Flare™ — The New Industry Benchmark in Multi-Channel, Single-Source Publishing

“The more I use Flare, the more I like it. With snippets, conditions, and proper topic chunking, I'm using and reusing my content in ways I never thought were possible.”

“Originally coming from a structured SGML/Framemaker perspective, Flare impresses me way beyond how any other online authoring tool ever has. It's great to have multiple therefore versatile choices for editing, for example; the onboard WYSIWYG coupled with the internal text editor, or even TextPad if I so choose. The technical support is also stellar; great work, all around!”

“I just downloaded and started exploring the new features. I have to say, wow. Wow! I’m very impressed with PageLayouts (awesome, awesome, awesome!), resizing in XML editor, IntelliSense (Wow!), Global project linking (hello CMS!), inserting snippets by drag/drop (about time ☺), and love the Downloads links–key features guide, What’s New guide, etc. (very, very useful content – way to go Tech Writers!).”

“I am totally sold on Flare! I’ve been a tech writer for 27 years, and my chief tools have been Word for print documents and RoboHelp HTML for Help systems. I am blown away by Flare. Finally there is a toolset that not only supports my day-to-day workflow, but it actually enhances it, and in ways I hadn’t even thought of. And I'm convinced that X-Edit Review and X-Edit Contribute will support my clients' SMEs as we collaborate on their doc projects. Bottom line for me: There are no more comparisons to be made. Flare leaves the others in the dust.”

“I had just begun testing online Help tools for my place of work... Then I downloaded Flare 4 and what can I say.... I love V4 and was able to work with a demo to produce a great sample for consideration within only a few hours and very little help.

...for the needs of my place of work, Flare 4 is great. And the special introductory price makes it a tool we can afford to invest in.”

“By migrating from a two-product solution to Flare, which was specifically designed to serve as a Help authoring tool, we immediately recognized significant efficiencies that have led to a two-fold gain in productivity.”

Citect's decision to move to Flare was the result of an in-depth review of more than half a dozen products. “We completed a very thorough evaluation that compared 30 different Help content requirements. In the end, Flare addressed more of those requirements than any other product we reviewed. It also has a modern, forward-looking architecture, which stands out from the older designs of other solutions whose older architectures have been updated for today's Web-based Help demands.”

“DITA is very likely to become the next big thing in content authoring. That is why it's important to be familiar with standards-compliant XML software like Flare, which shares core principles in structured authoring with DITA…”

“By understanding how to develop content in Flare, technical communications professionals can significantly reduce the learning curve of DITA. And because Flare is future-proof, authors can be assured that they will always be able to move forward seamlessly with the introduction of new technologies and architectures such as DITA.”

“Just for the record, I'm not someone who normally writes to companies to give them unsolicited feedback, but I thought you might want to know that I'm very impressed with MadCap Flare. After a year of struggling with RoboHelp® for FrameMaker® and a year before that (at a different company) trying to figure out Quadralay WebWorks, it's a welcome relief to have a product that actually has the features and functions I want in an easy to use interface.”

“As a leader in the customer relationship management space for associations, the ability to listen and respond to our customers' needs is a top priority. We've found different solutions for tracking readers' use of our CRM for Members documentation, but only the MadCap Feedback Service has the Web 2.0 functionality that allows us to collect 'real-time' feedback from our customers. Using the Feedback Service, I've taken several valuable reader comments and made them available to other customers. More importantly, by viewing readers' input, I've been able to respond quickly to their needs and establish a closer, one-to-one connection. I now look forward to implementing the Feedback Server onsite in order to integrate it with our CRM system.”

“We have completed thousands of translation projects since our founding in 1994. For many of those projects, that has meant the need for special programming and workarounds because traditional authoring tools are not truly XML-based and lack full international language support. By contrast, Flare worked so easily, it was almost anticlimactic. It's rare that software of any kind lives up to its promises; Flare is one of those rare exceptions. We've now decided that even when we have to take projects built in other authoring software, we'll import these into Flare and then use Flare instead of the other tools.”

“…All told, we trimmed at least 30 percent off of our project time.”
“I'm impressed with how seriously MadCap is taking localization,” says Bass. “Flare doesn't care what language is being used, and that fits with our need to be free of any restraints when it comes to language.”

“The increase in multi-channel publishing driven by greater adoption of the Web means we need best-in-class authoring software designed to deliver training and Help content consistently across the Internet, intranets, CD-ROMs, and a range of computer systems. We are also thinking about Web 2.0 and looking down the road for software that can support us in the future. For us, that software is MadCap Flare.”

“Flare, we completed the project in nearly half the time the first project took in RoboHelp. Equally important, our customer is very pleased with the look-and-feel and easy navigation of the new Flare-based training.”

“Our customers have come to rely on us for timely, superior translation and localization services, capitalizing on proven methodologies and state-of-the-art technology. MadCap Flare is based on XML, the emerging standard for content, and provides full Unicode for translation into both single- and double-byte languages. When our evaluation showed how much more effectively Flare would let us support the demands of our many clients whose businesses extend across Europe, North America and Asia, switching from RoboHelp to Flare was the obvious choice.”

“One emerging trend for Help systems is the ability to provide real-time, on-demand Help, tailored to subsets of users, or even individual users, when they ask for assistance. Today, the one application that I know of that can do this is MadCap Flare, which can compile a Help project at the command line and create an almost unlimited number of custom outputs. With this combination of features and its use of XHTML, Flare today is the product best designed to support this new approach to Help authoring.”

“Flare is at the forefront in delivering solutions for today's documentation and training needs through its use of native XML, the emerging standard for software, and single-source publishing to multiple outputs—from HTML to Adobe® FrameMaker® or Microsoft® Word™. These features, along with support for Microsoft's latest technologies (Vista, Office 2007, XPS, and DOCX) were key factors in my decision to replace Adobe RoboHelp with Flare.”

“Adobe® FrameMaker® is one of the most widely adopted publishing tools among our corporate customers. Increasingly, they are looking to leverage conditional text, variables, reusable topics, and structured XML-tagged source content into customer-facing, dynamic delivery on the Web or into their corporate intranets. Not only does Flare provide the best integration with FrameMaker® among tools available today, it also produces fantastic, Flash-based context-sensitive Help that has wowed my clients.”

“I would like to thank MadCap for finally developing the product that seems to address all my online Help needs. MadCap has made great promises, and it has delivered on them with a robust, flexible tool that is a pleasure to work with and easy to manipulate. Flare solved all of my previous aggravations in other Help systems. I have installed Flare at clients that have shared my excitement and enthusiasm about the product.”

“We are at the forefront of enabling businesses to grow and capitalize on market opportunity through enterprise roadmapping, and we need user documentation that reflects the same level of innovation. As a RoboHelp customer for many years, with MadCap Flare 2.5, we now have an application based on the latest XML technology that goes far beyond the capabilities of traditional HATs. Equally important, Flare was created by developers at MadCap who had originally designed RoboHelp. We know we have a team that understands our documentation needs and is committed to supporting us today and in the future.”

“We are providing retailers with state-of-the-art solutions for marketing and selling on some of the world's most prestigious ecommerce channels, so it's important for our online Help and print documents to have a modern look that is in keeping with what they see on their websites. MadCap Flare provides the attractive, up-to-date image we're looking for, and it is very easy to color-code our Help content in line with our branding: orange for Merchant and red for SearchAdvisor. Flare is also the most intuitive product we evaluated, and the integration with Adobe® FrameMaker® is very clean. Flare has the right functionality, and equally important, MadCap has some of the most knowledgeable experts in the industry. With MadCap's support, we made our deadline, and the ChannelAdvisor developers were so excited by Flare's cool, colorful context-sensitive Help that they immediately started suggesting new projects.”

“We were rewriting all of our software in a cutting-edge environment with Visual Studio 2005 and using the Agile Development Model, so we wanted a cutting-edge Help authoring solution to provide our users with the best help possible, and that's Flare. Based on XML and using the latest technology, Flare has all the earmarks of being the rising star among contenders. We love that we can modify any topic, and with one button-click build new versions of HTML, print, and WebHelp. We also like Flare's use of cascading style sheets; formatting issues can be addressed in one location, and it flows through all of our projects and all of their builds.”

“I just started using Flare in the last couple of days… it is such a benefit to be working with an application possessing a modern UI that is similar to what we are accustomed to in development tools. For me, supporting Help development has always been an add-on task that had to be done, but I can see how Flare is going to triple the productivity of the limited time I do have for help development. Thanks for an 'already' obviously great product!”

“I released a Knowledge Base for our department today. I used Flare to generate WebHelp output and enabled and used every option that Flare has to offer. A lot of document automation was done using a Master Page. I used a Master Page for the first time and it really worked out well. My coworkers are really excited about this new tool and Flare gave all the tools to make it possible. Breadcrumb Navigation, variables, proxies, a-links, index, full-text search - short, everything useful was added

Compared to any other OLH or similar projects that I finished so far, this one is the best thanks to MadCap's Flare!”

“I love, love, love Flare's indexing functionality.
Whoever designed and implemented it must have looked at everything good in competing products and then figured out ways to make indexing even easier and better. Frame, RoboHelp, eat your heart out…”

“During my evaluation, I was able to convert a Robohelp project and produce working web help documentation without reading any manuals or attending any training. The end product was visually appealing and the resulting markup was clean. It even offered the opportunity to convert inline formatting to css. Flare has a intuitive and productive interface.”