MadCap Software Forums

We would like to use our existing CMS, Vasont, to manage our Flare project content. Is anyone else doing this?

In fact, is anyone using a CMS other than one of the Microsoft solutions that are supported out of the box? In theory, since all the files are valid XML it should be possible, but I have no idea how hard/expensive this would be to implement.

If you have implemented this, what did you and your vendor need to do to make it work? What is your workflow like? Can you access the CMS through Flare, or do you check-in/check-out from outside the application.

Being able to use our CMS for Flare would be huge benefit given our distributed workforce.

There are some who use non-MS CMS/SCS such as CVS and SVN. In general, if the control system can deal with the files that Flare generates you can manage them with that system. The question that remains is if you want to use Flare as a client to access the control system and check in / out files. In that case the system needs to be provide MSSCC API capabilities. That is something you can find out from the tech specs of the CMS. If it does not support that API you need a 3rd party tool, which may not exist for the not so popular systems (not saying that they are bad).
Unfortunately, MadCap decided to go the way to mandate the use of the prioprietary, closed-source MS-only API rather than use shell commands that are usually offered by such systems. So, in that sense, good luck!

Heya,

I'm using The TamTamCVS plugin for CVS. Works really well. There is an SVN version, too.

The plugin is USD$10 per seat.

But this is only temporary. We had hoped to see a beta of Team Server shortly. But since that's not happening, we're going to end up using some other solution.

I wouldn't call this a "CMS" like Vasont, but I'm using the Perforce source code control management system with Flare. The engineering department of my client already had the Perforce server set up for engineers, and they had extra licenses we are using.

I just started a few days ago and Flare seemed to know what to do with it. I don't have much experience with it yet. I'm now having trouble getting others set up with it, I'm doing a separate post for that.

7man40 - did you ever get this resolved? Are you (or anyone else) using Flare 4.2 bound to Perforce on Vista? Or just doing manual check out/in/add/delete?

Any news?