Mad Overkill

[Niels]

Dear Insane,

we are slowly going mad. When we decided to move from MS Word to MadCap Flare about two years ago, we were confident to solve a lot of issues. I must admit that I still prefer Flare to MS Word these days. However, frustration is growing. Too many trivial use case scenarios keep failing. Maybe the reason is that we put focus on print. After going through some wild migration times, I'd be willing to migrate again, to run away from these problems. The general experience so far was:

We love this forum who can help a lot.
In contrast, MadCap platinum support was a waste, so we dropped it.

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The general resolution of support involved too much time & effort without success:
"we will clean up your installation and reset everything" (1 hour x 5 issues, never a success)
"we will register this as a bug" => doesn't really help (especially if this is most basic functionality that should have been working for a decade now already)
"you can make a feature request" => doesn't help either.

Below is my quality report of unresolved issues that occurred within one year only:
- Auto column width heuristic and local resolutions
- Page break mania in lists with images
- Insert Annotation
- keyboard accessibility: Side Navigation Menu Item *(focus)* => resolved by our web developer
- Image print size issue
- Git destination publish fails
- Subtle layout changes independent from CSS in PDF
- Unbind project file but keep it locally managed by Flare
- Multiple version management: am I missing something? => we have our own approach but it is hard to maintain in Flare
- Glossary Proxy: Exclude entries based on conditions/targets => via MadWorld we learned that it only works "by exlcuding" not "including" (not appropriate in our case)
- Vertical alignment of DIVs in page layout => would not have expected that we must fall back on tables for that...
- Unexpected Table Header Alignment-CSS Inheritance Conflict?
- Cross-referencing target-specific variables (I know that I could make a feature request but this does not help right now.)
- How to resolve footnote table style conflict
- PDF/A

For some other questions I posted, I was able to find a resolution by myself and replied to me. I guess that's why I can be proud to be a Propeller Head.

Due to the sheer amount of little issues accumulating within one year, we'd be willing to migrate away. Any tips via private message are really welcome!
(This post should thus be politically correct...)

To finish this post, I'd like to quote one of my team members:

I recently became aware of the fact that the amount of my notes and references to our wiki to handle Flare (issues) is roughly four times as much as the amount of guidelines for our actual documentation tasks to consider...

[ChoccieMuffin]

Niels, please remember that this is a peer-support forum and while Madcap employees do occasionally pop in, just about everyone who takes the time to offer suggestions (whether you listen to them or not) is just an ordinary Flare user like you.

So I suggest you send your comment to Madcap, perhaps using the "click here to contact Madcap sales" link.

[doc_guy]

I'm sorry you have had such an unfortunate experience with MadCap Support. I have found them to be a great resource for resolving problems in my project. Often they have seen similar issues or we are able to find some resolution.

However, sometimes we uncover genuine bugs or feature limitations in the product. Some may have been reported previously. Some may not have been. That will be tue for any organization. At my company, we have a great support staff, but our product does have its limitations. And we have a back log of customer-reported bugs and features that haven't been fixed yet because either there are work arounds that work, or there are sufficiently few customers affected by them that they haven't become a high enough priority to get them fixed. For the customer with the issue, that has to be incredibly frustrating. But we are a company of limited resources, human and financial. We can only do a fixed amount of work with the resources we have in the time we are allotted. I imagine much is the same experience at MadCap.

Are there bugs I've seen that have lasted longer than I'd like? Sure there are. Is it frustrating to see releases come and go without getting a resolution? Yes it is. But I have seen a lot of my bugs/feature requests implemented over the course of my 13 year relationship with MadCap. I believe they are trying hard to do a good job, balancing customer needs with new features to stay competitive in the marketplace.

I think if you knew the people behind the product (and this goes for any company and any product) you'd have more compassion on their limitations. The folks at MadCap are a stellar group of people. I'm able to look beyond some of Flare's limitations, in part, because I know the team behind the product, and I trust them and know they are working hard to create a good product. I hope the same could be said about the company I work for. It's harder to be angry at a company when you humanize them and understand that they are a group of dedicated professionals, doing the best they can with the limitations they're under.

[Isleofgough]

Niels: my experience has been similar to yours, but I still love the power of Flare and that it saves in a non proprietary format. Like you, I dropped platinum support, as I was not that impressed with their solving issues. Many bugs and limitations have continued for years ( Framemaker import and export, some issues with Word files, inability to rotate text in table cells, epub compressed mime problems, and obscure instabilities and crashes). Still, I renewed my maintenance for three years as it is very useful for multiple targets, and better than alternatives I've tried. I still use structured Framemaker and InDesign and occasionally Oxygen for various projects. Good luck with finding the right solutions.

[Niels]

@ ChoccieMuffin
I am totally aware of this and I do not criticize this forum in any way. Sometimes I wonder however, if I am not capable enough to specify my intentions. Please be aware of this part of my message:

We love this forum who can help a lot.

[Niels]

Thanks, doc_guy & Isleofgough.
Maybe one other aspect is the fact that we are a team of two, only. However, I'd like to point out again one core statement I made:

Too many trivial use case scenarios keep failing.

How can I become confident in a product, where I want to use a trivial feature for the first time (insert an annotation) and then must consider calling support?

How can I become confident in a support team, if I present them a complex scenario and ask for the reasons behind, and they again start with the clumsy approach: ZIP and send us your project files...

This is not about the people in the first place. It's about the product and the system in its whole.
I will be at MadWorld in Dublin and I am seriously looking forward to this.

A pleasure it would be to meet you guys!

[chuck_agari]

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say much of this--and not a few of the issues I've encountered over the past year--have to do with the PDF engine that MadCap chose. I think I've heard before which one they are using, but I forget which one. (GhostScript, maybe?)

Using 3rd-party PDF engines is pretty standard; we had our engineering team choose one when we wanted to implement printing of reports. Thing is, when a 3rd-party PDF engine fails, there's nothing a company such as MadCap can do except report the issue as a bug and then hope it gets fixed.

Or they could evaluate the current state of PDF engine offerings and swap out their existing one for a better one, which would take quite a bit of time, resources, and debugging, and even then there's no guarantee that a different engine won't have different issues. It's made worse because Flare is, AFAIK, still based on the now-creaky .NET Framework.

Of course, they could rewrite it from scratch like Adobe did with RoboHelp--and like Adobe release with many features missing. For a small company, there are not many good solutions.

That all said, I would have preferred that development effort had been committed to fixing bugs like the ones you encountered (and some of the ones I reported) and features that sill do not work correctly, instead of new skins, a new product icon, and a "feature" that's not a whale lot more than warmed-over snippets.

[Niels]

Thanks chuck_agari,
I fully agree and had assumed in one of my posts that sth. like an underlying PDF engine could be the cause.
Sad thing then is always the missing transparency. If MadCap listed current issues with their root cause being identified in other named, included third-party components, I would not have started this thread here. Knowing our own approach, however, where we reveal any such issues to our customers to save them and us from the pain to report related issues, the approach of MadCap (and certainly many more software companies) is simply disappointing. I read in one other post already, where someone suggested this idea to MadCap, the reply: no company should do this and such a company would be stupid.
That's the seriously wrong way to go in an open minded, agile world.