Edit users. This is really useful because it limits how and what formats your users can use. No more wacky formatting. They can still hand format stuff, but this should reduce that, hopefully.

When you create the template, you can also specify what items are locked in the template. Why would you want to do that? Well, in our HR example, say all documents must have certain sections. You can add a locked heading for each and the users can’t delete it.

The headings with the gray background are locked. The users can’t delete or change the text in them. The narrative text under each heading can be deleted and new text added. Locking headings means that you may spend less time chasing people down, reminding them that these kinds of documents need that sort of information. It’s right in the document.

Templates can be stored on a network drive somewhere with a name that reflects what they are for. Then tell your users to go there and get the template for the kind of document they want to write.

Easy pleasey.

 

Wow. WritersUA is a fun crowd.

WritersUA is about the most fun I’ve had in a while. I got to:

• see people I’ve not seen in a while, sometimes years
• meet new people
• do presentations and demos
• listen to people talk about what they like and don’t like about our products
• see some of my former staff
• crawl back to the hotel room at the end of the day (Tip here: Don’t wear heels if you do booth duty)
• nearly blow out my voice
• watch Portland’s SWAT team show up at the hotel

Could you ask for more? Not without being greedy, I think.

So, what did we announce?

Lots of stuff. Here’s a list:

• Blaze went to public beta Monday morning. I strongly suggest you download it and then attend one of my demos to get started with it.
• Team Server – a Documentation workflow management tool that goes from content to review to CMS to localization to source control. It’s going to be great.
• Press – a glossy print product. This one lets you have multiple article flows, automatic jump pages and more.
• X-Edit – a small document product for people who need to contribute content but shouldn’t have a full version of Flare or Blaze. The documents that X-Edit creates can be brought seamlessly into a Flare or Blaze project.
• X-Edit Express – a free reviewers tool that either edits or annotates Flare or Blaze topics. It fits into the review workflow for Blaze or Flare.
• New product manager – Pat Dear is our new e-learning product manager who started Sunday at the show. We figure if she floats, she’s a witch [historical reference here, no Wicca bashing intended or implied]. She’s going to add a lot to our product line with her expertise in the e-learning field. We’re happy to have her!

The product I’m super excited about is Team Server. We’re working on it right now, so if you have ideas about how we can make your workflow easier, send them to me and I’ll pass them along.

People who need people…

One of the first people I saw at the show was Eddie Van Arlesdale whose name I’m sure I’m misspelling but I can’t find the card he gave me. I met Eddie a long time ago, the first time I was in Washington DC. He’s a sweetie pie and I told him I need to come back to DC and see people there. It’s perhaps my 3^rd favorite city, right after Rome and Mexico City, in that order.

I also saw, in no particular order, Geoff Hart, Char James-Tanny, Sarah O’Keefe, John Hedtke, Sue Heim, Bonni Graham, Elaine Randolph, the fun Docs group for the client I saw a few weeks ago in Dallas, and way too many other people for my tired brain to remember. For a while it seemed as tho I was spending all my time hugging people. I really enjoyed it. Just so fun to see all of us in one place.

I also met many new people. When the sessions were out, we were swamped with people – sometimes 15 people deep. It seemed that everyone at the conference came around to see our products and talk to us. I tried to talk to everyone but it was hard because there were just so many.

Working clean is harder than not

Mike and I (Mike more than I) presented several products. We also drafted our Tech Writer Paul to do several demos about what Tech writers would like in Flare. He was amazing. He did stand-up comedy in the past, too, but was more successful than I was. He also works clean, which is much harder than it looks. It’s actually easier to work dirty, which is how my material goes. But Paul did a great job and I was pleased to have him helping with these.

The in-booth demos were a zoo. We had people standing all over the place watching. I did 2, I think, and I enjoyed both of them. Very good stuff.

We also did several presentations that showed more detail about our tools. I did Analyzer with RJ the product evangelist for FrameMaker in the back of the room. I was delighted to have him. The room was pretty full and people asked great questions, some of which I could answer! Some of those questions were really technical and I’m going to have to get back to people. The stuff you guys think of…

Past lives, present voyages

I ran into some of my former staff and had a chance to talk to them and catch up. It’s good seeing them. At my former employer, I had the rare fortune of leading a very talented group of people and I miss them still. I want only the best for them and it was fun to see them and catch up.

It was particularly good to run into Don, who I spent 3 months trying to fire. In the end, he was one of the most valuable employees I had and I’m glad I didn’t fire him. I was completely wrong about him and his abilities. I’ve rarely been this happy to be so wrong. He’s a very talented writer and I miss working with him.

No, honey, this time the SWAT team has nothing to do with me …

So I was outside the hotel yesterday afternoon, talking to several people, and said “I’m going to get coffee at the Starbucks on the corner.” I turned around and there was a large group of well armed Portland SWAT team men, all hanging on a SWAT truck, parked in front of the Hilton. Behind them was another truck, another load of well armed men. I looked up the street and saw more. “Hmm…”, I thought. “I better get that coffee right now.”

In the Starbucks, I asked and it turned out that there was an anti-war protest planned to march down our street. Portland police appeared in large numbers to make sure it was a peaceful protest, I was told. Nevertheless, I scurried back to the hotel.

Then I realized that if my husband turned the TV on and saw large numbers of heavily armed SWAT teams in front of a Hilton in Portland, he might flip right out. Husbands can be so tense sometimes. I called to tell him about it. I got to the part about heavily armed SWAT teams outside and he actually asked “What did you do this time?” I think he was joking.

But after they hung out for about an hour and nothing happened, they all piled on their trucks, adjusted their helmets, and left the area. Apparently, the crisis was averted.

And I left for the airport 2 hours later for an uneventful flight home.