Gross added, "The single-sourcing in MadCap Flare is tremendously advantageous for quickly delivering the content our customers need. Once we developed the documentation, it took us just two days to build two CHM files for our SDKs, nine PDF manuals, and a full WebHelp version of all the documentation to meet the deadline for our product launch."
Another important factor is the availability of variables and conditional text to support content reuse and consistency, said Gross, who notes, "Flare's approach to variables is very slick. We like the way we can override variables for a particular target. "The variables combined with the separation of content and style give us a great deal of flexibility."
The team also liked the fact that Flare did not require schema locking. Instead, by separating the structure from style, Flare provided Microsoft HSG's writers with the flexibility to present data across different topics in the most effective way possible.
As soon as Flare was in place, the Microsoft HSG documentation team was able to get up and running quickly, Gross noted: "The learning curve was a low ramp. In fact, most of our challenges were with people learning how to write for single-sourcing and figuring out what content they could turn into snippets for reuse. Once they got it, our snippet collection exploded."
Microsoft HSG's technical writers soon went beyond basic content reuse with snippets to sophisticated automation integration. Utilizing XSLT to reflect against the Amalga UIS product code, snippets are created for the API software developer's kit (SDK) for partners. These snippets are extractions of comments in the constantly changing code. Finally, the snippets are then inserted into the broader documentation source control.
"This is the most effective way to update the API SDK that we've produced to date," Gross says, "Moreover, because Flare is pure XML, we were able to develop our source-control integration solution on our own with just four weeks of effort. Going forward, we have a roadmap for automating this process even further."
In addition to expanding the functionality of documentation and online developer Help for Amalga UIS, Microsoft HSG also plans to localize it for customers worldwide. Flare's Unicode support and command line compiler, which enables bidirectional text, will play an important role in facilitating the translation.
"Because Flare provides a command line compiler that can handle right-to-left languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, as well left-to-right Western and Asian languages," Gross explains, "that means we can simply send the original source content for localization. Once the translated content comes back, it becomes part of the project that we can have Flare build."
"We've taken a huge leap with Flare," Gross adds, "And there's still a lot more potential to tap."