Creating an in-house Flare User Group

[Stuart Johnston]

My doc team is about to move to Flare from an old Word+CMS solution. In preparation for this, I spent the best part of a year reading all the Flare documentation, scouring the Forums(!), migrating lots of test docs, and developing all the required project templates, CSS, and processes, to ensure writers could transition as smoothly as possible. Three other writers have now migrated some pilot projects and are getting up to speed, but to all intents and purposes I am still essentially the sole "expert" in the team in terms of how everything works under the hood.

To try and mitigate this dependency, a couple of months back I started a small regular "user group" meeting for the pilot writers and anyone else who was interested, to try and foster knowledge sharing. However the rest of the team (20 in all) are getting their licenses shortly so I fear this kind of group may become a little unwieldy, given the differing levels of expertise and plain old time constraints.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to effectively on-board a group of writers like this, and help spread support expertise across a team? Most of the writers are enthusiastic about the transition, though for some the change may be stressful, so I want to ensure the process is as inclusive as possible.

[RamonS]

My suggestions is to have folks take a look at the online courses from MadCap. What might work is buddying up, pair a seasoned writer who has a leg up with Flare with someone who is new to this. In regards to sharing information and discussions, use Teams or Slack or a tool like that. Also, a wiki or a web help can be used to cover common issues and document any conventions to be followed.

[Jbleasdale]

You probably want to schedule a day or two of in house Training that you host as the expert.

Introduce everyone to the structure and show them how to do all the common tasks they are used to doing. Explain everything project specific and everything Flare specific that will be a new workflow for them.

Maybe prepare some examples to go through together as a group using the test docs you migrated.

[Stuart Johnston]

Thanks all for the suggestions!

I am creating a comprehensive User Guide as it pertains to our Flare processes, and will also try making some mini-videos in SnagIt in support of that.
The Flare buddy idea is good too as it would take some of the workload off me.