During the course of the MadWorld 2019 San Diego technical communication and content strategy conference, we sat down with more than a dozen customers to learn how MadCap Flare has changed the way they work and function as a team. Whether used to create more intuitive user experience, or to reduce technical support calls and encourage self-help, or to gain efficiencies when creating and managing content, Flare has allowed teams to deliver dramatic results and spend more time focusing on content.
We asked our customers a series of questions including their decision-making process, their return on investment, learning and development challenges they have addressed and more. Here’s what customers from companies like Illumina, disguise, and BeyondTrust had to say.
How Is MadCap Flare Changing the Way You Work?
The first question we asked our customers was how MadCap Flare is changing the way they create, manage, and publish technical documentation.
Usability and efficiency was a common theme with many of our users.
“There are so many little things in Flare that change the way I do my job every day, it’s hard to just point at one and say that this is the thing that makes my job easier, as a whole there are dozens or even hundreds of little things that really help me make my do my job better.”
Thad Miller, Technical Content Director, LI-COR
“I love it! It is a very powerful and simple tool to use compared to others similar options. We work a lot faster and we can definitely publish content a lot faster. In the past, if we had a customer that wanted a demo of our software, we’d have to publish those manuals in advance. The turnaround time took us up to two days, now we can do it within a couple of hours which is a significant increase. We have also been able to implement review processes and quality control our content without increasing our staff; overall we have increased our capacity very significantly.”
Jenni Christensen Documentation Manager, Plexsys
“Since we started using Flare I think the biggest gain I’ve seen would be with the efficiency of the team. Even though right now I’m just a lone writer, it takes me a lot less time to accomplish a lot more. I can focus on actually writing the content and not spend so much time trying to make everything work together nicely. If somebody wanted to get my feedback on using MadCap Flare, I would say you need to go for it. I actually had to convince other teams in my company to use it and I was successful. It is easy to use, you can do so much and it is so powerful. I haven’t found a single thing that I have not been able to do. Managing content is easy, reusing content couldn’t be simpler and it just makes the whole process from writing the content to publishing super easy.
Amy Kearns, Knowledge Management Coordinator at Perforce
Many talked about how Flare's single-source authoring and publishing not only has helped streamline content delivery but, it ensures their end users are able to easily access the information they need, on any device, or format.
“The feature that stands out to me the most is the ability to single-source content. As you’re pursuing multiple formats and outputs for your content you don’t want to duplicate your source material. [MadCap Flare also has] various tools for single sourcing: snippets, variables, and conditions are tools that don’t exist in Word, InDesign or other software. So, being able to use those to increase reuse and single-source content is huge!”
Jason Ross, Senior Science Writer, Illumina
“To someone that is evaluating Flare, there is no contest really, there is nobody else that can really do what Flare does, evaluate all that you like but you are going to end up coming to that conclusion.”
Joe Bleasdale, Associate Product Manager, disguise
“We were working with RoboHelp, with front page, with Word…each department had its own tools and one of our projects was to unify all of this content and define a single tool for technical content. We chose Flare because it is very easy to use and was packed with resources so we really loved it, especially because we were going after unifying our documentation and single-sourcing was our most powerful ally so Flare was very important for us in that journey.
Luciana Voigt, Knowledge Management Coordinator, Senior Sistemas
Why Are Companies Making the Switch to MadCap Flare?
Next, we wanted to know what factors drove companies to start looking into alternatives, and how they chose Flare.
Several customers mentioned how they have been able to cut costs and streamline the process of developing and deliver content for learning & development programs, training, technical documentation, and more.
“We had a collection of tens of thousands of files. One issue that would come up [when using Word document files and PDFs] with was with a specification change, even something as simple as one product update would affect 80-100 files. We would have to go into our document library, locate all of those files and do an old school find and replace to swap out the one value with the new value. Now we can update our values in one location and use destination publishing...saving us time and making us more agile!”
Chad Kreiger, Publications Specialist, Vernier
“Prior to using MadCap Flare we were using Adobe InDesign…to produce a majorly complicated PDF layout, but the major limitation we had was that was the only output type. The advantage we saw with Flare was that we could continue to produce PDFs of the same quality that Adobe InDesign was giving us but, that we also have Microsoft World output for certain documents, and HTML5 outputs for others.”
Jason Ross, Senior Science Writer, Illumina
You can watch our full series here.
How Does This Impact Prospective Customers?
If you’re considering another authoring and publishing solution, we’ve compiled a series of resources to understand how organizations are taking advantage of MadCap Flare’s rich feature set and capabilities. Our comparison guides are packed with case studies, testimonials, and transition resources to help you determine if Flare is the right fit for your team.
Have a question about how MadCap Software can help your team? Contact us anytime for a product demonstration, training support, and more.
+1 (858) 320-0387
info@madcapsoftware.com
