X-Edit: which, when and how

[Cecily]

I've looked around the Flare website, but not spotted clearcut answers to these questions (apologies in advance if the info is actually there):

1. How long does the free trial last?

2. It looks as if new reviewers download the X-Edit family and actually so get the Full Features Mode for the trial period (whose extra functionality may confuse them), after which it downgrades to Review Mode. Can they just get Review Mode from the outset?

3. Are Full Feature and Contribute Modes the same price?

4. Contribute Mode doesn't include "light word processing for stand-alone documents", but presumably it does include the normal level of word processing for those that are part of a Flare project?

5. I have not yet upgraded to Flare v4 (I have a licence key, but am waiting till the end of my current doc project). Am I correct to think I need to upgrade before I share work with people who are using X-Edit?

Thanks.

[Adrian Durand]

Hi Cecily,

Welcome to the forums.

I'll try to answer the questions as best as I can.

1) The free trial lasts for 30 days.

2) All of the X-Edit products are downloaded and installed by default, but Review is available immediately, and new reviewers do not have to use the full featured or contribute version.

3) I can't definitely say yes, but as there is only one price shown on Madcap's site for X-Edit I would believe they are - maybe Madcap can confirm this.

4) I have not tried using Contribute, as I run Flare V4, so have not needed to (and as Review is free I have no problems trying to obtain the funding for the licences). Hopefully someone else could answer this.

5) Yes you do need to upgrade to V4. Within V4 there are options on the File menu for both Contributions and Reviews.
Note: see the posts on Review elsewhere in the forum as there have been one or two problems with setting up the e-mail server.

I hope that this helps.

Regards

Adrian

[Cecily]

Thanks Adrian. I know the product is new, but it is odd that MadCap's info makes it so hard to understand the details of the different levels of X-Edit and indeed how Full Feature X-Edit differs from Flare itself (other than in price).

Anyway, has anyone given X-Edit to non-authors recently? I've read how some got on with it in the "X-Edit setup could be improved for reviewers" topic, but there wasn't much about how easy was it to incorporate their comments into the main project. I recently had a Flare project I built as Word and one reviewer put all their suggestions as comments and another edited the text directly, which was a bit of a nightmare to disentangle in places. Would X-Edit be better, and if so, in what specific ways?

I'm assuming it would be best to give reviewers just the Review Mode, not only because it's free, but because it's simple and shouldn't distract them with too much functionality. But am I right in inferring that they can add comments and add and delete sections of text as well? (I presume they can't add or delete topics, which is fine.)