OS agnostic Flare document collaboration?

[sdcinvan]

For the fourth year, I would like initiate this conversation again.

My work environment is comprised of nearly all MACs or Linux workstations... this means that the Flare Windows collaborative tool, Contributor is useless to me. That is why I have asked MadCap to consider creating an online/web based collaborative tool as an alternative to Contributor.

But still, documentation collaboration with SMEs and other stakeholders, is vitally important. My only solution was to employ Google Docs as the draft/source for my documentation; Google Docs allow very easy collaboration across our company. Unfortunately, it's almost a full-time job to constantly sync between the Google Docs source and the final Flare copy. There is no way (AFAIK) to automate this, so I must manually copy and paste between the two, which effectively doubles my workload.

Submitting my fourth feature request about this issue. :] If this feature is important to you, I encourage you to send a feature request to MadCap: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx

Any thoughts? Anyone else waiting for this feature?
Shawn

[morganhancock]

I'm dying for this feature... at a minimum I need to compile a project on a Unix machine. At my company, R&D is entirely Mac/Linux, except for the technical writers using Flare! As we more closely align with the R&D's best practices, workflow, and tools, this limitation of Flare has caused some serious issues.

[morganhancock]

Also, to work with my SMEs, I have to use some programs that are OSX-only, so I now have to juggle two computers. Flare is the only reason I have to use a Windows machine.

[sdcinvan]

I'm dying for this feature... at a minimum I need to compile a project on a Unix machine. At my company, R&D is entirely Mac/Linux, except for the technical writers using Flare! As we more closely align with the R&D's best practices, workflow, and tools, this limitation of Flare has caused some serious issues.

To be clear, what I am referring to is the ability to allow subject matter experts the ability to review and edit documentation drafts in a web-based MadCap Contributor-like tool. Currently, MadCap only supports the Windows based Contributor editor, which is unusable in my corporate environment.

I require OS agnostic document collaboration and the only solution I have is Google Docs. Unfortunately, that means that I must manually synchronize content (copy/paste) to/from Google Docs to MadCap Flare. It doubles my work load and can be frustrating at times, especially when the SME doesn't turn on the Google Docs "Suggesting" option...which results in me manually hunting down document changes.

I don't have a problem with the MadCap Flare program working in Windows. That isn't a hindrance in my workflow.


If this is what you are looking for, please submit a feature request to MadCap, here: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx

Take care,
Shawn

[sdcinvan]

I got Rick Rolled by MadCAP!

I opened the MadCap Central public beta email announcement with four years worth of anticipation. It's pretty interesting but no online document collaboration.

[Feebeegeebee]

I would like this too. R & D are on Macs and some Linux, and our customers are all on Linux/Unix.
I also have to use Googledocs for intenal reviews, etc.
Will log a feature request.

Feebeegeebee

Feature request now logged.

[sdcinvan]

I would like this too. R & D are on Macs and some Linux, and our customers are all on Linux/Unix.
I also have to use Googledocs for intenal reviews, etc.
Will log a feature request.

Feebeegeebee

Feature request now logged.

I also recommend replying to the MadCap Central public beta announcement and express your need for a document review feature. Your request may reach a different team.

I suspect that the reason why such a feature doesn't exist is that not enough Flare users are request it.

[fchan]

Yes, at our company the SMEs also use google docs to collaborate too, which means that I also have the same problem of having to copy/paste stuff into MadCap Flare

[sdcinvan]

Yes, at our company the SMEs also use google docs to collaborate too, which means that I also have the same problem of having to copy/paste stuff into MadCap Flare

When you have dozens of SMEs and/or you add content into both the Flare files and the Google Docs synchronization becomes an inevitable mess. I am now working on synchronizing my main document, our primary product's user guide. It's 29 chapters, taking 44 Google Docs and over 200 pages. I'll be spending a week carefully and MANUALLY comparing side-by-side! This is when I start grumbling and cursing MadCap (quietly b/c I don't want my company to erroneously assume that I made a bad choice when I choose Flare over Adobe's PageMaker) because I have no other way to do this and it is near impossible to write any meaningful code to automate this.

I desparately need MadCap to provide a more useful online MadCap Contributor tool.

[HyperMom]

I am also using Google docs for collaboration. The last post was in 2016 so I'm wondering if this is still a thing for everyone?

My current workflow is to download the edited document from Google doc to Word and now I'm going to have to edit closely there before I finally upload it to Flare.

Anyone else doing this?

I'm thinking about moving to Microsoft's Word on OneDrive to see if that helps.

I have a lot of editing to do from Google to Word to Flare.

[doloremipsum]

Madcap Central now has a review feature which allows SMEs to review online, so maybe some people do that. It's pretty expensive compared to the base price of Flare though, so you may not be able to get buy in!

[HyperMom]

Thanks for your reply @doloremipsum!

My company is not going to buy into that when they have been using Google docs, and it is a lot less $$.

I did try to use Microsoft's OneDrive as a way to share my files but it immediately showed itself as not a good collaboration tool. My SME's had to log on and do not have a Microsoft acct, and I only had 5GB available storage.

Has anyone ever copied the text from Google docs straight into Flare? That is my next test!

[ChoccieMuffin]

Don't have any experience with Google Docs, but one question I'd like to ask is whether you can impose a proper stylesheet that they HAVE to use if they're editing it (you can in Word) or can they just do what they like? If you can impose it, that might make any tidying up you have to do a lot less onerous.